Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Schools Connected?
rtobyr writes "We use the Internet — E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. When I was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, we used e-mail (secured with encryption and stuff, but e-mail nonetheless) to communicate the commanding officer's order that a combat mission should be carried out. My third grade daughter produces her own YouTube videos, and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network technology. Yet here I am trusting a third grade girl to deliver memos to me about her educational requirements in an age in which I can't remember the last time I used paper. Teachers could have distribution lists of the parents. The kids' homework is printed. Therefore, it must have started as a computer file (I hope they're not still using mimeograph machines). Teachers could e-mail a summary of what's going on, and attach the homework files along with other notices about field trips or conferences that parents should be aware of. Teachers could have an easy way to post all these files to the Internet on blogs. With RSS, parents could subscribe to receive everything that teachers put online. If teachers want to add to the blog their own personal comments about how the school year is going, then all the parents would see that also, and perhaps have the opportunity to comment on the blog. It seems to me that with the right processes, the cost and additional workload would be insignificant. For example, instead of developing a syllabus in MS Word, use Wordpress. Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"
It seems odd that primary schools in at least the U.S. don't use technology to communicate with students much. My younger sister went to a private school that made reasonable use of Blackboard, but that seems to be the exception.
"Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"
Poor people exist. And attend school. And there's an odd notion that we shouldn't make things even more unfair for them than they already are.
A plague of viruses would ensue.
communicates with us primarily by e-mail, but is still required by federal law to have some things on paper.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Most tenured teachers are luddites and strike down any measure to modernise.
They must bend over backwards to reach the lowest available method. They have to presume that not everyone is connected. They have to send out memos even to lax parents that won't read them anyway. They should at least do both.
Students do not give their password to parents.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
As long as some people didn't have (or didn't want to use) electronic access, the school would have to have processes in place to handle paper-based communication. The good news is that paper-based works for everyone; as long as they have to do it that way for some, they can do it for all "for free" as far as process cost goes (which is not insignificant).
The alternative might save money (might not), but would require teachers either having to figure out each parent's preference independently, or to do all of their work twice for each student (again, not an insignificant amount of time they're spending on overhead).
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
See the elementary school teacher who used a school issued PC and accidentally shower her grade school class porn. She lost her teachers license, the school had a lot of explaining to parents to do. The anti-virus on the PC was out of date and had become infected from some other site.
Given the nature of modern parents allowing connectivity out of school is always going to be scary for teachers and schools.
What they could do is provide lessons, plans, updates and communications from the school to parents. This still has some risk of the school web-server getting owned, but is a lot less than the risk of one of many-many machines doing something wrong.
It's a good thought, but you gloss over many things. First, not everyone has a good computer or Internet access. Second, can you imagine the support nightmare? I went through an online Masters program through a good school and it was almost impossible to get everyone online at the same time with working video conferencing. Tons of problems...tons of issues... Now add in to that people that just want their kid to go to middle school and you're setting yourself up for a lot of missed homework because the computer was infected..or Word kept crashing...or the Internet was down...etc.
The only way this works is to do it in parallel with traditional processes, which many schools now do. We're not at the point where we can cut over to all electronic communication just yet. I'd love to...but we aren't there yet. My son's preschool does a good bit online but many forms and other information still come home on a regular piece of paper.
I work in IT in a large school district. 1. Capital costs. It's easy to keep paying administrators and teachers to keep pushing paper around. It's hard to pay for new computers, new network infrastructure, and new employees that know how to set it up and use it. 2. Security. You need to be careful with children's identifying and private information. This is easy to do wrong, and expensive (see 1: new employees) to do right. And it has to be done right. 3. Even when you can do it, you still need to provide the paper versions, because some parents won't/can't use the computer versions. So why pay to do it twice (see 1)?
I have a friend that teaches 4th graders in a Gifted and Talented program. I helped her set up a blog and the kids are supposed to discuss 1 "extra" topic a week that she posts. This has gone over GREAT in her class room.
Now, setting it up, wasn't so easy. We needed to get on a server, and have it secured. It was actually kind of a hassle. But, security for the kids was the #1 concern (as it should be). When you look at using electronic means, security becomes more of an issue. The real issues, I would expect have more to do with training, logistics (not everyone has computers/internet, especially at my daughter's school), school support. There are just a lot of holes out there.
I was surprised how many hoops my friend had to jump through. A lot of projects are rejected because of lack of security.
I work in K-12 education as a systems analyst and at least in Alberta where I am situated the change is coming. It isn't as easy as flipping a switch though, there are a lot of barriers in the way of this kind of progress; privacy and security concerns, limited funding for information technology in school jurisdictions, limited funding for professional development for staff to take advantage of this kind of technology, the Old Guard, etc.
Believe me when I tell you for the most part we are with you, but it takes money that nobody wants to pony up, and time that nobody seems to have.
In Boulder, Colorado, every school in the district (50+) uses the web portal 'Infinite Campus' to convey grades, as do many, many school districts in major areas. I was going through school during the age of rising web technology, and every school I have been in since middle school (schools all over the united states) has conveyed grades, class performance, etc through web portals and email.
I don't know where OP is getting their information from, but from my experience the school system has been rapidly introducing web technology to communicate with parents since 2006.
Speaking for myself and my students, most of the time the parents are to blame. Not everyone has a computer with Internet connection. And those who have, most of the time are too tired with working with a computer all day to get home and care about school
Just be thankful they aren't using Blackboard.
I'd prefer a piece of paper than having to navigate that monstrosity.
A) You can't assume every child and parent has access to the internet or computers. I work in a fairly normal catchment area of the UK and I'd say there are around 10% of families that fit into this category.
B) Too many excuses. You set homework online or through dedicated software and the pupils come back with 1001 excuses - "broadband wasn't working", "I couldn't download it", "it was in the wrong format", "printer was out of paper", "I've got it on memory stick and it still needs printing" All easily check-able and solve-able individually but not if you have 30 students. Give a child a piece of paper with homework on it, and if they lose it it's their fault (they could have come and collected a new sheet before the lesson), and if its not done it's their fault. Much much simpler.
It's all fun and games until the child creates a website that explains the entire operation has been cancelled, changes to the password to mommy's account, and never is held accountable for grades again.
Then again, such a child probably would do better outside of traditional schools anyway.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There's your answer. Private schools can screen applicants and parents, if they don't like either then that child is not accepted. Private schools can choose to increase tuition costs to hire people that spend time managing PCs and IT systems (many public schools are struggling to keep the teachers on payroll). All this greatly reduces problems of viruses and (God forbid) pr0n accidently displayed. But then my opinion here will go unnoticed by those in the "high castles."
mfwright@batnet.com
My daughter has a couple laptops, a tablet, iPod... symptom of being a geek's daughter. Alas, many households don't even have a single computer. Many parents have never used a computer or even an easy and secure way to retrieve email.
Think PCI regulations are tough? There are regulations on who can see your child's report card. It may contain classroom information that could be used by a kidnapper. The parents may live in separate households (divorced, separated, etc.). Schools are not allowed to disclose if a student is enrolled at a school and putting that information on the Internet makes it open to snooping.
Yes, not insurmountable problems, but with zero dollars available to even give teachers raises, it's no wonder that it's not happening quickly.
Education has historically been slow to change. As an example, it was a technological breakthrough in schools to get VCRs in each classroom in the 90's. To communicate with students, the student needs to know how to check email/facebook/twitter/blogs/etc. However each one of these tools is blocked in the school I teach. Students are not allowed to email, no one is allowed to facebook, tweet, blog, etc. Why not? Because the media has shown that every teacher is a perv who uses facebook/twitter/blogs/emails to stalk students in order to molest them. While I know this isn't true, and the slashdot crowd knows this is not true, average Mom and Dad watching the latest Foxnews/CNN feed gets this idea that teachers use these communication tools for evil. Word got out that I collected students cell phone numbers. (I wrote a script to send an sms before tests, quizzes, due dates, etc.) As a result a district wide policy was put in place stating that teachers are not to text students under any circumstance.
Why this fear mongering? Lawyers. The district is afraid that a parent will sue and so the entire educational environment is stifled in the community.
I use Moodle extensively and have set up accounts for parents to view lectures,take quizzes and participate in discussions with the students. it is great. I email with the parents, I set up a blog which parent have the option to subscribe to vis RSS feeds. The parents are slowly getting into the habit of checking the child's grades online....This has been slow going though. I first started posting grades and assignments online ine the mid 90's... it is just now gaining steam... Just like it took the VCR to become commonplace, it will take 15-20 years to get current communication technology in the schools.
Look up common core standards... New "rules" of educations pushing "21st Century" digital learning standards...
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Not sure where you live, but the school district that my children are enrolled in has been using this technology since we moved here in 2003
Grades, email progress reports, absences and the like are all conveyed via email/portal pages to parents and children of the school district, my kids even have a shared space where they can upload their home work to then grant permissions the the teacher they want to have access to it.
Maybe its time you got involved or move?
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
At least where I teach, we *are* connected. The school has a website that links to all courses, the grades are all in an online gradebook that families have access to, and on and on.
As with many systems, things aren't as well integrated as they could be. The ecosystem of ways to share is so rich that what we end up having is a cobbled together system where people use what's most comfortable to them -- some use online calendaring for assignments, others use a static web page, others a blog, others email distribution lists, others just use the online gradebook to post things, etc. It's tricky as the tech director to decide when to regulate and enforce a common solution for consistency and when to let the diversity flourish to allow for innovation. In our case, we've standardized on the online gradebook and some form of course website, but that's not to say the other forms don't flourish as well (sometimes well integrated into the required forms, others not).
There are, however, some real downsides.
The biggest downside is putting everything in electronic form gives parents a weird level of insight into our grading process. By allowing them to peek into everything we do, we no longer choose how and when to communicate with parents, and the result ends up being some weird expectations (parents who right in with anger and concern when there kids have a low average early in the semester when we've only graded 2 assignments, etc. etc.). I also find that by having moved everything online and made things much more public, we are ennabling a lot of parents to continue coddling their kids and lowering expectations for them. Certainly it seems like parents expect us to put everything online.
Note: I don't speak for all schools, but I can say that here in the Boston regional area, what I'm describing is not at all exceptional. I work at a charter, but the same kinds of expectations are there at the major public districts that surround our suburban town.
I have three kids in school (one in each EL, MS & HS) and the school system is online with almost everything. Grades are only posted online and we can checkup on home work assignments in almost real-time (one day delayed at most). My wife can and does email the teachers all the time (my wife is an ex teacher now doing in-home daycare). The only thing we see from them are permission slips that must have a signature. It's really a great system from a parents point of view. And yes I live in an affluent suburb (of Denver). From what I've heard from the teachers, they like it as well, less paperwork and they only enter grades once and it's all taken care of.
That is BS in general. There are certainly some teachers that this applies to but any parent can request an observation to see exactly what is being done in the classroom. If you to examine you can. A teachers job is to teach the kids, not show the parents what is being taught. If you want to know what they are doing, go and check it out or ask the teacher outright. I am not a teacher, but have always found the district my child attends to be open and helpful.
