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Ask Slashdot: Is E-Learning a Viable Option?
An anonymous reader writes "My spouse, who is an elementary school science teacher, has had some experience in e-learning, since her school gave iPads to all the students. She found that students used these devices, not for school purposes like note taking, but for gaming, etc. It got to the point that she banned them from her classroom. Do technology aids help, or hinder, education? Is the idea that students can be home-schooled electronically realistic, or absurd?"
Well from my experience with those electronic "white boards," they just distract the teacher as much as the students.
This question has been answered MANY times. NO study has shown that students benefit - and many have shown that the diversion of resources hurts them. It's a dead horse. Stop flogging it and move on.
Lock them down, you need to assert control over school electronic property. This should go beyond what walled gardens like Apple does and if Apple can't provide that kind of control to individual institutions then you need to look to other tools instead of iPads and such. Just because a student can take it home doesn't mean the student should have complete control of the device since it's still school property.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Technology breaks concentration because it offers a variety of distractions in one small, portable package. There is not much else you can do with paper, pencil, and a Maths textbook than study.
Others claim to see improved student engagement with technology, and my feeling is that with enough resources you can get an improved experiences. I lean towards the opinion that for now the technology is not good value for money in terms of projects running now. On the other hand, now is a good time to be running small pilot projects in expectation that costs will come down, and software will improve.
I know 6 families that have home schooled with over half the kids now in college (other half still in high school). From my observations, electronics has very little impact or success or failure. Nearly all the success or failure is based on the parents: how serious they are about educating their kids, how connected they are with home school cooperatives, how much time their willing to invest. The complete failures that I've seen were easily predicable before the home schooling began (poorly educated parents, doing it for the wrong reasons, etc.)).
in our math class.
That didn't really say much about whether grid paper and pens were aiding or hindering our education.
It possibly does say something about the quality of the teacher...
My sister, when she lived in Ohio, had a learning disability. It wasn't until my family discovered ECOT that she finally had the fighting chance to graduate. They sent her a locked down computer, and gave her all the help and support she needed over the phone for all her lessons. Electronic home-schooling should seriously be considered all over the United States.
Just me
The kids who need help often have chaotic home environments. They need role models, not electronics. There is no technical fix.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Judging by my kids, the idea of home learning is absurd. Or at least it will require one parent to constantly supervise the home learning. Kids lack discipline and tenacity, they only learn those after growing up. So, if we are going to teach them boring stuff while they are growing, they need an environment that helps them focus on the matter at hand. I-products do not.
I actually find it quite interesting how many different schools around the world try something like this. Wonder if any of these projects are working out well. From what I've heard from teachers, even though kids nowadays know a lot about computers, it's all gaming and entertainment. They might not even know how to write a letter with their computer.
My daughter has a master's degree in education. Her master's project studied distance learning for adults over the Internet. She found that Web-based courses can indeed be effective. HOWEVER, she also found that such courses are far more effective if the students and instructor meet face-to-face as a group about once each month.
Distance learning can be very important for adults. For example, in some areas, doctors are required to pursue ongoing education in order to retain their licenses. For a doctor in a rural area where he or she is the only health provider, leaving the community to take a two-week course would mean that the community is left without any doctor.
Content consumption of widgets, and assorted eye candy along with advertising is the new education practice that teaches us the most important lesson of the 21rst century. How to consume content. Just sayin.
The answer to your questions is yes it is a viable option in the classroom and for home schoolers. Your wife apparently is in need of in service training on classroom management. She is doing her students a disservice. They are all suffering because she does not have control of the class room.
Technology is an excellent tools in the hands of any competent teacher.
Giving a young student a device they can play games will result in young students playing games. The ipad seems like the wrong tool for the job with young students. Also, taking notes on a iPad???
The problem with many (maybe most?) attempts to put technology in schools and even home learning environments is that people don't think through the implementation. Technology is not magic. You cannot expect to get good results simply by dropping a chunk of technology into a classroom without spending a lot of time and energy rethinking how teaching and learning is going to work in that classroom. For example:
What, exactly, is the technology going to be used for? No hand-waving general answers allowed here (e.g., "enrich content with interactive multimedia presentations" is a useless answer).
In what specific tasks will the technology allow you to do something that would have been cumbersome or impossible without it (e.g., using graphing or numerical methods to approximate solutions to equations that are not amenable to the usual algebraic techniques)?
What more interesting or more engaging problems can you now attempt to solve (that address your learning goals) that you would not have been able to attempt without the technology?
Will you want to change or expand your set of learning goals now that you have this piece of technology? If so, how?
How much instructional time will be needed to get the teacher and students working comfortably with the technology? Is the potential benefit worth that amount of time?
How do you implement the technology in ways that do not detract from the learning you are trying to do (i.e., what are the unintended consequences)? How might you plan ahead for negative unintended uses?
Almost every case I've ever seen or read about where technology was just dropped into an educational setting without painstaking planning and thought about curriculum and implementation, not to mention extensive training of teachers and staff, resulted in mixed results at best, and failure and rejection at worst. To answer the original questions directly, technology aids can help or hinder education- it's all in the amount of time, thought, sweat and tears that get put into the implementation. I won't comment more on the home schooling part of the question, as I really have no experience there (aside from supplementing my own kids' educations).
I just finished the ai class. And the db class. And the ml class. That's "e-learning", right? Involved an old box booted off usb with just enough linux to run opera and flash for the videos, and (for ml class) octave. And an editor to take notes. Did that at home, on a different continent than stanford is on.
Why you'd want to give kids ipads and expect them not to take full advantage of it is a bit beyond me. What's wrong with books? You're in a classroom setting, everybody is there already. No need to go all "e". In fact, that schooling approach with "no computers!" is quite popular in silly valley. And I can see why.
The thing is not to focus on the technology. It's an enabler, but so is a nearby teacher, so are places to sit and learn, so are books, so is pen and paper. Focus on teaching the kids stuff, already. All the rest is gravy.
If gaming is the distraction, perhaps the better way to hook the kids would be through game-based learning - see http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=155852
I am perplexed by equating "e-learning" with "give every kid an iPad". If you give a kid a screen and make it under their control they will find the games. If someone is unaware of this, they probably dont have kids. But this is not unique to electronics. If you give them a stack of text books and no supervision, they'll make paper airplanes. Education requires supervision at that age. Putting an e- in front of things doesn't change human nature.
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Especially since kids don't get textbooks anymore (thanks to Republican backed funding cuts). My kid often comes home with homework that I have no idea how to help with, because there's a particular answer / way of doing it they're using. More than once I've had my kid doing twice as much work solving a math problem because we did more than what the teacher wanted. With the white boards I started getting the teacher's notes, so I can see what the heck they actually want.
So yeah, in a properly funded school electronic whiteboards aren't needed. But in today's run down hell holes that we pass off as schools they're a life saver.
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The US Military has demonstrated the failure of electronic learning, and continues to pour millions of dollars into it. There are really only 2 things relevant to teaching; the students, and details. I click through 200 sylabus hours of CBT's a year, and learn damn near nothing from them. Being uninterested in human trafficing, that CBT went as fast as I could click. The annoying ones make you "listen" to each video segment. They get muted and backgrounded and take twice as long as scheduled because I forget to click the next button while doing somethign else mind-numbing. Fortunately, the DOD ones require good accessibility, so almost all of the course material (for ones with non-obvious tests) is available in PDF so you can search and click.
That being said, my 4 year old is obsessed with books and has pretty much taught herself to read with starfall.com. It's all about the students. Your wife's experience with computers in the classroom is like mine. They're absolutely useless. She taught calculus and honors algebra, and found taht the computers were a net negative because they were an authorized distraction to the students who didn't want to learn. Fortuantely, she quit teaching before she became bitter and jaded. There are a few people who have done well with the ECOT system, but that's not a strength of ECOT, it's a weakness of our public schools and a testament to parents of kids (who in my limited experience are all have a spectrum disorder). However, there's nothing magic about a computer.
My cynical opinion is that we should accept that there are motivated kids and useless kids, and give the motivated kids a good education and not let the rest of them prevent our good students from getting an education. And yes, that's all about parenting, but will never fly in the US, because it will discriminate horribly. Given the state of our education system and it's interaction with society, though, the only chance is that, forced sterilization, or punishing parents for not caring (instead of paying them per kid)
Unless it's a locked down device because too many distractions exist on a standard platform, however the real measure of how effective this sort of teaching is is how the students fair later on down the education road and how they compete in the work place against the rest of the World.
It's really too early to tell.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I think the current state of technology in the classroom is: "lets just throw money at it" instead of figuring out what is really out there. If there was more thought and planing and effort put into it by the schools it would be great, perhaps even better then a traditional classroom. At college I usually take a couple on line classes each semester, and they take advantage of the medium. It isn't just "here, read this and do 1-20 for homework" there is embedded content and interactive assignments that would just be cumbersome or not possible in a traditional classroom. Where I work, we do tech support for K-12 and districts just blow money on iPads and smartboards and other du-dads, some of the teachers don't even have room in their curriculum for this stuff. And the iPad thing is really stupid, they spend 600 dollars on the thing, then another 80 on a keyboard and mouse with a case that props the iPad up...buy a laptop, for less money and more functionality. Again, if there was more thought put behind the purchases, it would make things so much better.
Oddly enough if you hand out a device that happens to be an excellent toy to a bunch of kids things won't go as well as you might expect. Yet I have a simple solution. Move your desk to the back of the classroom. Unless your educational software looks like angry birds one glance will tell you if little Johnny is screwing around.
I am the creator of Learn French by LessonStudio (shameless self promotion) which is a singleminded app that teaches basic French vocabulary and Grammar;. It follows some pretty basic modern educational science and personally I believe works rather well. Handed out to a class of kids they could probably absorb some French pretty quickly as compared to an equivalent textbook. But again I wouldn't hand the app out to the kids and leave them to their own devices(ha ha).
At the same time I don't think that there is any complete end to end teaching system out there. Moodle is a mess for teaching. It does what it does well but it certainly is far far away from being some replacement for teachers. It is really only for administering a classroom. But great administration does nothing to improve the teacher. I pick on Moodle but all the systems that I have seen are aimed squarely at the bureaucrats that run the schools with only a nod to actual improvements in teaching. So based on the state of the art right now if I were a teacher I would not look for something where I could go home but a series of tools that enhance individual lessons.
I'm related to a couple elementary school teachers and there are some universal problem with i-devices:
They come out of fed-grant or state-grant or capital budget to get the physical boxes. If you're extremely lucky you Might get grant / capital funds to buy tough cases and/or charging cradles. The kids will eventually destroy the charging cables by shoving them in upside down. Spend the money now, or later, your choice. The political types get more "points" by a press release that you have purchased 100 devices, than you have purchased 50 devices and all the wasteful accessories which are the only thing that make them useful, so you're not getting cradles or tough cases or spare charger cables. So soon you won't be using them at all.
Then you have no wifi inet access in the classroom. If you had wifi inet access the kids would spend most of their time surfing around aimlessly, even theoretically the "cool" ed sites like starfall are or at least were flash-based only, or they want a subscription, for which of course you have no money. You could probably afford website subscriptions if you didn't buy ipads, that is how the suppliers set their supply/demand curves. So you probably won't be doing "internet" stuff with the ipads.
Assuming you shake the parents down for itunes gift cards like you shake them down for other school supplies at the start of the year, you still have to find a freaking app. There are like 75 cruddy rote addition apps, then half that for subtraction, then half that for multiplication, pretty soon to do anything specific you end up with nothing. So you either have dozens of shovelware, or nothing at all. The teachers grapevine helps a little for the stuff in between, but pretty much there's nothing out there. Then you get to fight the local IT people about software installation onto school property, or cave into them and wait six months for them to hire an intern to enter the gift cards and do it on ITMS for you, to "save your valuable teacher time". Meanwhile the ipads sit in the box.
The final killer, in all honesty, at elementary levels, you'd like to think the kids spend three hours a day doing calculus but realistically the majority of the school day has no purpose for an ipad. Could you use an ipad for 30 minutes one time using an electronic instrument synth app? Yeah. Once. For 30 minutes in music class. The rest of music class is spent singing and learning about other physical music instruments. Not sure what you'll be axing from the district mandated curriculum to fit the ipad in.. All that is not compulsory is forbidden and all that is not forbidden is compulsory is the motto no a days. Ditto gym class, art class.
The academic classes have strict no child left behind curriculums decided mostly at the district level. In this district on day #34 we will watch Bill Nye Volcano episode and discuss. Where does the ipad fit into the district curriculum that is only updated every decade or so? It doesn't. In 10 years, instead of the curriculum containing mandatory 20 year old VCR videos, it'll contain mandatory 20 year old technology requirements (so you must run Oregon Trail on a genuine original Apple II to meet our NCLB goals...). The 20 year old tech at that time, is currently 10 years old, so in about 10 years you can expect intense demand for Palm Pilot III models on ebay, sony clie era palm pilot clones, etc.
So... paperweights?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I can only speak for myself, but I am enrolled on a distance-learning taught masters degree, which is taught solely over the Internet, and, on the whole, it has been a great experience.
Without physical classes, I've been able to study whenever I have wanted - the term has a structure, with deadlines to be met, but, around those, I can work during times which suit me. Lectures are delivered in the form of podcasts, in 30 minute slots. These I tend to listen to when I am driving or ironing - sufficient to get the gist of the topic. I avoid taking notes, since I just want to soak up what is being said.
The text book is delivered as a Word document, but quickly and easily converted to .pdf; other reading comes in whatever form in which it was originally provided (could be a link to a web page, or a .pdf download and so on) - again, all easily converted to pdf. These I read on my iPad (in iAnnotate) and mark them up accordingly; all synchronised back to my computers, to become searchable when it comes to thinking, and writing essays.
Essays are written - unsurprisingly - on a computer, and are submitted electronically; I tend to use .pdf, but I am not sure what others use. These are all run through TurnItIn software - I'm undecided whether I think that this is a good practice or not, but, since I have no say in the matter (short of quitting the course), I can live with it.
On the whole, a very positive experience indeed - I've studied on trains, planes as well as sitting at home, and have written essays in four different countries. The flexibility is great.
There are some downsides, though - particularly around student camaraderie and discussion. Despite there being some great tools available, I don't feel that we've quite cracked the discussion / debate side of things yet. I've chatted with some of the students around the world via Skype, which has been very interesting, but, having encouraged mailing lists, real-time text chat, and now blog posts / responses and (*shudder*) a Facebook wall, nothing seems to have attracted critical mass which, for me, is a real shame - I value the ability to discuss and debate very highly, and I don't feel we've got this quite right yet.
(It may, of course, be that few of the students actually want to discuss, and the distance-learning nature means that people can studying without feeling a pressure to discuss - if this is the case, the course is probably suiting them very well, and I could indeed see the value of this form of study for those who do not want to be in a classroom environment, or required to make conversation. Personally, I think that discussing and critiquing of ideas amongst peers is very valuable, but I appreciate that others may think differently.)
On the whole, though, it works very well for me - I find it easy to be motivated to study something I enjoy, in an environment which suits me.
I have some experience in this area.
I tell parents only allow computers where it will really aid their child. If its being used as a crutch to get them over something they are deficient in such as writing spelling or math, Then its not being used properly.
Computers and related devices are wonderful tools. In the education field the can really help or hinder depending on how they are implemented.
Locking them down is one option, but kids always find a way around this. I find the best way is just not to make available, Don't allow the kids to take them home, set up a centralized server to store the information and turn the tablets into dumb terminals. Each day before the kids leave for the day collect all the tablets, dump any information into the kids account then wipe and reload them. Redistribute them when they comb back to school.
Now this may limit What teachers can set for homework. But this is probably a good thing.
Well, here is the cold, hard truth: Learning is HARD. Period.
Some kids, for one reason or another, are more interested and motivated in learning than others, but they are a small minority. (Nerds are among them, but that's another story.) Even so, they are mostly only interested in learning a subset of the subjects offered as the general education. Most other kids couldn't care less and are in school only because they have to.