This question fundamentally underestimates the incredible effort and expense required to develop, operate and maintain modern social networking and communication systems.
Unfortunately, many schools are having a hard time paying their teachers, let alone a competent IT staff. Such advancements are rarely possible without the proper technical support. Maybe if we could get the federal and state governments to actually fund schools, we could move them into the 21st century.
I think the problem may simply be that teachers perceive they will lack the time to answer questions / comments they receive from parents via email if they open this pandora's box. I know a similar feeling is present in much of the health care industry and other "social service" sectors. The more available one is via "always on" technology, the more time one will have to spend on addressing communications conveyed via this additional medium. Businesses see it all the time - think how much time each day the stereotypical Dilbert-like employee must spend on emails compared with time spent addressing paper memos and phone calls alone (which still exist today) prior to the advent of email. Teachers fear their already strenuous schedule will become even busier. It takes a lot more time for a parent to pick up a phone or write a letter to contact the teacher... and I think that's how a lot of teachers like it.
You will see it much more in private schools than in public ones. The main reason is the base assumption of wealth of the family. You can't expect a family that can barely afford food and housing to have a computer and internet connection at home. Many people take these things for granted (especially people who read Slashdot), but the reality is that there are many school districts where 20% or more of the students qualify for free breakfast and lunch because those might be the only meals they have for the day.
In private schools, you will see systems like you mentioned in use. Case in point, my cousin's school uses one. His parents can see every homework assignment, every memo/note every night. They can see what class he is in at that moment, what readings they are doing in class that day, what grades he received on every quiz, test, and assignment as soon as they are marked. They know if he is in danger of not getting an "A" for the term while he still has a chance to fix things. It IS an advantage, and one he would have unfairly over other students at the school if their parents did not have computer and internet access. It is why most public schools will not implement it. That said, the reality being what it is, statistically, the parents/families who can not afford a computer and internet access are already hurting the child's performance by not having access to materials which could help teach their child things that he/she is struggling with, especially given the fact that statistically, those parents themselves are least capable of knowing the subject themselves well enough to help.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Your first assumption is that the school administration is competent.
From my experience, this is not a safe assumption.
Honestly, it's a simple question of logistics & education. As a student teacher that's constantly integrating technology in productive ways, it's hard for me to watch the rest of the teachers at the school I'm working at (and we're a fairly well off district) try to use technology. They ask me lots of basic questions about things that people really should be able to do by now. My ability to embed youtube videos (not just links to videos, the actual media itself) has drawn gasps. That's frightening.
The teachers, though, *want* to be able to do this stuff. The fact is that the people who know tech in the district are either too busy fixing mundane things and managing accounts (they're sysadmins, not trainers) or they're overbooked. For a building with 150+ staff, we have one tech trainer that's in once a week, offering classes like "intro to microsoft word."
At the university level in the education degree programs, the classes still haven't been updated in probably eight or ten years. They're still requiring as the big, scary final project: a powerpoint with at least three images in it. Or, a newsletter that you assembled in Word with at least three images in it. The educational technology training at that level is a joke. There are generic blackboard trainings, but honestly blackboard's so bloated and buggy that it's been deemed by many of the staff that I work with to be too unreliable. I solved that by getting some cheap hosting and putting up a Drupal site that I've configured to pretty much mirror blackboard's capabilities (and even on shared hosting, it's more reliable than BB). That is far beyond the reach - even the conception - of most of the teachers I work with, not because they are stupid or luddites, but because they simply don't know the options. Not only that, the school's so sold on these huge packages - $10k a year for a flaky BB subscription and $400 Dell computers (old, slow, etc.) that they can't conceive of moving to an alternative.
Also, we use Pinnacle to enable communication between students, teachers, and their parents. Any parent or student can check grades & comments online. The problem is that most of the parents simply hate it, and the school can't go invest in a massive new package and try to move their data over. It's slow, it's flaky like BB (I've had all of my students unenrolled on a fluke, and it stayed that way for two days), and honestly, the students and parents just don't check it often enough for it to be an agent of change in parent/student behavior.
In summation: the tech they have sucks (it was sold to them by persuasive "consultants" - read, salespeople), and because they don't have access to decent training or resources, they don't know that tech can be an amazing ally in education.
My kid's school (public, in an Atlanta suburb) uses email for lots of communications, teachers keep a blog (usually one for the whole grade, where they post resources and homework) and the state has a site for exam practice, digital library etc. The school also uses letters when they think it's appropriate (not everybody has a computer or checks their email every day; returning signed stuff by email is not that east :), and occasionally mass phone calls.
Los Altos school district has a pilot program with Khan Academy to do exactly this. Instead of lecturing in class and sending homework, they actually have kids watch the instructional videos, and the teachers help the students learn in class depending on their graphed and measured feedback. I'd say that Khan Academy is probably the leader in the next generation of education technologies. It is a free service and the organization is a non-profit. It is worth checking out.
The flipside of this issue is inertia. Most teachers and parents aren't very tech savvy, and shrink from having anything to do with fundamental changes to routine. I'm having an uphill battle convincing key PTA members at our school to implement Google Apps for Non-profits, even though they have had several communication issues where having a service like that would have made a world of difference. The problem is that enough of them simply cannot see the value of the technology. I'm having to go *very* slowly and do my best to not alienate people because of their own prejudices surrounding "it's tech, so it's hard".
I volunteer in my daughter's classroom, and I hate to be the one to break this to you, but mimeographs are alive and well in public education.
That said, I never understood why there isn't a website that parents can log in to to access homework materials at the very least. Maybe have all the homework on the website, identified with the section/chapter number, complete with parent material to help your student. You could roll parental communication into it as well, but just the homework alone would be pretty spiffy.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
You're using logic and reason, which is expressly forbidden in public schools.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Your 3-year-old daughter is not setting up VPNs.
The reason your school hasn't gone full-bore with technology is because technology doesn't really revolutionize education.
Plus, it makes no sense to spend time and money implementing RSS for parents unless all the parents will use it.
Paper forms are the lowest common denominator and will be around for a long time.
Here in Australia it is not uncommon for schools to have portals that have everything including homework and communications to parents.
Blackboard now offers their latest software to individual teachers completely free of any cost, with free tech support. There is now no excuse for not using it. Go to www.coursesites.com, read the terms of use, create an account, use it to create your first course, enroll students, and get on with it.
Some of that money being embezzled would need to be spent on something legitimate, which is something that will always be opposed by schools.
I used to teach at a public high school. I asked about web-based systems for the school, and the answer was that the school board ran a web site, and that I was not allowed to touch it. (Reason 1: The administrators are afraid of what a teacher will post on the web, even though they trust us to do after-school tutoring with your 15 year old daughter.)
I set up my own system, and posted the critical things online. I never did get video lectures online, but I did get the syllabus / schedule, daily homework assignments, FAQ, etc. So, I was supposed to get my students to ask their parents to sign a form. I handed a copy to everyone in class, and someone asked if it was also online. I said it was. A third of the class threw their forms away. The next day I have every form (except 2) returned. That was the best in my department. The principle did what principles do...she looked for someone to blame because it was not perfect. She addressed the two students who had not returned their forms, and asked why they did not return their forms. They said I had said it was online, but that their printers were out of ink, or their computers had crashed. The principle marked me "below-expectations" on the "use of technology" part of my evaluation. (Reason 2: Principles look for someone to blame when unrealistically high expectations are not met, and the kids know to blame the teachers. Ultimately, anyone trying anything new gets blamed.)
Public schools pack more students into classrooms until there is a riot, then they pull out 1 or 2 students. They grade teachers first and foremost on classroom control. (The only possible secondary grading scale is what percentage of students meet a very minimal level of academic achievement.) When you are concerned about controlling a riot, paper is easier. If you were to hand out laptops, a few kids would smash them in the first 5 minutes, too try to start an argument. I know you think this is strange, and that the school would throw out the problem kids, but we cann't. The administrators' budgets get set based on student head count. That's why they employ armed truancy police and why they refuse to expel bad kids. (Reason 3: Public schools are not there to educate; they are there to incarcerate.)
If you want to change this, disband the public schools. Let people teach themselves on the Internet.
The high school i went to just got computerized grades last year. I work in the IT department of the same town ( separate from the schools, but we still communicate between each other ) They want to do stuff but no one wants to bone up the money to get anything good done.
Att: Johns chemistry teacher. John will be missing chemistry classes next week because of a dentist appointment. Regards, -My dad
Public libraries exist, they have computers, and they allow poor people to connect to the Internet. In fact, I have corresponded with a homeless person in the past, who was using a library computer. Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology, and we could spend less money paying cops to arrest poor people and more improving our library system. If we had priorities that did not come out of some Soviet playbook, that is.
Palm trees and 8
... then it gets to the point where the entire project is cancelled before any thought it even put in to it.
You have a paper system.
That can still be used on request.
You add an e-mail system.
No paper is needed, minimal maintenance by a local council network admin in the case things fall apart or crash.
DONE.
You do not need to do anything else.
All it needs is a smart e-mail tracking system. You do not need anything else.
You use open formats from text to 3D modelling data. Screw Microsoft, screw all proprietary file formats in fact. Open or get the hell out.
Or you kiss Microsofts butt for yet another education price cut and be another one of their bitches, your call.
But that is it. You don't need any other fancy crap.
If a persons connection is bad, or they have none, paper.
That. is. it. Don't think about it anymore. Just. Do It.
There is no equal access argument. Don't even bring it up. Everyone is getting access to the content. That is all that matters!
It was done when I was in secondary school. I came in 1 year after the project was initially started. For the next 6 years I was there, it improved massively.
But the scope of this was much larger, it was an entire education intranet, so it required much more management since there was hacking, abuse of services, breaking services, and of course just terrible security in general. (I found the damn network administration program when I was bored after finishing all my work. That is how terrible it was. I wasn't even trying!)
But they finally got their act together and locked things down after I pointed out some horrible backdoors to the entire damn network. (including council stuff!)
Meanwhile the skiddies got banned from any council network permanently. And like always, they grassed on each other. So much for that "hacker integrity". Oh, kids.
But they still had access to the content. And that is what mattered.
Silly wabbit. Openness and transparency isn't for Kids (or school).
I'd imagine it has something to do with teachers not wanting to be that transparent. They're also already under enough pressure for very little pay... of course this very well may make their jobs easier. Maybe there's a "pilot program" somewhere, where teachers are doing this, or at least using SOME tech in the classroom.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
The teacher already has Too Damn Much (tm) to do, managing 40 kids. Ease of distribution is completely irrelevant. It's making and maintaining those emails and spreadsheets. That's head-down time, not interacting with the class.
Here's a idea: YOU do it. Talk to your kids. Every day from the first day of school, have a regular 'what's happening' casual conversation. Be part of the Loop by holding up you end of it, not expecting the teacher to be some sort of maid-servant submitting reports on your spawn for your leisurely review.