Electronic gadgets are not going to help much. Short of the invention of a knowledge serum (e.g., a shot for advanced physics, another for Greek history), or a Matrix-style interface, there is no easy way out.
e-learning works, it's the brick and mortar schools that became babysitter replacements and they won't perform better no matter how much "e-" you add in front of it.
Would it be e-learning if the textbooks and practice quizzes would be distributed in an electronic format ? Would it be still e-learning if the reference materials would be available in an electronic format ? Would it be e-learning if the teachers would use Skype/YM/GTalk/forums to interact with the students after classes ? I guess it would, but then the "e-learning" solution providers would gain less.
The best e-learning tool is wikipedia. It's not perfect, or accurate or neutral, but in itself is a learning tool and the schools are stupid not to embrace it.
Using technology correctly shows improvement. Well-written learning games are immensely useful on game devices.
Taking notes on paper as opposed to electronics is just as useful/useless either way. It depends on the teaching itself.
The other aspect of e-learning is the distance stuff. Folks learn a lot better in interactive groups and anything that diminishes the interactivity diminishes the learning.
This principle doesn't mean e-devices are bad, just that they need to be implemented properly.
Aristotle thought reading would spell the death of civilization (because students weren't memorizing poems the way Ari did as a child).
It's a tremendously stupid waste of resources. If you want kids to learn about technology give them a crappy low power device (like a Pentium 1 equivalent) running a low end unix variant. This way, you can give them access to wifi, but the laptop can't do a heck of a lot more than check email and slowly load simple articles. The Internet at large combined with modern distractions is too enticing when you're supposed to be learning geometry. While there are myriad distractions in any learning environment, they'll at least have to learn something to get to 'em.
Heck, the whole reason I learned to program is because I only had access to an older computer no one was writing software for anymore.
this is slashdot... a good 99.3% of you were geeks as kids and it got you to where you were. chances are you learned complex technology despite the fact most people around you sucked at it (sometimes even teachers) and often tried to distract you or discourage you from these endeavours... willpower kicks ass when you are motivated and technology is a knowledge enablers.
Technology can be helpful but you have to teach the children boundaries and focus them - and this is as much a responsability of the teacher and the students. Yes, technology can be a distraction, so can a bee be one too. Students are easily distracted.. at all ages.
Even playing can be a learning experience... it can be argued some people get paid to play games they played as a kid under different settings (sports, singing, ...)
Don't blame the distraction, blame the distractee (the student) and the distractor (the teacher failing to focus the attention of its student)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Yes, adults benefit greatly from E-learning overall. Whether it is doing courses through Open-University, Khan Academy, or even just learning through the sources of Wikipedia articles at random.
Kids, however...
Most kids will tend to want to play games, go to Facebook or whatever else.
If you lock these things down, then they might get some more work done.
If you lock the places wi-fi down, more if you have no control over the devices in question.
And to be honest, this is equally a fault of the system itself rather than the fact that games exist.
Education "should be fun", not boring. Coursework should make you excited to work with it, should make you genuinely interested in learning.
Education shouldn't be "here, go to page 12, this is how you do this, practice it on the next 10 pages with slight variations, you have till half-past to finish."
My school took the former approach after years of "the standard" and actually engaged students, our year helped them get after-school clubs setup which actually really worked well, there was a remarkable turn-up for Maths, Computing, Art, English and many others.
Then sadly had to close due to huge structural damage, pipes on their last legs and asbestos. (I still think it is a conspiracy to keep people a certain level of stupid)
I would be very reluctant to use almost any kind of technology at the elementary school level. In my experience, computers are a great tool for expressing your imagination but they're not so great for helping to develop one which is what students should be doing at that age.
someone asking such a question should definitely not be concerned with education whatsoever.
"Do technology aids help, or hinder, education?"
Short answer: Yes!
Long story: When I was in college, I would often bring my laptop (my good ol iBook G4) to classes with me. I'd use in just about every class I could get away with it (couldn't in music classes, science labs, etc) and I'd often spend time reading a new book or catching up on facebook. That being said, there were also a number of courses I was enrolled in that I brought it to and used it to take notes. I'd still end up reading a book, but I'd find I'd get about two chapters done and about two pages worth of decent notes written, whereas in the other classes I'd be closer to five or six chapters (and no notes).
Interestingly enough, even when I would get absolutely no notes taken, my mind was still active enough to catch much of the class discussion and chime in when appropriate, surprising everyone around me (who saw what I was doing) with (mostly) useful insights on the matters. The thing is, when my iBook was battery-less (couldn't get to an Apple store to bitch about it still being under AppleCare), I was so far out of it that when the professor called on me I had to ask her to repeat the question more often then not. Never had that issue when my laptop was there, even though I was not paying the slightest bit of attention...
So my point is, they help, and hinder, but they really help when:
A. The student is interested.
B. The student is able to learn.
C. The topic is important (I paid far more attention in my courses directly correlating to what I wanted to do).
D. Most important of all, the professor/teacher/educator knows what they are doing.
Without point D, you can't expect a student to have A, making C less than likely and B difficult to develop.
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People at places I've work think of their work computers like their home computers and spend a lot of time on personal email, surfing net, chatting and other non-work computing. Some places I've worked address this restricting what can be loaded and content monitoring. That helps but people find way to waste time on non-work (and bitch they have to stay late to get work done.)
Then I've been places and gone toe-to-toe with management over all the non-work activity and typically non-work software installed. Management starts justifying it saying people work had "they deserve their diversions". They only time management will complain is when the network start slowing down or I tell them I need more storage. Then they slap employees on the wrist and the cycle start anew.
So I can fully understand the youth of today who live their lives on social media getting a tablet and doing everything but school work. Tablets and other devices will only be a distraction unless they are restricted to education related app's and tools.
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology
for all the wrong reasons - Buckminster Fuller
People are simple organisms. They react to immediate threats to their lives, after that they prioritise their next meal, their next dose of "fun" and whatever bodilly functions cause them discomfort.
Now, try to persuade those people to stop doing things they like doing and address some abstract concepts that may, but almost certainly won't, become important to them at some distant point in their futures. That's what education tries to do. it only succeeds because the teacher (for want of a better term) is able to induce or threaten their pupils to PAY ATTENTION - or at least not blatantly ignore them. Then, if the teacher is lucky, a small percentage of the wisdom they impart will be retained - for a few days, at least.
Once you remove the teacher from the scene, and replace him/her/it with a device that gives the pupil access to an almost infinite source of "fun" the chances of them stumbling upon the information they are supposed to be learning is indistinguishably close to zero. [ Although it's still perfectly possible that they will learn stuff that WILL be useful to them in later life, that's not what they will be tested and their teachers' success assessed on - so it doesn't count. ]
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
taking that a step further, you can argue that the decline in middle class wages is a bigger part of that. Women can't afford to work for low wages as school teachers because their husbands no longer bring home enough money to maintain a middle class standard of living.
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Is E-Learning a Viable Option?
In a word, no.
... wouldn't be a problem is teachers were still allowed to fail students.
Sure, little Johnny can play Skyrim all day - but wait till Mommy and Daddy discover he's flunked the seventh grade....
Check your premises.
Children learn all the time and, for those with inclination, having access to boundless information pays off. They might start from gaming, but will eventually progress to wikipedia and so on. The rest are just hopeless no matter what you do. However, as a teacher you are obviously responsible for giving direction.
Other than that iPad is not a bad choice. While there are cheaper/more ruggedized netbooks, iPad is a magnet for kids of all ages and you can be sure it will be actually used. It's up to you to channel that for educational purposes.
so long as the students and teachers actually make use of the tools provided, even elarning can be better than in person depending on the person and the material being taught.
(I'm not claiming that the iPad is the only, or even best, tablet for eLearning. But it is the one that I have, having moved to an iPad from a Sony eReader (and a COOL-ER eReader before that), and I've had a good experience of using it for eLearning, hence my comments here.)
iAnnotate PDF: an outstanding application for reading and marking up PDFs. I make a point of converting all my materials to PDF (primarily so that everything opens in one application on my Mac, rather than whatever is assigned to the format of the original piece, and also to make it easy to mark up / annotate on the iPad. I use this for pretty much all my reading, other than published books (below) - for me, it has been most definitely worth the cost. I had a problem with synchronisation, and the support team could not have been more helpful - they invested a considerable time in trying to help me solve the problem, and did not curse me when it finally dawned on me that I had messed up the permissions on the directory on the Linux filestore which holds all my materials... I offered to buy them a pizza or two for their time, to say thanks, but they declined - if you happen to read this, the offer most definitely still stands, guys (and gals). The latest version seems pretty good - minimising distractions when studying is particularly important (and is one of the reasons why I study with Wi-Fi switched off), and the cleaner reading mode and the ability to mark up with fewer taps is very welcome.
PenUltimate: a very simple (to the user - it may be very complex under the surface) notebook-style application - coupled with a Bamboo (Wacom) stylus, it's great for scribbling down thoughts and plans. (I use this in my "day job" for taking notes in meetings - less intrusive than a laptop screen between me and the person with whom I'm talking, and no annoying key taps.) The addition of handwriting recognition (even at additional cost) would be great - I've tried various other notebook applications (including NoteTaker HD), and found PenUltimate better for my needs.
iBooks: I love reading, and thus read a huge amount; frankly, for reading books (where I do not tend to make annotations), a device with an eInk screen is still better, but, since I've moved the iPad for the annotation support and do not want to carry yet another device, I've used iBooks a lot. Clean, simple and I can add my own copies of books, and not just those bought through the iTunes book store (which I've never used, actually) - very pleased with it indeed. I must have read thousands of pages on it, and, whilst it tires my eyes (the iPad screen, not iBooks, really) far more quickly than reading on an eReader device, I'm still happy with it. Calibre (on the PC/Mac/Linux machine, not the iPad) for "liberating" eBooks to be read in iBooks is rather handy, although I don't use it for eBook management.
Bamboo (Wacom) stylus: I used an AluPen stylus for a while, but found it became less and less easy to make a positive mark on the screen; whether the tip was wearing down, I'm not sure. I initially baulked at the idea of spending £25 on a stylus but, once I'd tested the Bamboo stylus, I decided (on the spot, as it happens) that it was worth the money. I find it very fluid, and easy to use to write on the screen,without needing to worry about making a stroke - I can focus on the thinking, and not the physical act of writing.
What I have used less:
Pages: hardly worth the money, in my opinion. I use it on the Mac, and am a fan, but not so much on the iPad, since I don't find typing on the on-screen keyboard very easy. I've used Pages on the iPad a couple of times for making minor changes, but never for the creation of substantial pieces of work - a physical keyboard works better for me, and, since I tend to have a computer with me if I think I might want to do some writing, I'll reach for that every time.
MindNode: bought because it syncs with the desktop version, which I've used on and off for brainstorming. However, on the iPad, I just find it less useful - I've reviewed the occasional brainstorm on it, but a PDF version works just as well for me.
I mean to offend no one but simply stating my belief will upset many people. A good child in a good home can -learn easily. Two parents with solid incomes are needed. One must be able to pay close attention to the child constantly. Single parents or income challenged families or families with a child with issues or even homes with too many children will make e-learning a poor choice. As usual this will become almost racial in its perception. What we have already are classes that have what amounts to a guard observing the class while media and computers educate the kids individually. Spanish classes in some schools are already automated. This will also mean the elimination of teaching as a career or source of livelihood. And finger pointing is going to take place. The only reason for that classroom and guard to exist are the troubled families. More fortunate families can have pure e-learning at home which will pretty much eliminate the cost of education. Even college can be done this way for almost no cost at all. Old Ivy may be in deep trouble. What about our teachers? And then there is school staff to consider, cleaners, lawn workers, cafeteria workers all vanish and the construction trades used to build and repair schools will also suffer. Yet when a quality education can be provided almost free of tax dollar input just how can we justify traditional schools tom serve only troubled homes? It is almost like declaring lack of affluence and stability to be some sort of crime against society.
There's a lesson from NLP: There's no failure, only feedback.
If the pupils use the iPads for gaming during class, that is a very strong feedback that the games are more interesting than school.
Maybe that is the root cause, not the technology? If they don't have iPads, they'll go back to playing games on paper, like pretty much every generation of school children since the invention of the pencil.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Having a chalk board in a rrom does not cause education to take place, but if it is well used it can be helpful to the process.
Giving a kid a computer is only slightly better than giving them a chalk board. If you provide tools and guidence and use the tool well then you have a chance an real learning.
Programmed instruction, computer aided instruction and the like were very successful in the 60's and 70's, but most educational environments couldn't afford it.
One of the most successful was the PLATO project sponsored by CDC. Using touch screen technology and programmed instruction, students were able to learn advanced mathematics and other subjects like chemistry in a client-server environment.
Texas Instruments had a "Talking Typewriter" that taught 3- to 6-year-olds how to touch type. (The keys were different colors. The teacher painted the student's fingernails colors to match the keys, and a programmed instruction course on the terminal would teach them to type.)
A key element was that children couldn't fail. They would become completely engrossed in learning when they were immediately successful and immediately rewarded for it by getting immediate feedback.
Programmed instruction was developed by B. F. Skinner and Norman Crowder. (Your history may vary, but i'll stick by it.) Programmed instruction was more expensive to develop because the information, presented in "frames", had to be tested so that over 98% of the time the student picked the right answer. This required much testing and re-writing. Also, programmed instruction presented in books usually resulted in books twice or three times larger than regular textbooks. Even though a student would finish the book in one-third to one-sixth the time for reading a comparable textbook, the publishing costs were much greater.
B. F. Skinner fell out of favor first, because it turned out that his theory of Operant Conditioning and Behaviorism didn't explain the learning of language in young people, and second, for political incorrectness during the late 70's and early 80's.
You can't just give children a device without the proper tools to accomplish your task. Giving children computers and game consoles without goals and direction is a case of "jumping to solutions" without adequate requirements analysis. Given the choice, children will automatically gravitate toward those things that are more like play than study, but children love to learn; they will spend hours on projects that they find rewarding.
What works? Montessori methods work, but this is a whole environment. If you have money, send your kids to a Montessori school.
Directed study works, but the teachers have rebelled.
Deer Park, Texas started a TQM project for their schools, and increased student competency by 20-44%. Teachers don't like it for the same reason they don't like directed study; they think they are the experts. (In spite of huge quantities of evidence to the contrary.)
An example of modern programmed instruction, pretty well done, is The Logic Cafe ( http://thelogiccafe.net/PLI/index.htm ). TLC is a hybrid site that uses the principles of programmed instruction with additions. To me, this is an example of how good programmed instruction could be developed. If someone designs a programmed instructional website they can automatically pinpoint and revise frames that don't get 98%+ positive responses. IMHO, most CAI fails because they just record boring, un-goaled lectures and present it as "instruction."
Programmed instruction in books was used a lot by CDC, IBM, Jeppson, Xerox, Fereal Electric, Phillips-Ford, and many others. Ken Stroud's book, "Engineering Mathematics" is still one of the most popular Engineering Math books available.
Yes, technology and e-learning could be real good for kids, but there has to be some content.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
As it stands, your question yields by default the answer, "it depends." With no restrictions, minimal training and supervision, the use of iPads (or whatever) in the classroom can hinder greatly students' performance. On the other hand, with restrictions, training and adequate supervision, there's no (immediate) reason why iPads (or whatever) cannot benefit students greatly. Without any additional information about how and within what framework the technology is being implemented, a more definite answer cannot be reached.
No yesterday, no tomorrow, and no today.
For speed and access to composition, technology is great. Many, many people will use it for games and porn, instead of X, and X is rarely "read collective works of Charles Dickents". But the yellow press helped pay off printing press investments in record time, and in the end it doesn't matter why 99 people use the technology if it lowers the cost of production for the 100th. Snail mail is the same way, without junk mail the cost of sending a check would be much higher.