And nobody seems interested in spending a lot of money on schools. IT in primary schools is some of the most pathetic I've ever seen. They do a completely shit job of it and a large part is lack of funding. When there aren't enough people, isn't enough cash for good systems ans software, is it any wonder you can't attract people who are good at it and that they can't do their jobs well?
So first big money increase is that the schools have to overhaul their IT. They need a lot more of it and higher quality. If the system is going to be critical and required, it'd damn well better be implemented and supported properly. You can't say "Well just go find something online for free," when it is something critical to the success of the school.
Support for people using it, both teachers and students, would be massive too. I know every parent likes to think their kids are real clever with computers but here's a newsflash: They aren't. Regular kids know how to use them in the same way regular people know how to drive a car: They know the minimum necessary to make it work and lack any advanced problem solving skills. I can see that shit every time I play an online game and have to give people support in making Ventrilo or Teamspeak work. Here are people who like computers enough to play online games, and they still don't know enough to make a voice chat app work properly.
So this wouldn't be some magic thing that would just work. It would require a lot of infrastructure, support, and development and that costs money. Now in the end it very well could be worth it. Maybe it saves money in the long run, by replacing more expensive labour intensive things. Maybe it doesn't save money, but the increase in quality of education make it worth it. Either way the problem is you have to fund it first. Since people are not hot on providing extra funds to education, that is a non-starter.
One reason is that everyone can receive paper, but some people can't afford computers with Internet access. Sending notes home with the kids is the one distribution method everyone can afford. The other reason is accountability. Schools generally require a paper trail proving what has been sent home. Letters go home, they get signed, they're returned. If notices are sent using e-mail you'd get parents who would just delete the messages, or some would get lost in the spam filter, or some parents wouldn't understand how to reply properly.
Basically the electronic thing will only work in areas where everyone has money, everyone is tech savvy and teachers don't need signed documents from parents to cover their asses. Can you think of any places like that?
Our county uses Infinite Campus which does just about everything you are asking for. https://campus.dcsdk12.org/icprod/portal/icprod.jsp?section=faq I'd expect most schools have at least a couple parents who could help get something like this setup.
Any properly formatted document available on the web is also properly printable. Make the document for the web first, and print out things when needed. Depending on the percentage of parents connected, you can either print out copies first and hand them out to everyone, encouraging the more connected parents to recycle on said paper (opt-out style), or have students/parents request printed copies to be sent home (opt-in style).
Since they print the document up anyway, typing it up using something like Wordpress and then printing is fairly trivial. If they want to do something fancy in Word, type it up in word, print it out, and upload it; or, set each teacher up with a directory that will auto-list contents for download online so they can just save to that network location.
I'm sure every teacher would 'love' to be able to send an email out to 30 students, and receive 30 "email-read receipts" -But that's not even close to a real-world case, now, is it? The average user doesn't check their mail hourly or even daily, nor do they read every message in the same routine (most) /. users do. What IS tried and true is sending a note home with the student and telling them, "You go to detention unless this comes back signed". This way, it makes 'someone' responsible for the message rather then saying, "Whoops... it went in my junk folder"... Paper is just the most common way to reach everyone.
Not sure where your kids go to school. But my son in law goes to a public middle school in Ohio, and we are kept informed by email frequently of what is going on. Grades are posted on some webservice we can access. teachers send weekly or biweekly summary emails.
Important notices are delivered by paper (given to the kid) and also announced by email.
So I guess it depends on schools and community and how tech savvy the teacher is...
Let me count the problems:
1. Some parents (and grandparents etc.) don't have internet access at home. These days, mostly this is the poor, especially those who are sofa-surfing, living in a homeless shelter etc. Those people will still need paper.
2. Yes, you could email me the homework, but my daughter will still need to complete it on paper. That means I have to have not run out of either printer ink or paper at home.
3. ...and you know that what gets emailed home is going to be a Microsoft Publisher file or something...
4. Schools may not even have the rights to do that. Many schools purchase eg. Math workbooks. These come from the publisher as one book per child, and the teacher or some helper/parent removes all the tear-out pages. Teachers then hand out as homework throughout the year. The school doesn't own the copyright and can't just copy the pages.
My high school used a web interface to track grades and other information instead of the papertrail. My old elementary school has just started the same move to digital. Many schools have class mailing lists where teachers, students and parents can communicate. Of course, transition is slow, partly because schools are heavily infested with the paper-based bureaucracy, but it is already happening, at least here in Europe.
What's the advantage to the school? You're talking about introducing highly complex IT systems that will require development and support, both of which are expensive. What's the school going to get out of this?
I work on (development, training, support, strategy, the whole lot) these sort of systems for a university, and even for us the list of "nice to have" features that aren't going to be implemented is huge (100+ items last time I looked). A lot of schools are adopting open source solutions such as Moodle ( http://moodle.org/ ), but we're still at the point that for many smaller institutions it just doesn't make sense on cost vs benefit.
My wife is a first grade teacher in the school system I and my children attended. (I graduated high school in 1972, so technology had a whole new meaning back then.) I have volunteered for many technology-related projects, including a committee overseeing a complete overhaul/rebuild of the schools, so I have some first-hand experience with this.
There was a big national (sorry, U.S.) initiative in the 90's to get every classroom connected to the Internet. I participated in several "Net Days", or something like that, where we volunteers ran Cat5 through ceilings and musty basements and punched down net drops In every classroom of every school in our town.
After that initiative, finding net-capable computers to hook up was a problem (two of my wife's four classroom computers were formerly our home Macs); most school systems are stretching their budgets to put teachers (and mandated special Ed aides) in the classrooms and keep textbooks current; technology is a luxury few systems can afford.
Don't even get me started on staffing to maintain systems and networks. Most school systems get by with less than a tenth of what a comparable sized company would expect to have in place for IT support.
As someone pointed out earlier, there was a time not that long ago where you could not assume every home had a computer with decent access to the Internet, and you could not make it the primary means of communication without excluding too many people.
For a while, my wife paid out her (our) own pocket to maintain a web presence.
Things are improving; our town is using a system called X2 for web presence, report cards, communication, etc. But refer back to the support staffing issues. There is no real support; the system is maintained and updated by marginally technical personnel for whom this is a secondary responsibility (after, say, actually teaching), for a miserly stipend that works out to less than minimum wage if calculated by the hour.
I know some people who wish schools did a better job at this would be willing to spend the extra tax dollars to support it, but you'd be amazed at how many want more for less.
It's almost like it's on purpose or something. Nawww.
i don't claim to speak for the rest of the country, but my school is relatively technically able. even in a state that consistently ties for last place when it comes to education, there are some schools with a remarkable grasp of technology. the software isn't up to date, the computers are crap, and the IT department is barely ever here (when they are, they just browse reddit and such like the rest of us). still, i can't blame the school for it. it's jefferson parish's fault. if some aspects of your daughter's school seem outdated, that's because they are. many schools simply don't have the funding to update as regularly as you or i. my school provides (shitty) laptops to every student. granted, the computers still run vista and are over five years old, but you can't have everything. even more surprising? it's a public school. the grades and assignments are shown online, and there is regular digital correspondence between the parents and the teachers. as a result, i am being punished for having a D in a class with three grades entered. such is life.
thank you for your time. ~spacetimeExecuter
Throw a few million dollars into a school district and move your family into it. Wash, rinse, repeat...
There are certainly steps towards this type of interaction with the parents. My two older sisters are both teachers (in different states) and they already do this. Both work in the public schools, although one works in the magnet program which is a special program for students who excel in the arts, sciences, or other similar situations. Either way, it all boils down to those families who cannot afford the technology, however in my sisters' cases those parents just don't get the added luxury.
-SirDinky
teachers actually have lives. If they become even more connected parents would expect 24 x 7 responses to every email they send, and bitch mightily if *gasp* a teacher didn't respond immediately to an email sent at 11pm on a Saturday. Most parents are reasonable, but all it takes is one or two idiots who seem to think that the teachers are their and their kid's personal servants who must drop everything to serve whatever need they perceive as having.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Figure out how to make it benefit the teachers union. The next problem you'll have is funding the power consumption of thousands of servers and workstations howling in the unused portion of every school facility in N. America.
1. The middle school I left behind in Maine has students from 17 different countries, speaking 28 different languages. Unicode is not so well supported as we hoped it would be.
2. Many parents cannot even read their own native language, and their children translate for them. Surpisingly, their children are largely honest about what they bring home.
3. For parents that drift from one ISP to another, changing email addresses are normal. Forcing them to Gmail presumes they trust any single authority. Many come from places where the government will kill you for talking about something, and it need not even be subversive. Using Gmail scares them just because it is ubiquitous.
4. Parents who can't read also tend to not go to libraries, nor be able to type in their login name and password. Go figure.
It's a big world out there, even in America. Email is not yet universal, and I propose that we recognize that the parents that most need to be involved in their kids' education are also less likely to have it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This whole question is behind the times: My little sisters (age 16 and 18) already communicate with their teachers via email, receive assignments and take some tests via the school's website (or perhaps a third-party site, I haven't looked into it much) All the normal school spam is emailed out to both kids and parents; weekly reminders for holidays, short days, school events, etc. Paper copies are also sent out, which parents can opt out.
It will take a bit longer to catch on fully, but once the "connected" generation has kids of their own, they'll accept nothing less than instant gratification.
Nobody else has said this already? Really?
The companies that make educational material maintain their copyright and grant licenses for the 30-odd students in the class. I would very much doubt that teachers are even ALLOWED to post that material online, even if they are willing and able. If you want homework online, you are either going to have to change the licensing agreements schools make with these companies, find alternative sources, or produce their own materials - and none of those options are trivially easy.
If we were to get teachers that actually could use computers, and administration actually interested in education instead of the sports programs, things would be very different.
But spending $22,000,000 on a new gym is far more important than computers in the computer lab or a chemistry classroom that is fully stocked with modern equipment, reagents, and textbooks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The loser schools in Nova Scotia have "upgraded" to Robo calls. I have two kids in two schools and most times their stupid robo-calls don't even bother identifying which school is calling. Then it takes them forever to get around to the point which is usually something like "Please return your textbooks as we are still paying too much for paper versions."
I don't fret too much as the school system in NS is such an epic fail that I realized that it exists for comedy purposes only. The latest was where they pointed out that NS isn't near the bottom of the heap as rated by the PISA scores(Internationally recognized scholastic test) if NS is at the top of the margin of error and the rest of the provinces are at the bottom of their margins of error. Even with this twisting of reality two provinces crushed NS. Another good example was where a local grade 12 class had something like 7 math teachers before Christmas. The schoolboard did everything they could to say it didn't impact the students. Only one student passed the already dumbed down standardized test. Students were on the radio begging for something to be done.
ever try reading 100s of pages of student papers which necessitate marking up corrections on a computer? give me paper and a pen any day to make my eyes happy
Schools aren't connected with buzzword compliant social networking crap because there's no reason to think that it would help kids learn! I've worked in an education department's IT division before, and every time somebody tried to push through some sort of "social" or "connected learning" crap it was a total failure. It was underused and pointless. Nobody could ever demonstrate the slightest benefit, but the costs were massive.