Gently reply
This is actually my field. Basically, it all comes down to teacher training. There are many very valuable ways to use iPads or netbooks in a classroom. Interactive instruction IS more effective than the traditional lecture model. Teachers just need to learn how to design interactive instruction. An iPad should never be used as a note-taking device in an elementary school classroom. It can be used to access the internet for webquests and interactive project making. There are a lot of great apps that teach a large number of spelling or math skills. There are more for younger children that deal in shapes and colors. These can be used at home and are fun, that is one of the areas where an iPad shines. A lot of the time homework is just a way to grade how good of parents a child has. If a great piece of interactive instruction has been designed, then students won't need help on it. I am trained to design such things (there really is a lot to it), but teachers only get one course in how to use technology and older teachers likely had none. It takes a lot of time and teachers don't have have the time or knowledge to do it themselves. They will get the funding to get iPads, but no money to buy useful apps. There would be great learning taking place with these devices, if the infrastructure was in place. It isn't. You have to have the hardware, the software, the training AND the time to make it work. It is rare to see of of those things come together.
Pads are a gimmick in search of a serious application. If your class plays angry birds instead of taking notes, then it's because the game was made for touch-screens, while typing (real, productive typing, I mean, like the one you would use when taking notes) isn't.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Im a teacher and IT IS a useful tool just like many other things. As several intelligent people in this thread has pointed out, the most important factor for learning is the teacher and the way the students work is organised. Feedback and feedforward, formative assessment and engaged and enthusiastic teachers are the best way of improving learning. Computers are a good tool both for me as a teacher and for my students. Im not a fan of the 1-1 projects that pop up everywhere, a computer is in my experience best used as a collaborative tool where two to four students use it for writing, making presentations and doing research. I work with kids in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade (9-11 years old here in Sweden). Its not the technology in itself, but what you do with it that has an impact.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
First of all, if you give the kids a toy, of course they will play with it. Tablets are overpriced toys, give them real netbooks. What's important to understand, that technology is just a tool, it's not going to educate the kids (outside a small number of nerds) just by itself. If you want to teach using technology, you first have to learn how to use technology yourself. You need complete control over the stuff, the ability to set any privilege on and off remotely, to transform the machines to a dumb terminal or even a dumb monitor when it's needed. You need to plan your classes around the devices. You need to have the material in digital form. You need to have programs that can help learning a subject. But, most importantly, you need to learn technology yourself.
As for home schooling, while I can't speak for all of us here, I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who gained most knowledge from the iInternet instead of the school. It's completely feasible, there are tons of knowledge on any topic, along with the requirements that are needed in school. It only requires the will, or a supporting parent. Even better, nowadays there are many video lectures that someone can just watch and learn abot any given topic.
When my son was in high school, he took an online community college course. It was a disaster. He didn't read the material, didn't do the work, and basically just blew the whole thing off. I think it's like anything else - if the kid is self-motivated, interested and wants to learn, it will work - if not, it won't.
For students younger than College age, supervision is needed in the classroom. What was told here was that the Teacher had trouble monitoring the students, and so avoided the problem by removing the tool. For teachers without the proper background or without the proper tools, this would be a good approach.
What the tablets (or netbooks or whatever) need is to have the teacher able to monitor what programs are running, and shut down any non-educational ones. That vital piece of the puzzle was apparently lacking. Letting the kids just use the tablets without any monitoring is going to be an epic FAIL. The problem came from up the IT food chain in the School District.
This problem is not really a new one. When I was in school, it was common for a student to slip a comic book into his/her textbook to read during study time. A simple blank piece of paper also works, if you have a pencil or pen. (Remember passing notes in Jr High and High School. It hasn't stopped, just gone more high tech.) My Wife, a remedial reading teacher in a Jr. High school, confiscates several cell phones each semester for texting in class. The phones are turned into the office, and the parents have to come and pick them up.
Tablets are really just one more distraction if they are not locked down.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
US birth rates are hovering at 1.9, and that's before the introduction of several new contraceptive solutions.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
levels tech the test is bad for pre College and even in College many classes are all about the test as well.
When you talk about changing modern education, you first need to understand how unprecedented and cheap it is.
All education before it had a student:teacher ratio of at most 5:1, with the average under 2:1. The majority was 1:1 - parent-child and master-apprentice (Even Sith Lords understood the importance of the ratio!)
"Modern" education, with its 30:1 ratio, made it affordable to all by dropping the cost of teaching a remarkable order-of-magnitude, but at the cost of regimentation and a wide spectrum of outcomes, from the left-behind to the racing-ahead. Any teacher will tell you that it's all about the parents, ie the direct-contact with the child, encouraging and expecting learning. The teacher has about 200days * 5 hours/30 =33 hours per year per student; the parents, about 365*12 = 4380. Google "30 million word gap" for an especially depressing take on how handicapped some kids are by their parent's behaviour.
The mistake with e-learning is imagining it to be the 'electronic teacher' (as TV was called the "electronic babysitter" when I was little). But until we get AI - and computers allowed to *make* the kid mind with punishments or something, they will remain just a passive tool that requires MORE, not less, supervision. The teacher here *could* have made use of iPads, if they'd had another teacher assigned, well-prepped with iPad experience and software. But they had no more time to supervise iPad use that they would have had to supervise the kids being given their own LHC to help them learn physics.
The big deal when I was a kid (60's) was TV in the classroom. That was going to free up teacher time because we could just watch our education on TV. Alas, we required closer supervision with the TV on; kids werre more likely to talk and giggle than when watching a live person who kept making eye contact.
I suspect a majority of the population could qualify for the Ivy League if they were raised in homes full of stimulation and good example, then educated at a 5:1 ratio that gave the educators time to use and supervise the use of modern technology.
My parents, educated in the late 1920's and most of the 1930's, were the first generation to all get 12 years of 30-kid-room public education; my Mom's coal-miner Dad went to the mines at 12. If the overall rising wealth of society since those days had been expressed with shrinking class sizes rather than , say, an increase in home size from 500 to 2000 square feet, we'd have at least 8:1 classes by now - a return to old traditions, as it were, you'd think that would be popular with conservatives.
And then there'd be time to think of something to do with those iPads.
One of the greatest meta-learnings from my course was that my life, and my work habits, were full of distractions which kept stealing my attention and focus. I don't claim to have the ideal solution (and spending time on being less distracted is, in itself, a distraction, so there's a clear cost-benefit exercise to be done), but I've found the following things very valuable. I am enjoying the journey of discovery but, at the same time, I wish I'd thought to implement some of these before I had started my formal eLearning - although they are useful to me for far more than just the formal studying.
1.) Use my head for processing, not storage. Even without a computer around, I found I was distracted, simply with too much going on in my head. I've tried very methods of solving this but, so far, the one which has worked the best is David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach. My implementation is very simple and, so far, has proved very effective; crazy though it sounds, it just feels - physically feels - that my head is less crowded. This alone has had a massive impact on my focus and productivity.
2.) I am not connected to the Internet unless I need it for the task at hand. I find that, if I have the Internet available, I can be distracted quite easily - just by disconnecting, I can concentrate on the task at hand, without email pinging in, temptation to browse the web etc. - for me, it's about minimising the temptation. (William Power's "Hamlet's BlackBerry" made me think more about this, as did Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows.")
3.) Taking regular breaks. I can do a task for about an hour before my productivity starts to dwindle. A five minute break gets me back up and running, although there is a slight lead time to getting back to full productivity again. But, overall, there is a definite gain by having that break.
4.) Minimise computer distractions.
As a first step, this involves switching off any form of notification which does not relate to the task at hand, with the exception of a warning about battery life. If I want to see if I have email, I can check, for example; I don't need it pushed to me, or automatically notified to me.
If I cannot switch off Internet access (perhaps where I am researching online) I will switch off / do not open my email application, turn off Skype and the like. I switched off incoming email sounds and on-screen notifications quite a while back, but I realised, after I had stopped to think, that email was still distracting me. If I had the email application open on one screen, when an email came in, I was drawn to it. If it was not visible, I had to switch to it every few minutes, to check.
Now, I work with my email client either closed, or else offline. When I want to deal with email - either where there is a logical end of a task / some free space in my head - I log in and check; if there's something there, I apply the "Getting Things Done" principles. I don't feel guilty that I am not constantly monitoring it, and am less stress and more productive as a result.