Meanwhile, the real problems that could be solved with technology are being ignored. For example, I have this great statistic that shows that the further away a school is from the city centre the fewer books it has per student. That's insane! What does the physical location of a student have to their with the propensity to read? Why should schools in the country have fewer books? If books could be delivered electronically, students everywhere would have equal and fair access to literature, but noooo... the politicians are totally spineless, and don't have the nerve to tell the publishers to provide digital copies of their works. Copyright this, renegotiate that, it's so much effort... so fuck the kids, let the country bumpkins stay illiterate, what matters is that the honourable senator's kids go to a private school with a library that has three floors and subscribes to fifty journals.
teachers already do a sh*t ton of work outside of lesson planning & grading. They already dedicate late nights and weekends to their students. They dedicate their own f*cking money to buy supplies.
In return they get people demanding they take pay cuts, accept fewer benefits, a smaller pension, and work even harder. All the while they must deal with the pressure of sh*tty kids, even sh*ttier belligerent and demanding parents, and a community that wants to them to teach personalized lessons to their children despite having more kids in the classes and fewer teachers in the schools.
If you ever spent one month as a teacher you'd never stop thanking them and you give them a raise every yearâ"or at least enough of one to maintain their salary to the cost of inflation.
Connectivity is the weak point of most computer for every student program. If the school district is already providing a computer to each student, then working with a local ISP to provide broadband connectivity is a viable subsidy. School computers can be set to automatically VPN into a school controlled network, limiting the potential for abuse. To be useful, the school district will need to spend a great deal of effort toward integrating an LMS and on professional development..
When my children were in Elementary School, we'd get the occasional phone call regarding events, grades, meeting etc. When they were in Middle School, we'd get some email and there was a website to check grades. Now that they're in High School, I get emails if they miss a class, an assignment, if they do poorly on a test or quiz, there's an up to the day posting of grades and attendance, the Band director has a mailing list, the Band Boosters have a mailing list and the attendance record also goes out as a robo-call.
Elementary school teachers typically have a single class of 30-ish kids all day long. Middle school and High school teachers can see 6 times this many kids.
Up here in Washington state there is quite a bit that parent's can do online. For instance all teachers use the same unified program to input grades, which means that my grade book is essentially open and online as long as you have a password. Any parent can log in at any time and see every grade I've given their student (obviously the information is limited only to their students and nobody else). Some teacher's don't like it because grade books tend to be messy things with placeholder assignments inputted for future projects or having blank grades simply because some periods have been graded and others haven't. Helicopter parents hate it when there's a blank for a grade, for any reason. On the other hand I do know many teachers, including me, that do have personal websites, and some that even update them with weekly assignments. My website is hardly checked at all by parents, so I may not be keeping it going much longer. Ultimately though the problem with going to a completely paperless system is that, as amazing as it is, not every student has access to the internet. In my school somewhere between 50-60% of students are children of migrant farm workers and all live in a rural area where the internet is not dependable and expensive. I have no idea how many of the 150 students I see every day don't have internet access, but I would not be surprised at all if more then 50 did not. Obviously this might be different in the suburbs, but even there I think people would be surprised how many did not have regular access to the internet. It is still considered by many a luxury, not a necessity. Until that changes schools are forced to rely on low tech means to reach parents.
In most cases education has used technology as a theater exercise. The only important part is taking a picture of a student using said technology with a attentive and concerned educator looking on. At best technology is used to replace existing tools on a one to one basis. Smart board for blackboard, tablet for textbook, laptop for notebook, etc.... The goal should be to do what every other company has done with technology and become more productive. Teachers should be able to use technology to teach 50-60 students at a time, all with individualized instruction.
My kids' school has something called "Wiz Kids" which is essentially a low grade social networking and collaboration/sharing tool. It allows them to post to boards, communicate with teachers and other students in their group (the teacher decides how wide groups are) and access resources provided by the teacher and other students.
The school uses "Parentmail" to communicate with the parents and other external groups (governors, PTA etc). This sends out emails with updates and notices, or SMS text messages for time critical information. It also has facilities for groups (PTA, board etc again) to share documents and communicate internally though we don't currently use that.
This is a primary school (kindergarten?) and I know many of the other primaries in the area use the same services. I guess they're quite widely used throughout the UK.
For the poorer kids, below a certain threshold there's money available to buy a netbook or similar. To the best of my knowledge no-one has claimed one though I could be wrong on that. Everyone has some sort of device that allows Internet access.
You seem to think that the teacher would do things that are to the benefit of the student, and are willing to create a public record of what they are doing. While this could clearly be done, without requiring teachers to be extremely knowledgeable computer users, it will be fought by the teachers and their unios who do not welcome the openness that your request would bring about.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They are teachers.
Lazy, Luddite and heavily unionized.
Probably the most "entitled" portion of our society in N. America.
Some schools don't have IT staff or lump on top of a stuff members other job.
Some schools may have 1 tech covering 3-5 schools and they don't have the time to much more then a basic setup.
A timely piece found in today's Georgia Straight:
And, to throw some red meat to the /. crowd, here's a quote from the first (and only, so far) comment:
Anyone volunteer to post a comment to set the record straight?
It's just a matter of time before republicans move from hating climate science and elementary biology and start to target computer science too. It's easier for them to just avoid that fight in the first place. Besides, computers are expensive and may require training the teachers, which also costs money, and every dollar spent on eduction is a dollar not spent on paying goons to feel you up at the airport or the hardware necessary to "accidentally" kill civilians in foreign countries.
Theres already too much parental control over kids lives these days - giving the assignments to the kids and what not at least forces them to somewhat talk to their parents sometimes as well as some vestige over control over their education (ie. the kids will play around with it first - in this day and age, sending the homework directly to the parents or what not will end with quite a few of them just doing it and submitting it back).
Not to mention that you're printing it out anyway and what not. Theres also the need to just develop the ability to do things without a computer (yes, slashdot, the world still exists) - try doing a college level math class on a computer, and your speed drops immensely for most people - typesetting is the last stage as it rightly should be.
I remember a few years ago a Michigan area school had a gun found on or around campus. Some parents complained about not being notified by phone of the relatively minor incident. There was a paper notice, but that wasn't enough.
I was reasonably understanding,and said, sure, they should have that kind of system available.
Somebody else in the discussion board was aghast at the thought, how dare the parents expect any such thing, and the school system might not have the capacity to do it. I visited their website and found they had an advanced voicemail system so I dismissed the technological argument
.
They were still furious about the idea, and never accepted that it could be done with little trouble or cost.
And we were in agreement that the parents were asking for needless assurance. I just figured it was easier to placate than argue with them.
It is happening in some places. A friend of mine has a daughter in elementary school. He can log in and review her homework scores, grades and quiz scores (even seeing the answers) any time he wishes. He can log in during the day and literally see the scores for the quiz she just took.
This is all in a fairly small town in Idaho...
You're talking about fairly advanced topics when it comes to normal peoples' level of computer knowledge. E-mail would be the best method of content delivery, and it might work, but it would incur costs (at least at first). Schools move at the pace of their funding, and the U.S. educational system is horribly ridden with red tape as well as 'certain vendors' that wouldn't want that due to loss of money somewhere along the line. Also, schools have so many regulations to follow, so many student/teacher privacy issues, blah blah blah...ugh.
I've worked with California schools as a technical consultant/engineer in the past, and let me tell you... for the most part, the people on the ground (teachers, other staff) are respectable and well open to doing things like this (though they won't understand it one bit)... but the system itself is a total bitch. It ends up imploding upon itself very often, in my experience. Kinda sucks.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Someone has to pay for the IT costs at the school and then the IT costs in the students home.
Then you have quotes from the Facebook founder calling people who trust passwords with him foolish.
And finally - the places you cite are marketing the people who join/use the sites you mention. Why are *YOU* so quick to want to sell out people's kids to marketers?
Imagine, if in addition to your full workload (in school 7:30-4, plus a few hours grading at home), you were ask to blog for 150+ students and their parents. Who has time for this shit?
It's amazing how educated people got when there were not computers. I got into an argument with my daughter's private school over technology in the classroom. They were arguing over laptops (Mac/PC) and then over formats (Google Docs/Word.) I sat back and said if this is the whole goal of the school to 'bring in' technology, I will be withdrawing my child. They looked at me confused. I told them that if they are that determined about HOW they write the material versus WHAT the material they write is, then they are not educators, but lazy bums. I also argued with a parent who is a very smart guy, very wealthy and very successful. He argued that the education system is broke, that it is terrible, that technology needs to be pushed into the realm. I gave him a simple thought . . . If the education system is so broken, how did you do so well in it? Another parent who runs a nerd company doing PC repairs was arguing that the schools current machines were running XP on Shuttle boxes. He kept arguing how old the OS was. I told him, "If the school upgrades to Windows 7 or Mac OS X, do you think all the students will suddenly get straight A's?" People miss the perspective imo. Would I like to have gotten away from the paperwork nightmare that the school generated and sent to me? Sure. But I realized it made my child have to come talk to me. That act alone, opened up an opportunity for conversation. In essence, I could be a PARENT. When I wanted to find out how she was doing in a class, it was simple, I emailed the teacher directly. I used the old business trick and gave the teacher 48 hours to respond. If they didn't, I sent another notice and CC'd the principal and the board members. I got the answers I was looking for. There are lots of studies out there that have shown that there is no gain for electronic based teaching for the student. There is tremendous gain for electronic based teaching for the owners of the school. This is no different. There is a LOT to be said about the ability for a student to have interaction with a human teacher and human students.
I live in a homeowners association community of 305 lots and 220 houses. We have about 2/3 of the email addresses and 5% of those change every quarter. Since we use the email distribution list to inform about storm conditions, obituaries, road closings and the like, we'd like to have more. But who is going to follow up on the 1/3 missing?
Not to mention that 2/3 of the families have no children currently so would not vote for a dollar more in taxes for even desperate needs of the schools. This in an era where an educated work force is the most important input into the GDP you can have.
I don't think enough educational institutions are utilizing text message technology to easily communicate with parents. If they can use it to get news across in the developing world, we should be able to make it work domestically.
But the teacher tells the parents flat out that she doesn't respond to email. Why? Her job is to teach my daughter and twenty or so other kids. Not sit behind a screen and answer parent's emails and make blog entries. I think it's fantastic -- she's really dedicated to her work, and it shows. She will send an email if there's something important coming home that we really need to know about. It's typically short and to the point, because she has lesson plans to work on, papers to grade and other stuff to deal with. I can also imagine that by being upfront about her email policy, it likely cuts down on a lot of BS mail that parents would send. Not to mention a bunch of unsolicited advice -- imagine having 30-40 people telling you how to do your job.
But the district is by no means a bunch of Luddites. The district has a listserv and web pages. The principal and superintendent send weekly emails, as well as community updates. The kids have access to computers in the classroom, and they are working on getting iPads in all the classrooms (they currently have to rotate them). Technology is well-integrated to support the actual educational mission of the school. As I've visited the higher grades for one thing or another, there are ample computer resources available, and the district has wifi in all the schools. So it's there, and it seems that they have thought seriously about how to use that technology to get the job done.
As for bringing home papers, working on them, then bringing them back -- there's a big lesson about responsibility in there. Kids are very tactile and oriented towards things -- so the paper has a meaning. It's the same reason we give an allowance in cash and why they teach counting with things instead of numbers on a board only.
There is also the finance question, too. Given that the private sector is slowly dragging itself out of the last economic downturn, the public sector is lagging the public sector by a couple years. Our district is facing a $3M shortfall this year, so spending of any kind is being severely impacted. Groups like the PTA and some other educational foundations in the town have been doing a fantastic job with technology donations, but it's highly likely that teachers will be laid off and classroom sizes will rise again. We already have athletic fees, bus fees, numerous fundraisers and other ways of extracting money for the school already. And we are in a town that's relatively well off, where property values haven't been slaughtered too badly -- there are towns in far more dire situations. We still have some art, drama and elective classes left.
So add that all up and yeah, schools aren't going to go out and spend big money on new and unproven stuff. They will make what they have access to last longer, and do what they can to get the kids educated. I'm proud of the work they do, as they accomplish a lot with what they have, and they seem to have good leadership, too.
There are a LOT of reasons that schools don't use information systems like this: Training costs (training teachers costs money), cost for software (blackboard isn't cheap and other solutions require dedicated IT people), concerns about student privacy (public web pages can be a BIG issue, so there is a need for private web pages accessible only to parents, students, and school staff), poor families not having internet access (my students ALL qualify for federal free lunch), copyright issues for posting digital copies of assignments to a web page if they involve copyrighted materials (almost every lesson I teach involves copyrighted material--I teach middle school English), and teaching in a classroom is fundamentally different than teaching an online class, so digital "connections" like course management software and blogs are of variable usefulness depending on subject taught, format of the class, and availability of computer resources for students.
I teach using a wikispace as a repository for course materials, a promethean interactive whiteboard, a netbook for each student, and integrated software tools like LanSchool and ActiveEngage, not to mention Accelerated Reader and Learning Upgrade services our school and district provide for us. 75% of the staff at my site can barely use the tech. When I tried to create a new wikispace for my school, the principal "encouraged" me to do "whatever (teacher X) is doing, so we're all on the same page". Of course, (teacher X) teaches math at a different grade level, and is doing flipped classes, with practice during the school day, and watching video lessons after school in the classroom or at home. Not AT ALL what the English dept. is doing (and the principal is directing our department's work, so he should know better). Don't forget to rule out incompetence on a structural/institutional level.
So short version is MANY reasons, especially the larger the school or school district.
Oh, and did I mention that my school district just gave layoff notices to 1600 (25%) of the teachers? The youngest, most tech-savvy teachers? Not going to be anybody left who knows how to use the tech.
In the school district where I was teaching, we were blocked access to most of the useful sites on the internet. Likewise, the computers we were forced to used were barely able to run the OS (The machine in the room I was working out of was 700 Mhz). The IT department at the school consisted of one guy who worked at 7 other schools. I still remember that he was very proud last year because they finally got all the computers in the school running Windows XP from previous versions.
The issues stack up. Email is preventative because the amount of space required to send emails with attachments is very limited and is usually taken up by internal documents concerning accountability and test scores as well as attendance memos and other miscellaneous documents. Hosting is another issue that is faced since, as mentioned before, much of the useful content is blocked. This includes the hosting sites. While there is the possibility of hosting with the school, at least at the school I was working, the amount of space allocated was merely 1.7 MB of space. Definitely not enough for any media or even a grading period worth of assignments for the 5 different classes I was teaching.
I feel the real problem is that IT infrastructure is a joke at the public school level and with the latest rash of cuts in many school districts nation-wide, IT is getting even worse. The districts just don't fund it, mainly because they can't.
I hear about how good kids are at computers these days. Then I question a bit further and it turns out they do nothing but the basics. I was far, far more advanced at that age with computers, despite them being more uncommon, since I am a huge geek and loved it.
However good though I was, I lack the support skills I have now. I can think of numerous problems that could occur with a system like this that I would have been unable to troubleshoot as a kid who was good with computers. As such it'll take professional support being available to deal with issues. And don't even get me started on teachers and the problems they can have. It's not that they are stupid either, it is that they are specialists in another domain of knowledge.
You also then of course run in to the issue if computers are used for homework, "the computer ate my homework" becomes a real excuse. We had that problem at the university I work at. As such we have servers you can SSH to where you have to compile your programming homework (so that the compiler version/type isn't an issue) labs full of computers that students can come and use when they need to. All that and we STILL have to issue that excuse. Had a girl some time ago who couldn't make a program work on the lab systems and sure as shit, it didn't. I'd installed it and ran it, but I don't know how to use it so that was all the test I could do. So I had to let her TA know it was my fuckup and she needed more time (well his fuckup really for not testing it himself but still).
People say it's equal access and such, I don't think so. It wouldn't be hard to do this kind of thing alongside the current methods as to not disadvantage those without computers while helping it be more convenient for others. I go to a public school, and they actually do a few of the things he mentioned in some form. They're just SHIT at doing it so everyone pretty much ignores it.
They try to put the grades online, but it only updates when they tell it to and when they tell it to it takes a whole day to upload the grades. It doesn't let you do anything with them either, they're basically on a spreadsheet so it'd be nice to be able to say "hey, if I took a retake would that help my grade or just inconvenience the teacher?" but you have to calculate it yourself you can't just check. My friend wrote a plugin for the website they use and if you install it on your browser it does all that for you which is nice. They also have a different site run by different people to do college planning. Basically it doesn't make any sense and nobody knows how to use it, and you end up waiting in half an hour lines to turn in checks and paper forms anyway. Also through ought the year you definitely give them your email and phone number on like 20 different forms. They should just make a database of each student and their contact info but they don't have one aside from home phones. They have a few other sites but I don't remember them. I'd complain more but nobody really cares about the details.
The thing is, I go to one of the best high schools in the country. Here's their website, good luck getting anything out of it it's shit: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/bcchs/
There's also federal privacy regulations concerning the release of student's information. You can get around that, but The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act makes the sharing of student information more complicated than in other contexts.
In the state I'm in at least, any email lists are public record and due to Sunshine laws available to anyone that asks for them.
Technology is simply a tool for teaching but this tool will not miraculously make a poor teacher stellar. While I like the idea of technology in the classroom and encouraging its use, it won't supplant teaching teachers how to teach. Teacher education needs to improve!
The reason for this likely doesn't have so much to do with availability of the technology, or interest in doing so. It's more likely because of legalities. Things like data retention and privacy laws come into play big time.
A majority of teachers are technophobes, and this extends even to college professors. Blame the teachers.
private schools can discriminate based on household income or parent education levels... and do just that at application acceptance, and every time they send out tuition invoices. a publicly funded school cannot.
a private school can expect or even require their students and parents have the in-home equipment and service needed for internet access and communication and online-based homework. a publicly funded school cannot.
technology is a barrier, paper is not.
technology costs money, for schools and families... hardware, software, services, access and staff all cost money.. mimeograph machines are much cheaper for schools to acquire and use than any technology product or service intended to serve entire faculties and/or student bodies.
In 2004, I did a brief internship in a small urban (~95,000 pop.) school district.
Every elementary schooler in this district was being taught software on SUN SPARCstations, circa 1998.
The high school had slightly newer terminals, and most of the Windows machines were for staff, with a few in the library.
There was barely enough property tax revenue to keep the sports teams funded, and they figured most kids had better computers at home anyway.
Social Worker Perspective: half my clients do not even have a checking account much less a computer & internet access. Got to love the USA.
I live in the Philly suburbs and all the public schools in the area do at least some of what you're saying. You can login and see every assignment, for every class, and see if you child turned it in or not. It's updated frequently through the day too. So you don't ask your kid if they have any homework in the evening; just check the website before you leave work and see what the assignments are. Then you just ask if they did them or not. Next day, you can immediately see if it was turned in.
You are asking a arts degree to actually use technology? The best you could expect is porn in the classroom, and stalking on facebook. Every school teacher I have interacted with is at best a D student at worst borderline retarded. All useless.
1. Once people realize that textbooks, knowledge, connectivity with experts - including people trained to teach children - etc. is free legally on the internet, it will be a lot more difficult to get them to pay for it.
2. Textbook companies have a choke hold on schools, technology is a threat to them.
3. Schools are paid based on attendance. If it was as easy to remotely get an education, attendance may drop.
It is known fact that technology can be so much of a distraction that positive learning benefits can be far outweighed by the negatives of it being a distraction.
All the teachers have e-mail addresses, and e-mail is our primary mechanism for communicating with them (we also go to parent-teacher conferences, but that's only twice per term). The teachers also have web pages where they post assignments, upcoming activities, and other notices. They use an electronic gradebook that we can log into to see not just our kids' grades, but also all of their individual assignment scores, what hasn't been handed in, etc. The school district automatically e-mails us for any unexcused absences, usually within an hour after the missed class starts. We can either call or use the web site to excuse their absences.
Our two younger kids are in a K-8 charter school, and one of the requirements is that parents have to give 20 hours per year of service. All of that is logged and reported on-line.
For the older kids, in Middle and High School, the school has a Google Apps account. All of the kids have school e-mail addresses which they can access like any gmail account, and many teachers distribute homework assignments and messages via e-mail and accept completed assignment submissions the same way. Many of the teachers have the kids do all of their writing, etc., assignments on Google Docs, which works beautifully. When my son writes an essay for English he "shares" it with me so I can proofread. For trivial stuff, I sometimes just fix it, but normally I add comments pointing out what he can improve/fix. When he's done, he shares it with his teacher, who can also mark it up and grade it -- with automatic e-mail notifications to my son to let him know what she said and what grade he received.
I think the schools here have embraced technology very effectively. They use it where it's useful, primarily for communications, and don't get hung up on useless stuff like trying to use automated teaching systems, or high-tech classroom presentations (a few teachers do use Google Docs presentations, but most just use a whiteboard).
As for the issues with kids who don't have access to computers at home... I don't know how much of a problem that is or is not in this area. My part of the school district is fairly affluent, but there are other areas which have a fair amount of poverty. I know all of the schools in the district have multiple, large computer labs, which are open for quite some time both before and after school. All of the libraries have computers, too.
Oh, I live in Colorado, about 40 miles north of Denver.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network technology.
?
To be honest, the privacy regulations surrounding children & their school activities are so draconian as to have a stifling effect on technology. Read up on FERPA sometime; it's a serious bitch.