I've tried to avoid particular software solutions, but I have found DoublePane on the Mac very useful: if I am typing corrections / annotations on a PDF document into the word processing copy, I will have the two applications on screen, side by side. Having to alt/cmd-tab between applications increases the chances of me getting distracted, and this is an easy way of minimising that risk.
5.) One task at a time. Perhaps just part of the "Getting Things Done" approach, but I get much more done if I focus on one thing at a time. If I'm reading a document, I'm reading a document - I am not checking my email, or browsing the news, or drinking a cup of tea. At the end of it, I can go and get that drink, and, if it's really stopping me from concentrating on the reading, then I'll go and sort it (no point trying to read and understand if not concentrating), but if I can wait, I do.
6.) Waves / rain soundtrack: stupid though it may sound, I find it easier to concentrate when having waves / rain soundtrack playing (through headphones preferably, but speakers at a pinch) then having music or no sound at all - it helps my focus hugely.
The problem with modern public education is that from a young age any child going through school is disenfranchised from it by having to do things they already know, dont know, or having difficult social circumstances with classmates, etc.
Whatever it is, the problem is that 90% of kids dont want to be there. They dont care, they dont want to learn because they dont care to learn. That is the massive gaping wound in public education. It is also a factor of the factory like public schooling we have - in this "information" age, students should be learning what interests them from a young age. If you foster creative sparks and teach what the student wants to know, they will actively participate and things like ipads become accessories to learning to help promote it, not the other way around.
Real world example. At my high school we had macbooks when I graduated. Standardized test scores dropped by 30%, 60% of students grades dropped, 20% stayed the same, 20% went up. The 60% whose grades declined were using the laptops to ignore the classroom and not engage in something they didnt want to do. The 20% whose grades went up used the laptops in class to accelerate learning. The other 20% did some of both. The net result is that a huge fraction of a student body doesnt want to be there, and has no interest in learning, and you try to force feed them material that wont stick or have lasting impact but then try it again the next day, the next year, and for 13 years straight. It is a broken system by that mark.
You need to get every young person interested in education, get them something that they would want to learn, and move away from the factory farm public school system we have today. Technology allows more specialized per child education, and it really needs to happen. The technology has encroached everywhere else in their lives except in schools in any meaningful way - just throwing ipads at a disenfranchised populace only gives them more tools to ignore the class.
An advantage of a tablet is less weight than carrying around textbooks. Web access is great for submitting assignments and getting help. The next generation ought to be releasing the elearning courses under some kind of creative commons like license to some variation of wikipedia so that all students and teachers can find the best lessons that explain a particular topic. Then you wouldn't be as limited by a local crappy teacher if you could find the best of the best in a national repository. Just like there is differing quality of teachers, there is differing quality in textbooks and elearning courses. If we had a best of the best repository (with user ratings), then we wouldn't have to waste as much time plowing through a crappy lesson. I know in looking at technical books there are few genuinely useful gems and a lot of mediocre to crappy one that do no more than repeat the basics and each other. Thats one reason I went exclusively to safari books-online so after I have read a crappy book I have only wasted some time, not $60. I wish there were more electronic libraries.
Mod parent up. I also got into programming because all I had access to was a hand-me-down Apple II in 1993. It probably got me into the field single-handedly.
That being said, there is something to be said to provide technology for the sake of learning the technology itself. Logging onto the web and finding your own games IS a skill. The second part of my computer education was getting through the school's pathetic security (FileMenu=0 in Windows 3.1's win.ini) to run my own programs. Sometimes I think the whole thing was set up as a sneaky way to teach kids about computer networking.
(Downloading Doom on a 2400 baud connection and running it on a 25 Mhz Pentium with 4MB of RAM was also quite a learning experience)
When you give pen and paper to kid, they do draw things on it even when taking notes and so on. They play tick-tack-toe games and send notes to each other.
When you give a computer to kid, they search its functions and exploits them, they play games or send messages to each other.
The computer like iPad can be very powerfull tool, but it demands that teachers and especially school IT admins knows how to limit the access to it.
Instead with paper and pen, you really can limit what applications can be installed to device and what can be ran. You can set every message to be sended trough school servers. You can even have a remote control to them so you can turn them off or just turn the screens off, or even see what every kid is doing with their computers.
My college has made school E-learning systems using Linux. And one of the features is that every file is stored to school servers and systems anyways use remote logins, and teachers has full remote control capabilities if needed. One of the most important features is to turn students screens off until teacher release access again. It is really a important thing as it really moves kids attention to teacher much better way.
Teachers can as well see who is doing and what on their computers. They are not allowed to run any programs what IT-admins have not admitted, every URL/IP is whitelisted and teachers can give specific timelines when students can have a access to other sites than what is already given.
Teachers work is to guide and rule kids, slow down their access to information and teach how to use it to get full potential from it.
Computer does never replace parenthood, neither does TV.
The iPads what schools gets, should have whitelistings, remote control and controlled lists of installed applications. If not, then school has made first mistake in the beginning.
Learning requires effort. It requires concentration and forcing glucose through the brain. If using a gadget can make that easier (e.g. word processing), use it. But don't expect the gadget to reduce the core effort. But that is what some wish these gadgets to be - a method to effortlessly upload knowledge.
Trying to learn without effort is like trying to build muscle without working out. For the freakishly genetically endowed, like Herschel Walker or Bo Jackson, they are freakishly strong and powerful and have massive endurance without having to do much work at all. In the intellectual arena, there are kids who are able to upload vast quantities of knowledge with little effort.
I applaud people for trying to reduce the effort required to uptake knowledge. Just like I'd applaud someone who came up with a system which could increase our strength and endurance with less effort. Computers are powerful devices. But I don't see their use reducing the effort of learning, especially in the earlier grades.
An Encyclopedia Britannica subscription will make it much easier for an interested child to access that knowledge, than requiring a parent to take him to the library. A math game could speed up a child's uptake of multiplication tables. Perhaps electronic games could be used to motivate children. The Economist had a fascinating special report a couple of weeks ago on the "game-ification" of the world.
I think we should continue to look for solutions to make education easier and more accessible. We should think outside of the box to look for optimizations. But, on some level, learning will always require some effort and discipline. Just like strength or endurance training.
Stories like this are kind of like saying, "Pencils - are they really good for writing? Look what those junior high school kids did with their pencils !!!!!! Can they possibly be any good for anything?"
Sheesh
There is only one way for a fat person to lose weight. They have to want to it. The same thing is true for e-learning. Student's won't learn unless they want to or they are made to. Also don't forget parents that enable bad behavior. I have personally witnessed a mother take an online test for her son so that he would not fall behind.
In my opinion, it can work well. My grandson is homeschooled through an e-learning program that has resulted in his gaining two years academically last year alone. He also gets one-on-one speech therapy (He has some burned out brain cells and a resulting Elmer Fidd kind of accent). He also gets plenty of interaction, so it's not as if he sits home isolated.
The key, I believe, is a school system that does not resist this and helps parents get the tools they need to make this work. It's inevitavable anyway....
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Where parents fit in is discipline and respect for the teacher
While, as a parent, I completely agree with that statement it is not easy given some of the teachers my kids have had. For example we've had primary school teachers who thought that "opaque" was spelt "opague", thought the french for 1,000 was 'cent' (which is 100) etc. These were not one-off accidents of writing but repeated multiple times on handwritten sheets or graded work.
It is exceedingly hard to instill respect for the teacher when you are having to correct what the teacher has told your kids all the time. Afterall, to correct an error we are effectively telling them to ignore what the teacher says because it is wrong and, as kids, the eventual logic is "if we can ignore the teacher for X perhaps we can also ignore them for Y".
As a result I'm always reluctant to correct what the teacher has said (or more often written down since kids are not always reliable at reporting what was said). Fortunately the large majority of the teachers our kids have had have been good but the odd one here and there have been somewhat problematic. However when there is something clearly wrong I feel I have to correct it regardless of the consequences and it is worth noting that generally the less than competent teachers are the ones who have had more trouble maintaining class discipline.
I graduated from my high school in 2005, and I *still* remember the nightmare of our school "computers". They were locked down, pieces of crap which were expected to last forever, and they were HORRIBLE to use. And guess what! Students hated the machines, hated the chores, and hated the class. I am sure most of them hated the subject, and will continue hating everything to do with using computers for work the rest of their lives.
;-) Being a nerd, I had a personal 128MB flash drive which I'd saved up to buy, and other students hated me for using it. One class involved my "special" group having to burn a CD, using the single computer with a 1X CD Writer.......it took literally the best part of an hour, to copy over ~600MB.
I'm talking about old ass IBM's with CRT monitors running Windows NT, until FINALLY being upgraded to Windows 2000 around 2005 or so. The actual Windows desktop was in some way disabled, so all we saw was a heavily locked down gray startbar (ugh!), with a blue background, and that was it, you saved to your personal drive on the server.
As many functions as possible were disabled, "oh, we cant have the children slacking off!", so what did we do? We spent all our time finding out what was left, ways to tie into the inbuilt messaging system, in some way manually writing little scripts to send a message to a designated computer, you'd open the file in Notepad, look around the room and count computers, "ok, so Jimmy is sitting one, two, three, four.......FIVE computers down, so thats CR23", you'd type in what you HOPED was the correct computer ID, save the file and then "run" it. A second later, a Windows prompt box would pop up on that computer, do be dismissed with an "ok" button. "I think you're fat and smell bad, ha ha!", "hey, lets skip Science next period" etc, poetry it was not!
When I left in 2005, we were still expected to save on school floppy discs, you know, because floppy discs were not exactly a household item in 2005!
Have some damn faith in students! Work *with* them, not against, dont treat them like convicted murderers (I'd also be in favour of rehabilitative work in prisons, treating everyone with respect, but thats another story).
Yes, the computers have since been updated somewhat, but they are no doubt still a joke compared to what most students use at home. Some schools in my area are using iPads, handed out to every student, and they seem to be very successful. The was a trial of multiple devices, notebooks, netbooks etc, and the iPad won for ease of use, battery life, cost, "coolness" *and* usability.
We are days away from 2012, every student has an entry level smartphone, an iPod, perhaps an iPad at home. They have gaming consoles, they use Skype, they use iTunes, YouTube.....so why plonk them down at some ancient, yellowing beige plastic box, with a frigging ball mouse connected via Serial, and do everything you can to make school work miserable?
The best teachers in the world cant work well with crap tools, would the janitors want to only have access to toothbrushes? Its not a matter of "blowing out the budget" on every student, but christ, cant they at least have *functioning* computers, perhaps allowed to use their own netbook/iPad, for schools to have lease programs on standardised netbooks/iPads (including 3G access) for X dollars a week?
Many of the school computers we were expected to use were broken, and the "working" machines were usually vandalised in anger, once a kid booted out of the best school in the area was introduced to "the resident nerds". Within a week, the kid had bought "napalm" to school in an ice cream container, had lobotomized several ancient computers of their hard drives and CPU's, and that left our class with even fewer working machines.
Who you want to teach in this environment? Each hour, to tell the same nonsense to a new class, "ok, we're missing some decade old computers, so share with your neighbours", to have *three* people watching one flickering old CRT, while Excel spreadsheets were used, and classes ending in "ok everyone, turn out your pockets, someones been stealing mouseballs again" ?
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So, yeah, some school districts are better off without iPads, because they can't do ANYTHING right.
Other districts will excel, because they have realistic expectations, and properly managed systems.
It really is that simple, it isn't an issue of "is technology bad for Our Kids".
... of progress. The whole idea you can just 'educate' people who have various abilities and traits due to human bio diversity is a bit ludicrous. The real issue is that everyone is in denial that we've made a society that out-strips the average human beings ability to deal with it. So we see the explosion of depression and a denigration of intellectual culture in pop culture because - people want things they can manage without suffocating themselves or their enjoyment of life. They want to enjoy life before they are dead.
Most people end up being wage slaves in our modern capitalist society at boring soul killing jobs. We've made a society that is for all intents and purposes centered around the puritan concept of 'work is good', 'play is lazyness/bad'. People are limited beings and not machines.
I submit it's because the enlightenment's view of the universe as a machine mixed in with american protestants cult of the 'work ethic' has made a deeply anti-human society where everyone just wants to escape drudgery to get those things that nourish their enjoyment of life outside of the anti-human grind of work and toil we all face daily.
The enlightenment was wrong about human reasoning and many ideologies descended from the enlightenment are riddled with erroneous thinking, especially in regards to the way modern society is structured.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
There are hundreds, thousands maybe millions of mini-games out there. I believe what you need are mini-games for different areas of education, that will help students use what they are learning and understand what it's good for.
For example a physics game that has objects which all have standard properties and which are put into different situations. Easiest one could be you have the ground with a gravity constant (maybe the earth's or the moon's), a propulsive device with a customizable force, an object with properties like weight, size, etc. Goal is to input a formula that uses the right properties and that let's the ball fly into a target.
I find it would be especially helpful in math to see the applications of that you're learning.
So yes, if done properly e-learning is a viable and valuable option.
the apprentice. The problem here is that the children have it right. The best way to learn through electronic means is to 'gamify' it. You can build your class to be very much like an IT project. This means you can give a clear objective but allow them many ways to the end point, but ultimately, through a points/milestones/leveling system, you can have them accomplish a task. The other thing the kids (and IT people know) is that you must allow some. cyber-loafing for some creative and personal exploration. If you want this to be useful, the teacher must make it a way for the kids to have fun and stay within the bounds of the classroom. I say this be because my sister-in-law in Katy Texas is already doing this in her classroom with a positive feedback loop in progress.
I think it doesn't really matter what tools you use. Kids always want to learn, but it has to on subjects they are interested in or that fit into their world (not yours). The same is true for adults, by the way. We're wired to learn, but only what we need. If you want somebody to learn something other you have to bend their interest slowly (so you don't lose them) towards the topics you want. For some that may go fast for others it may take years. Computers are an excellent way to provide individualized education, but it needs to be tailored for each student. And that is the problem, it's easy to give every student an iPad, but very difficult to give him/her the contents he/she needs. So usually it stops with giving the iPad. And that doesn't work, surprise, surprise. Like everywhere in society nowadays people want a quick fix. If that doesn't work they try another quick fix. But that doesn't work with a long-term goal like education.
I honestly don't understand this big push towards expensive electronic "learning aids" in the class room. They are just handed out with the magic notion that they will somehow help a student learn better. The problem I have with computers/tablets in the class room is simple. First, they are shoe-horned into the existing class room to supplement text books or note books. That is the wrong approach and is doomed to fail. Why? Because today's teacher is teaching using the same methods they have for centuries. The classic teaching method is what our parents, grand parents and great grand parents went through. You sit while a teacher recites a lesson, and take notes. Its not a real interactive lesson. Its almost static with the slight chance that there might be a discussion but that rarely happens. Typically the teacher drones on for about an hour on a particular subject while students write down notes. Now introduce a tablet into that environment, what happens? Its simple, the tablet now becomes a distraction to the droning of the teacher. Why? Because it sure beats sitting there writing notes about something that a kid does not care about. The average 13 yo today doesn't really give a shit about the revolutionary war algebra or frog guts, they want to play with their friends or play video games. Put a tablet in front of them and they have two choices, play games or take boring notes. What do you think they will do?
If they want tablets to succeed they have to reinvent the classroom teaching methods to match the technology. Note taking is static, why force a student to write down notes when they are fully aware that electronic devices can download stuff. Throw note taking in the trash, it does not belong in the electronic classroom. The lessons should be "pre-compiled" and when a student walks into biology 101, there should be a lesson ready to download onto the students tablet. The content should be pushed so the student has no choice but to see the lesson, they can go back if necessary but for all intents and purposes, the content should be static unless an interactive lesson is necessary. It could be a web page so its easy to distribute and access from home. What the teacher has on the "black board" should also be on the students tablet. If the teacher writes something down, it should pop up on the tablet for the student to take home.