Oh thats right, they fucking talked and communicated person to person in schools either via phone, personal visits, letters, etc. Why do schools need to waste all that time, money and resources on something that we have managed to go without for hundreds of years? Im 36 now and I managed to do quite well from kindergarten through highschool without ever having had a teacher email my grandmother, or have my mom read a teachers blog about how things are going in the year. Whats wrong with actually doing something anymore?
A lot of schools are in the shitter as it is, I think the least of their worries is "networking" with parents and such. When you have millions of students in this country who go to school hungry and go home to a empty house, students who are failing miserabley in school, understaffed schools, the fact history classes still skew the class so that america looks totally awesome, students who fall behind and no one picks them up and all that other shit I seriously doubt that networking with pretentious parents who want the schools to do the work of being a parent for them as much as possible is really their top priority.
Want to know whats going on with your kid? Then try fucking being a parent and getting involved with them instead of relying on electronic convience to take a lot of the actual parenting out of parenting for you. Technology has made people lazy and this is simply another example of it.
With a sample size of ONE, he has extrapolated that every public school is exactly like his child's school.
Using the same logic, every school in America provides every child with an email address, ha computers in every classroom, posts student grades on a secure web portal (infinite campus), and has a "virtual backpack" that school announcements are put in (dynamic web pages, one per school/grade)... How do Icome to this conclusion? Because that is what my school district provides/offers...
Ken
We designed a system to do everything the original poster mentioned and a whole lot more. Presented it across 5 states, had great buy in and 2 million dollars worth of funding tentatively committed. The whole thing eventually fell through due mainly to unforeseen costs of variable types of regulation on a district by district basis. Even had a very long conversation with the CEO of the nations largest private school software company that said he'd never touch the public school market for exactly that reason. The only players in public schools are people like Microsoft that can do very little other than provide tools for district IT people to create their own solutions.
Through all of that, one of the first questions I got asked was "what about people that don't have internet access or can't afford a computer?" It was such a common response that I started leaving the answer out of the initial presentation so that I could pull up that information when the people I was presenting to asked about it.
The answer is pretty simple: there are a lot of others ways to deliver information to people when it's already organized in a database.
At the time that I was setting this up, there weren't tools like Twilio available but we still had several solutions:
1. The obvious, public libraries have free computer access for everybody.
2. Using a customized PBX, setup a call in phone number with a parent code where parents can dial lin and then listen to their child's homework assignments / upcoming schedules.
3. With the same PBX, allow parents to request an automated phone call at a certain time every day with their child's homework assignments / other important notes.
4. Send an automated fax on a daily basis with the homework schedule (if the parent would like). A fax could be sent to a place of business or a home if available.
5. Somewhat more involved, but for parents that request it monthly or weekly letters could be sent with the same type of information.
6. Text messaging wasn't nearly as common back then but certainly, it would be included now. The PBX solution could be dramatically simplified with Twilio's infrastructure too.
None of those provide the same level of access a computer + internet would provide, but certainly...it's a start. In conjunction with a public library's computer access it makes all of the tools that a parent who wanted to be involved available at no charge. The idea was to help make it easier for parents that wanted to be involved in their children's education able to be involved. To find out if there's a problem in a class after the first bad grade and not after half of the class is over.
The core poverty issue in schools isn't that lack of access puts people at a huge disadvantage. If you've got a parent who really cares, they can get involved. The bigger issue is when you have kids going home at night and not knowing if they're going to be sleeping inside or outside because their deadbeat parents need to use the trailer for a "sleepover". Some of the stuff I heard about like that while my wife was in the school system were appalling. Being poor isn't the problem. Parent's that don't give a damn are the problem and those are certainly not a reason to avoid putting better tools in the hands of everybody else.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
not "dialectial peculiarities".
My local school district has 3 full-time desktop technicians supporting about 1,500 desktops for a district with 4,000 students and about 500 teachers, aids, staff and administrators. In addition they have a DBA/analyst, Windows Admin and Mac Admin.
In addition to desktops and laptops, they are also responsible for the A/V across the campus - projectors and smartboards in nearly every classroom.
Ken
Being required to use Facebook to stay on top of my children's education will be AWESOME!!!!!!!!
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The problems we run into...
1. Older teachers who do not use technology.
2. A refusal from staff to adapt to any new technology.
3. Teachers who refuse to do ANY extra work (Updating their webpage, sending out emails etc) that is not described in their union contracts.
Now you say "Wait, there are teachers/staff out there who don't know how or simply WON'T use the internet?"
The answer is "Yes" and the teacher's union is way to powerful to fight so the teacher always wins the argument.
I teach a 5th grade class in a ~1,000 student district about 10 miles from a metro population of over 250,000. In my homeroom of 23 students, I email a newsletter each week and then print out 3 hard copies for the students whose families don't have a reliable email address.
Several teachers are starting to move over to blogs with online assignments and discussion, and all of the grade cards are emailed when possible. However, I'm typing this on an iBook G4 that won't reliably run Youtube videos because I haven't been able to afford a new computer in over 5 years (this one's a hand-me-down). If I'm the teacher and I can't afford the technology, how can I expect 100% (or 90%) of my students to adopt it, or a school district to provide and support it for them?
One last point and then I'll go: I started the year with three pencil sharpeners in my room. One was a hand-crank that got pulled out of my wall within two months of installing it. One was electric, and it stopped working after almost a year (it was a replacement for the previous one that lasted about a year). The last was a hand sharpener that just disappeared off of my desk. 5th graders rival labrador puppies in their destructiveness. Once I can reliably provide and support the pencil sharpening technology in my classroom, I'll tackle the microprocessor technology.
I mean that in the most serious sense. Learning has very little to do with technology; it has to do with _thinking_, something that is leaving our society at an increasing rate. I'm currently a TA at an extremely prestigious ivy-league institution, and you know what? My students are extremely unprepared, and it is _not_ for a lack of 'technological literacy'. Any sort of technology in the classroom is generally a distraction from the actual core ideas. They will think "why do I need to know this when the computer can do it?" They will believe this. Knowledge will decay. I would really prefer to see a school going back to pencil and paper. You know, back when you had to figure shit out? When you had to think about why things are or are not true?
As for technology as a life skill -- they will figure this shit out. Trust me. It's important to them.
Next time, before spewing all that venom on how the US is not spending any money on education, please check your facts:
http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd
"As we can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends more than any other country on education, an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen."
How much of this money goes to actually educating the kids after the unions take their cuts, I don't know. But saying that Republicans "demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a [...] dime of taxes to support it", is simply not true.
Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it.
Fix the families. Restore family values. Education and all other aspects of life will follow.
Ten years ago, things were pretty much volunteer driven here too. Parents would stretch cat-5 cables and refurbish second-hand computers so the students could get their hands on an outdated version of Windows. An ISDN router would get key admin personell online.
Schools in my municipalty now have gigabit internet access via fiber. Weekly class schedules and other info is communicated by teachers via wiki. Communication via SMS and email have all but replaced phone calls that would either disrupt work during the day or the teacher's private life in the evenings. Every school has one designated IT coordinator who's responsible for passing info between the municipalty IT dept. and the local teachers and staff. Grading and reporting is done via the same system used to manage classes and students. Each classroom has a digital board where the teacher can pull up everything from specialized education software to Google Earth. The school administration can focus on school stuff and the municipalty provides IT just like any other basic service.
Sure, the system isn't perfect. IT being "outsourced" to the municipalty like this means slower changes and less local influence but it leaves the school staff free to do school stuff. The result? Good teaching environment, happy kids and excellent test scores. It's expensive, but my kids are worth it. After all, I expect them to pay for my pension.
At least where I teach,
(parents who right in with anger and concern
we are ennabling a lot of parents to continue coddling their kids and lowering expectations for them.
Sigh.
OK, having read this far in the thread, we're up to:
1. I want to get email copies of notices.
2. So the school should send emails.
3. But there are poor people, so there should be printed notices as well.
4. That doubles the workload.
5. So develop an entirely new system for dual notices: email and printed.
6. But it would be better to just give computers to poor people.
7. Oh but they don't have Internet.
8. So the school should buy Internet for everybody.
All so some guy won't have to stoop to the level of touching paper, ew!
p.s. I forgot the mini-thread on signatures:
5a. What about signatures for field trips?
5b. Let the peasants use GPG!
5c. Or cut and paste into a separate program, wait to get a weird text thingy, and paste that back into the email, making sure not to accidentally miss a character or two, thereby invalidating the whole thing.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The teaching unions in the UK are pretty powerful, but that didn't prevent my parents (both teachers) doing reports using special software since about 1998. It essentially did what you describe.
I don't often have reason to look at school websites, but I sometimes do (I've taken evening classes at two different local schools). All the school websites I've seen have a "Parents Area". You need a password, but they seem to have the information I used to have to take home as bits of paper.
The school I do my current evening class at, which is just a normal, state-funded school in London for 11-16 year olds, have digital projectors in every classroom, and a touch-sensitive whiteboard.
My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
I think my dad purchased the first report software himself, since the time he'd save made it worthwhile and the senior teachers were a bit old. The school bought it soon enough, once he'd shown other teachers. This is the first result, but £23 ($35?) is probably a worthwhile investment for your sister. There's even a free trial.
When I was in High School, we got a brand new IBM computer lab - 25 PS2 model 40's. One one of them, there was a modem. Big mistake.
Kids were constantly getting onto BBSes and downloading porn and viruses and all kinds of crap. Yes, that stuff existed even before the Internet hit the main stream.
The computers ended up being a total distraction. Kids were cutting class to go play Leisure Suit Larry or other games, call up BBSes, or whatever.
Fast forward to today, I have a 16 year old niece with whom I have never had a more than 3 word conversation with. She can't be bothered to get her nose out of her smart phone long enough to interact with the real world. Her school was recently subject to a lawsuit over their phone confiscation policy, and the result was that they were barred from taking kids' phones or preventing them being used during school. Great idea. Right.
This year the schools have started using Power Schools which is supposed to have the live gradebook online. Teachers only put grades in around the end of the grading period, so we still can't keep our finger on the pulse. We tried to email our teachers at e-chalk and they some don't check that email, they use their school district email. The school district domain name changed and the email admin wasn't clever enough to forward the old domain's email to the new domain, so again, teachers didn't get email. The problem is an entire organization who doesn't give a poo. Why should they? They get tax dollars and when they don't perform they poor mouth and get even more money.
In so far as actual instruction goes, the teachers are being forced to "teach to the standard", which is code for "teaching the test" by the administration and No Child Left Behind. My child's teacher wishes for parental involvement, yet when I offer to take a long lunch to come speak to my child on the spot if he is getting out of hand, she backs down and says that might damage his self esteem. She (and others) seem to only want to gripe about student's behavior, but really don't want it fixed.
The administration is very keen on "the numbers", especially discipline numbers so they avoid responding to any discipline infractions... the kids are empowered due to lack of discipline and the worst kids act out unchecked in more severe ways. Then the administration has the gall to act surprised when this "good kid" with no prior offenses shows up with a gun or a knife.
Yes, I'm on a rant... the schools have become a culture of their own. The entire system needs a reboot.
Wes
"My younger sister went to a private school that made reasonable use of Blackboard, but that seems to be the exception."
-> that private school can select for students and parents that have computers, internet access, etc.
-> Public schools have a wider variety of "customers", some of whom are homeless, others of whom have no computers and have no access to them (a parent working 2 jobs and riding the bus isn't going to traipse on down to the library, which for budget reasons is only open for a few hours, and isn't on the bus line anyway)
-> it requires a fairly sophisticated IT infrastructure to do this well, including appropriate support staff. Would you rather your tax dollars pay to clean bathrooms and make sure there's toilet paper or have them sysadmin servers? Without getting too far into Maslow's hierarchy here, I'd rather they have clean bathrooms and hand stuff out on paper.
-> Personally, I'd be happy to pay higher taxes to do a better job in the schools, but it seems that various and sundry demagoguing politicians in the area have support for "starving the beast". They can afford cars with good suspension to handle the roads, buy bottled water, run their own generators, and pay to go to private schools, apparently.
We're a small startup working with 60 schools and we do exactly this. Providing an online space for students to submit assignments, collaborate and for the school to communicate amongst staff, students and parents/carers. The interested can find out more at http://fireflysolutions.co.uk
I work as IT in a school district. The reasons we don't have those things is lawyers, and parents who have them.
My ex-gf is a high school language teacher (spanish and french). She has approximately 110 different student in various grades.
Technically, teachers are paid from around 7am(ish) to 330pm (ish). She spends a 2-3 extra hours _per day_ reviewing lesson plans, grading work and doing other admin stuff. She also spends several hundred dollars per year of her own money to purchase extra materials to enhance the quality of the lessons.
While the concept is certainly sound - I don't believe that with the current workload that teachers face, it is feasible. They are already over worked.
And as for IT, typically there is 1 poor IT guy per school (in the wealthier districts).
Great idea, but who can implement it?
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
I know at my daughter's school we can get her homework online for that day if she leaves it at school. We constantly e-mail her teacher. Their class projects are on their class site for us to see. This all happens in an average sized town in lower Alabama. If it can be done there, it can be done just about anywhere. You just need teacher who care enough to do it, and a school system that supports them. Now granted that responding to e-mails and posting to a blog shouldn't be their only job, it can be done, and it should as our lives become ever increasingly digital.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Your grammar is horrendous. You're a teacher?!
This sort of comment is so arrogant, I have to call foul.
Are you an educator? Then why haven't you done this yourself? Why isn't education revolutionized as we speak?
Are you actually ignorant about how to teach? Then maybe you should learn about it before proclaiming yourself an expert.
Teaching is fundamentally about one and only one interaction: a teaching talking with a student. Notice the word "with": although some teaching can happen with one-way transmission, it's not effective. Humans learn through iterative processes of getting challenged, making mistakes, getting feedback, changing, improving, perfecting. This happens at every stage, even in the course of a five minute lesson or lecture.
Even when I am teaching college students, in a lecture setting, there is a LOT of two-way communication. I can tell when they don't get things. I can ask them questions to see how fast they respond. I can see them nod or frown. I can see them stare at their laps, smiling (which means they are texting instead of thinking). I can walk between them and look over their shoulders. They can ask questions. They can see my enthusiasm. They can participate in groups or singly.
Teaching is about conversation. Although there are ways of having meaningful conversation with 2,5, 10, even 20 people, the effectiveness of that conversation drops as the group sizes get larger, until you are in the 200 person lecture hall and the conversation becomes almost unidirectional.
The problem is not technical, it is social. Schooling in the US is a business, and the customer is the government, not parents. Technology that threatens the paradigm, and therefore the flow of funding, will not be adopted. Period.
If you are serious about seeing schools advance in technology, get a petition together to put a motion on the ballot THAT INCLUDES A WILLINGNESS TO FUND THE INITIATIVE and get it passed. The willingness to fund is where you are going to find the motion fail. We want something, but someone else has to visualize it, plan it, pay for it, and keep it moving. This is why there are school systems that can't teach evolution in this day and age.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
Wordpress is a blog, more suitable to writing news articles rather than summaries. I'm not that familiar with Wordpress, but depending on how it's setup, it can range from easy to use, to hard to browse. You want something contained in one place with a syllabus, and that's best done using a word processor, or publisher application. You can still use Wordpress to host it, but not to write it.
Wordpress also makes it harder for those who don't carry around a computer at all times, or for those who don't chain themselves to a computer.
You might as well suggest using MS Access to draw artwork. It's possible, but it's not the right tool.
My kids' elementary school does all that you suggested. We even have text and email alerts for snow days. I assumed everyone else was using the same thing. Each teacher has their own website too, so depending on your preference the material is available in your favorite format.
Very interesting post, thanks.
The thing I can't understand is: why do parents need a daily homework schedule?
In my day (walking uphill both ways), the teacher gave you your homework, you wrote it down, and then you got home and did it. (Also they taught you how to organize your homework notes, by class.)
Why does the parent need a separate homework schedule? Why can't they just look at the students notes, if even required?
Creating such a system and then asking teachers to input data into it as opposed to them just verbally telling the students to do problems 1-20 in Chapter Blah?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
My kid isn't old enough for school yet, but my sister has four kids spread across elementary, middle and high school. Every one of them can get their homework assignments online, and my sister can look online to see if they've completed their assignments, check their grades, etc. At the beginning of each school year, the kids and parents are given a printout of the list of websites, along with login info, that they'll need throughout the year, and it's a pretty long list.
Back in the nineties when I graduated high school, our school had electronic attendance records, and one of our classes was entirely online. The teacher actually developed the entire curriculum, complete with quizzes, tests, lectures, etc herself. And this wasn't a computer class, it was physics. We had the precursor to a smart board in the classroom, so at the end of class, all of the lecture notes were available online. Granted, this was made possible by a challenge grant from Apple and other tech companies, but it's not like schools are in the dark ages.
I think it's pretty impressive to see the amount of technology in use in the classroom today. Many high schools have more tech integration than your average college, and high schools have to do it all with tax revenue. It's not like they're generating their own revenue like a business, or collecting tuition like a college.
....
www.niels-stensen-gymnasium.de
Given that I work on average between 10 and 13 hours a day, while my kids education is very important to me and of the highest priority, I lack the time to sift through that much minutia about the goings on at her school. Frankly if the school thinks it is worth them putting to paper and sending home, then it is worth my time to read. Otherwise it's just more spam in my inbox.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
When my daughter was in senior kindergartern here in Canada she had a great teacher who emailed us everyday. Just a one liner of what the kids did that day - coloring, sang a song, whatever. It was fantastic. I know some of the kids were recent immigrants and I'm going to assume some of the families were poor, but the email list seemed to have all the families names on it. Having your name on the list was optional.
So it can be done, and I don't think it needs much infrastructure or effort for a simple system.
Now, the next year, when my daughter changed schools and teachers I mentioned this to the new teacher at the first parent-teacher meeting. She said: 'I've heard about that teacher. I won't promise anything.' She implied that she would take it up with the union as to whether it was a requirement of her job.
I am now getting more and more familiar with the educational bureacracy, but there are good teachers out there, and simple, appropriate solutions that help.
Not all of my students or their parents have computers or access to them outside of school. Communicating via computer resources is foreign to many of them. For those that do, communicating to them via online resources makes our lives much easier and holds the students more accountable for their work.
I worked in IT for 10 years at a public school and the teachers there refused to email unless it was required by their union contract.
Unless there was a collective bargaining negotiation involved that included additional pay for this new expectation, there was not going to be any utilization of any electronic communication by the teachers. It's just not in their job description. What a joke!
As long as everyone's berating the system, let me post a positive.
We were lucky enough to have the same public school teacher 4 years in a row (2 children, each keeping the same class/teacher over 2 years). When we met her for teacher conference the first time, our conversation obviously convinced her that we were involved parents and wanted to help out at home wherever she could. From that day forward, she texted my wife or me on her own nickel about every significant event - behavior problems, bad grades, attention issues, early dismissals, events in the classroom. She noticed my son's eyesight problems and let us know so that we had him fitted for glasses before the mandatory testing. She apologized every time we brought supplies (in our system, we're asked to provide about 2-3x the supplies a child will actually use) and told us about some of the students who were benefiting from that effort. As a result, we reinforced at home and improved everyone's situation. We still remain friends with her and her assistants today.
That's not to say we're fantastic people or whatever, but there are plenty of educators in the system who still give a flip about the process.
The local school board does *everything* online. Part of registering my kid for kindergarten was getting a sign-in for the school board's website. It's extremely rare to get anything printed from school that isn't my daughter's schoolwork.
Report cards? Online.
Attendance? Online.
Calendar, fieldtrips, notes from teacher? All online.
It's almost to the point where it's a bit *too* far Into The Future - the classroom doesn't have a blackboard or whiteboard, just one of those projector/touchscreen Smart Boards. At the kindergarten level I'm not too worried, but I won't be surprised to learn in a year or two that all the kid's classes are taught using Powerpoint slides.
It could be worse... My middle child gets notes and letters and calanders and events and we see them right away. My oldest in a different school doesn't get any of those notices... Instead I get an email about 5 times a week saying "I have updated messages in SchoolZone" I then have to digg up the assigned username/password. log in and guess what has been updated. Is it a notice, a homework assignment, a calander entry. or maybe the teacher just clicked on edit and save and didn't change anything.
Just email me the real message please.
i'm sorry, but computers have no place in elementary school classrooms - they're a distraction.
if a kid is up to par with her 3 Rs then she needs to be outside playing pretend with her peers. not having her imagination sucked dry by a computer screen.
Not every kid has a parent with an email address. Hell, not every kid gets fed a breakfast.
I'm more worried about those kids than the ones who have to suffer the trauma of paper handouts instead of an RSS feed.
Public Education is run by the government. What incentive do government employees have to be innovative, to try new things? Quite the opposite. Just stay with what has worked in the past, and you won't lose your job. If you take a risk with something new, you're likely to screw up, and that could cost you your job.
The solution: Get the government out of the education industry. They don't add any value. Private schools are expensive because they have to compete with the public "free because you are forced to pay for it anyway" schools. I'd like to see private schools competing for students, driving qualitty up and costs down. They would pay the teachers what they deserve, based on merit, instead of on tenure. Superstar teachers could theoretically pull down million-dollar salaries.
Private schools will deliver to the market what the parents want, which is often increased transparency. This also solves the bias issue; there is always bias, but when the school is funded with tax money, someone is always offended by the bias. With private schools, let the parents choose their bias, and they can counter it or go along with it.