Home work, Quizes and testing should also be done electronically using the same device. Teachers could very quickly grade home work, tests and quizzes that are in electronic form (multiple choice questions are the devil but could be automatically graded as soon as it is submitted.) The lesson from that day is available for the student to research and answer homework questions or write papers. Text books should be web pages or better, a wiki so a student can easily search for the relative subject matter.
Immerse the student in the lesson! Throw some animations or video clips in if possible. A quiz can be snuck into a lesson by introducing a question at certain points during a lesson with a time limit. Example: your teaching kids about geography (a subject that Americans are lacking in). Say you are showing them a map of Europe and are naming some of its countries. As the teacher is going over the countries, their teaching app will highlight the country on the students app. Then after 10 minutes the country names are removed and the students are asked to tap on Belarus. Give them just 10 to 20 seconds to make their choice. Students who have not responded in the time allotted can them be flagged as possibly having problems learning or paying attention. As long as you keep their eyes on the lesson, they should be able to answer quick questions. And present a few questions throughout the lesson. Lessons like this will keep kids in focus. And tablets can bring the lesson strait to the student There should be no worrying whether junior in the back of the class room can see the black board or not. Maybe my example is crappy but it gives you an idea of how the lesson should be i
All the technology COULD work better, but not the way it's being used now. You can't throw one of the coolest toys around at kids and say, "Okay, now only use this for schoolwork."
My wife's a teacher and I'm a tech guy and we are both passionate about this subject (pros and cons). Here's how an effective model could work:
1) Lock out almost ALL functionality during school hours. Specific functionality (perhaps to research a paper online) could be enabled on a 'as needed' basis.
2) Make teacher monitoring of usage integral to the 'in school' experience.
3) Offload rote activities (on the devices) to homework and have automatic tracking and reporting of usage for (perhaps) automated evaluation/grading.
4) Only use technology in-class for things that are enhanced by the technology (quizzes/test with automatic grading...heck yes!).
You notice that turns pads on the school grounds into basically glorified e-books+pencil+paper. This is the RIGHT answer... for now. Sure, some novel apps will be invented that could enhance certain topics but the vast majority of those could be used as easily off-campus. School time should be about talking with the teacher and getting specific 1-on-1 help as necessary. And I can easily envision some fun stuff that could be done in a teacher-directed environment, but those programs haven't been invented yet.
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
I am an instructor at a university in Canada, and I find it frustrating sometimes that I have 3rd- and 4th-year students who have never had any experience with online learning. It makes my job more difficult when I have to teach basic skills instead of the courses I am supposed to be teaching.
I currently run my courses in a hybrid manner, part traditional, and part online. This allows the students to feel comfortable with the traditional part of the course, and makes the online portion less intimidating. Here's a link to a paper I recently wrote about my class, and which describes the approach I take. The same approach with hybrid classes and software has been used in elementary and secondary schools.
The real problem with technology in schools is not the technology itself, but a lack of clear pedagogy on the part of the teacher. Just throwing technology into a class and waiting for a miracle to happen is ineffective. The teacher should decide which technologies support their teaching objectives and use those. The UNESCO Towards Knowledge Societies report (2005) states,
"Teacher training must therefore extend beyond the bounds of competency in a particular discipline and must include, as components in their own right, training in the new technologies and study of the ways and means of stimulating the students’ motivation and personal commitment. What they will need to learn, then, is not so much a technical skill as the ability to choose from among the increasingly abundant array of teaching and other software and educational programmes on offer, those that are most appropriate. Face-to-face tuition to learners, remains nonetheless essential in basic education. " (pp. 82-83)
Reference:
UNESCO. (2005). Towards Knowledge Societies. UNESCO World Report (p. 220). Paris: UNESCO Publishing.
I disagree. Many of the teachers in the current system are reasonably smart, and talented. However:
A: Streaming. Put the behaviour problems in the classroom with the normal kids. Put the genuinely stupid, the spinal bifida kids, the Fetal Alchohol kids in the classroom. Don't give the teachers any help dealing with them.
B: The parent is always right. Teachers can't keep kids after school if they act out. My sister in law got raked over the coals for keeping a grade 4 girl in over lunch break for 10 minutes to talk to her about her behaviour.
***
Addressing the original topic of this post.
Smart boards have their place. So do computers. Educational software generally sucks golf balls through a garden hose. But internet access beats the hell out of a school library with 6 30 year old sets of encyclopedias.
So far there is no good reader program I've run into that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate multiple books, and switch easily between them.
There is no good intuitive math entry software program I've run into that allows you to type math as fast as a pencil.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Technology often sedates students and harms learning. Without excellent planing and implementation it decays into chaos or becomes masked as success because child and adult learners show fewer negative symptoms. Should we be following the lead of parents who install screens in the minivan?
Please join me. I'm researching technology and education. Does the prize of technology hide the punishment? More screen time and web only courses are not really building learing or relationships. There's very little agreement that technology boosts k-12 state test scores, even if you believe in them.
Please read or help me edit this draft google document: Sedation or Salvation - Education & Technology
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1umIJ_XanBrF4PAvPiB6EGGCBQ1Jxilsy3MzrXnQvr8I/edit?authkey=CKGo06sE
There's a huge technology & education trade show that rivals the size and hype of macworld. The ISTE conference is full of people who ignore the pitfalls noted by such reports as "Let them eat data" and "Fools gold". I want to collect more research on all sides of this topic. Contact me if you or people you know are questioning the myths of technology in education.
my short bio: After working at Adobe & HP I managed IT for six years at a technology high school in San Francisco. ( the 2nd Cisco academy ) I've taught middle and high school for 6 years full time in low income schools. I was once a proponent of one-one computers and laptops, but I've now changed sides after my first hand experiences with the wide array of symptops ignored by most educators. This includes but is not limited to the massive costs, and quickly growing mounds of obsolete computers thrown out by schools.
Here's a great cartoon that says it all:
http://www.claybennett.com/images/archivetoons2/theaters.jpg
You gave students iPads and thought that this is e-Learning? And now, when this tactics obviously failed, you are blaming e-Learning for your own failure.
For e-Learning to succeed, you need to have what is called LMS, or Learning Management System. e-Book is not e-Learning, iPad is neither. It's much more complex solution which has to be done right and tested on small group of best students before implemented in mass.
This article explains much better what e-Learning is: http://www.kirsanov.net/post/2011/12/23/Why-e-Learning-Is-Better.aspx
The Distributable Educational Material Markup Language (DEMML) is both an XML format for marking up educational material in a highly structured yet incredibly flexible manner and a system for authenticating and distributing that content for independent or shared use throughout the world, even where there is no internet connection. This material is organized and classified to a degree never before attempted, using what turns out to be a rather simple system of encoding the hierarchical tree of all possible educational material right down to the paragraph - or even sentence - level. This allows anyone to easily contribute any amount of material to what will quickly grow to be a vast library of vetted content for all to use. In addition the format facilitates a new level of flexibility in computer based learning by allowing educators to specify what material the student should study while still allowing the student instant access to additional, alternative material as their needs require. Multiple different explanations or presentations can exist for any one fact within any very specific topic. This allows any student at any level to quickly find just the right explanation that helps them most efficiently understand the topic at hand.
To be clear, DEMML is not yet another Computer Based Training (CBT) system. Instead, it is a way of creating a library of educational material in a standardized format which all compatible CBT systems can instantly draw from, with no manual editing whatsoever. Existing CBT software can be modified slightly to make use of this content or modified even further to employ the rich functionality that only DEMML provides - facts, multiple alternate explanations, questions and answers, problems and solutions, multiple alternate explanations for each of those, prerequisites, etc., with very rich metadata about everything. Just as hyperlinking existed long before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and HTML, CBT has been around a long time before DEMML. Before HTML all hyperlinking systems were proprietary and only worked within limited confines. Similarly, current CBT systems are all either proprietary systems or are relatively unavailable to the public. DEMML will be to CBT what HTML and WWW have been to hyperlinking. It will open up a world of possibilities by making education easily available to everyone, everywhere.
Learn more at www.demml.org