"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies." --- Milton Friedman
--- wad
Lets start this out with a question. Has our education system gotten 3.5 times better since the 1960s? No, while you ponder that, have a look at this:
Here are the links I used to put this together:
#1) Near the bottom, this page ranks several nations on Reading/Math/Scientific literacy. I just took the 3 scores, added them up, and took the average to get my ranking. (http://www.siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf011210.htm)
#2) How much do nations spend per student? Not all the nations listed in the first part are listed. There are a few notable exceptions, unfortunately. (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_sec_sch_stu-spending-per-secondary-school-student)
Putting this together, I came up with this list of countries, ranked on their Education:
1. Finland - ?
2. Korea - ?
3. Japan - $5,890.00
4. New Zealand - ?
5. Canada - ?
6. Australia - $5,830.00
7. Ireland - $3,934.00
8 United Kingdom - $5,230.00
9. Austria - $8,163.00
10. Sweden - $5,648.00
11. France - $6,605.00
12. Belgium - ?
13. United States - $7,764.00
14. Iceland - ?
15. Switzerland - $9,348.00
16. Norway - $7,343.00
17. Czech Republic - $3,182.00
18. Denmark - $7,200.00
19. Spain - $4,274.00
20. Italy - $6,458.00
It doesn't LOOK like spending lots of money is the key... once again, spending it wisely, seems to be the key for the best education.
So, back to my original question, has our education gotten better, or worse, since the 1960s? Have a look at this URL, that adjusts how much we spend per student, since the 60s. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Does that make you think that we need to look at paying more for education helps? I am ALL for cutting admin costs, quit cutting teacher's salary, cut superintendent and district level offices. Usually, they are overly-filled with bureaucrats, and not in it for the kids. I DO think that teacher unions are a problem as well. Ultimately, it is the parents, and what WE allow. Who WE vote in...
It's been mentioned already, but we're pointed at the wrong tech-for-education problem.
You want transformative technology? How about a $100 e-reader stocked with every textbook used by US schools, in folders for grade level. I would have been plowing through the high school physics at age 10. Need specialized remedial stuff, or ESL or special ed whatever? It's loaded in every device. No friction, no stigma, no lag time.
Stop paying licenses. Start paying writers.
The tragic realities are that keep up with technology and education are both akin to changing the tires on a moving car.
Teachers are swamped with paper-tiger curriculum rewrites that consume incredible amounts of time, and inserting and updating technology in the classroom is very expensive.
The initial poster raises some very affordable low-hanging fruit (email lists et. al.) that are well within reach of most schools, but there is little motivation for tenured teachers to pick up those new tools while wrestling with the far more pressing issues of integrating special-needs students into mainstream classes, teaching the test, and dealing with clueless parents that have perfect children.
If you think you have a suggestion that would make the technology relevant and a force-multiplier, then I recommend you approach the school with a well-prepared presentation and business model to prove it. Use the same approach you would with your commanding officer as you consider adding another 5 lb item to a pack, or another 1 hour activity to the already full day. Dump it if it doesn't make life better, faster, easier, or cheaper.
How much of this money goes to actually educating the kids after the unions take their cuts, I don't know.
Link to unions taking their cuts? Why cite unions while neglecting the administration and school boards? When is the last time, if ever, have they seen the inside of a classroom?
But saying that Republicans "demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a [...] dime of taxes to support it", is simply not true.
It's a fair inference since today's Republicans are for "right to fire^Wwork" and for reduced taxes. A better statement would be that both parties are aiming to "reform" education, including the reduction in benefits for teachers and placing a partial burden of student test scores on teachers.
Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it.
Fix the families. Restore family values. Education and all other aspects of life will follow.
Ah, family values. You will need to be more specific, please. "Family values" is partisan code-speak.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
in this day and age of corruption, we usually see it rampant in the schools, where the money from budgets veryrarely make it to the proper channels....
they could be using kindles without handing out books, and save a whole lot of money that way, they could be doing a lot of things, but they cant wrap their heads around the idea of paying someone consulting money to suggest these things to them cuz theyre too cheap, and they never think of it on their own
I think the RaspberryPi can be an effective tool, especially since it can be plugged into a TV set for a monitor. USB keyboard and Mouse is not that expensive.
After that, there needs to be a deployment strategy. In other words, how do you quickly image and manage all these devices. Who decides the lucky recipients of the RaspberryPis? There's some manpower that needs to be dedicated to this to make sure it's done well.
The next things to think through are the cost of internet access and training. The cost of this project would have to include logistics for training parents/students on using a computer. Since the school district provided the computer, the families will call the district for support questions. This will include questions ranging from how do I turn it off? (unplug it) to how do I send an email? to how do I play a DVD with it? and more. It doesn't matter that the purpose of the RaspberryPi is for books, the questions will come anyway.
So there is some cost involved beyond the $50 - $60 per computer. You need at least one dedicated person to image/replace/train parents. Still, I think it would be a worthwhile project.
ADHD didn't exist then, either. They used to let children go run around outside for half an hour in the middle of the day, and when they came back, they'd be able to focus well enough to write down their homework assignments. Now there is no running around, so they have to offload that focus to the parents.
What, they got rid of recess?
Don't tell me, it was because of:
1. Fear that someone will fall down and bruise his knees.
2. Fear that recess encourages "heteronormative systems of oppression" (i.e., boys play ball and girls talk).
3. Fear of kids feelings getting hurt if they don't get chosen as top picks for (that half hour's) softball team.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Dialect includes many improper usages.
Who defines what is proper?
a lot of people in the city or people who live in poorer neighborhoods might use the word "axe" instead of ask
Who defines when a particular case of metathesis stops being nonstandard and becomes standard?
There are grammar feminists/genderists demanding everything to be written either neutral, for both sexes ("he/she"), or even all female. But what would a grammar socialist stand for (except adding a lot of "comrade")?
A grammar socialist would combine the two, corrupting a word like "comrade" into a novel gender-neutral pronoun. See what a Swedish preschool is doing about the word "friend" in #2 on this page.
that one jehova's witness who raises their hand is all like WTF is a birthday, actually learns something (at school, crazy!!) when it's explained to them that, hey, most of your classmates celebrate their birthdays.
Slashdot previously reported on that story. It's not that Jehovah's Witnesses don't know what a birthday party is. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Scriptures each depict a birthday party. It's just that the mindset that leads people to celebrate birthdays tends to be correlated with sin in three ways.
First, both mentions of birthday celebrations in the Bible involve the birthday boy having someone killed (Genesis 40:20-22; Mark 6:21-27).
Second, a lot of parents throw lavish parties when their kids reach certain milestones, such as 10 (double digits!), 15 (quinceañera parties in Spanish-speaking countries), 16 ("sweet 16" parties, the anglophone equivalent to quinceañera parties), or 21 (often involving getting "drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery" as Paul warned). These parties cost a lot of money that the parents may not really be able to spare, and such conspicuous consumption amounts to boasting that one's parents are rich. A birthday is like an anus in that everyone has one, but not everybody needs to flaunt it.
Third, gift-giving holidays encourage parents and others to hold back gifts until one specific day of the year, rather than giving gifts when they are most needed.
Not including a birthday in a test is a way to keep test takers from associating a situation with profligate spending, beheadings without due process, and holding back, and having those associations distract the test taker from the reading comprehension issue being tested. It also keeps people's minds wandering to cases where "birthday" is German for "bend over [and take it up the behind]".
Or the number of states in the US?
That changed as recently as after the Korean Police Action.
Re: the last 10 years of history-- history class never gets that far. The farthest it usually gets is FDR and the New Deal.
My high school U.S. history class did one war per quarter. Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam Police Action.
I think the RaspberryPi can be an effective tool, especially since it can be plugged into a TV set for a monitor.
Text is blurry and hard to read through composite, and for the price of a Raspberry Pi and an HDTV, you could just buy a low-end laptop.
USB keyboard and Mouse is not that expensive.
How expensive are an external 56K modem and 144 months of dial-up Internet access? And no, it can't be a winmodem because the Raspberry Pi probably won't have drivers for those.
As a former Biology teacher, I had 120-150 students, which equates to hundreds of parents. I worked in a relatively wealthy district in the Philly suburbs. The district made me post all assignments online, all grades online and answer all parent emails. We were highly "connected" and...It was an absolute NIGHTMARE! Do you have any idea what it's like having an ARMY of helicopter parents (er...bosses) telling you how to do your job, questioning every assignment you give, every grade you give, every move you make? My 20 min lunch break was spent justifying everything I did to parents whose goal, first and foremost, was to make sure their kids got the highest possible grades, regardless if they learned anything in high school whatsoever. If other schools are anything like this one, parents are OUT OF CONTROL, period. How do they expect their kids to learn to be productive members of society if you don't let them fail and don't let them learn on their own? Plus, posting assignments online gave the students yet another reason to not listen during class. Why should they, when everything was posted online? Heaven forbid I gave an assignment and didn't post it online. Then the parents were telling me their kids weren't responsible for it...ugh. Don't get me wrong...in this digital age, students absolutely need to learn about computers, web, etc, but it is a horrible idea to include parents on every single aspect of the classroom. We're raising a generation of coddled, unprepared, whiny, unimaginative babies who expect instant answers to all of life's questions on Wikipedia.
Well most schools have spent the technology money in different ways other than making it so teachers can email the parents and email and post lesson plans. Most schools now have smart boards in the classroom replacing the blackboard completely. The schools I've seen no longer use chalk and overheads so they are kind of up to date in some aspects. Grade books are now completely online so teachers no longer have to keep a written copy of their grades and their lesson plans are actually submitted online to the principal weekly in some schools so the principal knows what's going on. So they are almost there but they still have a ways to go when it comes to keeping the parents informed in a more up to date way. And not all states in the US put the same value on education. Some states just spend more when it comes to education and a lot of schools just are too old to support the needed technology upgrade. They would need to rebuild many schools in order to make them able to support the current technology. My high school was originally built in the 50s and was only supposed to hold a max of 1500 but when I graduated in 1995 the school was holding 3000 students. It's just now being rebuilt so it can support more technology and hopefully be able to catch up to the 21st century.
I was once talking with a friend who is a longtime school teacher, and suggested that perhaps teachers who aren't up to speed with basic computer usage, for the purposes of managing curriculum, homework etc., aren't likely to be very good teachers because they are outdated/outmoded and don't mind being as such. My friend strongly disagreed with my conclusion, and said that in practice, many great teachers can't use computers at all, but understand their subject matter adequately, and have a facility for engaging their students and teaching. Since this is a matter of opinion based on empirical observation, I'm inclined accept prima facie that such might be the case. If this were so, then it would further explain why schools aren't ready for computerization yet. We live in an era where, for various sane and insane reasons, there is a paucity of good teachers. If the intersection of "good teachers" and "computer illiterate" (or close) is non-trivial, then computerization might result in a good chunk of them being forced out, causing a further worsening of problems associated with quality of teaching.
We were actually trying to design the interface in such a way that all of the relevant information could be extracted quickly from the teacher's lesson plans. We wanted to change the way lesson plans were written down so that we'd change the way a teacher did something rather than add a new one. Making sure the system reduced workload for teachers rather than added to it was a HUGE part of the overall design.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson