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.
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
Those people are, however, notoriously underrepresented on slashdot.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
That is amost certainly the nail in the coffin of the electronic notifications to parents system. Imagine the "social stigma" if a teacher sent email notices to most parents, but had to give Billy and Marcia printed notices because their families are too poor to have the Internet and can't get email? Or if Roger is a bright kid and he tells the teacher that his parent's email address is a gmail address he controls?
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
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.
Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.
Perhaps you could fill the gaps? Shocking, I know...
The nearest library to the house where I grew up is 10 miles away in another city. You assume the poor folks in the neighbourhood are going to just have to walk that each way every night because because there are no buses or other public transport in the country, and if they can't afford net access, they can't afford the extra 100 miles of gas a week either.
"Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology".
Yes it is an excuse when you fail to actually think about what you are talking about, and put a huge extra burden on the poor because of your rather stupid assumptions.
"signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway."
No, there are many ways to electronically sign things.
The point of a sig. is not that they can trace the ink back to your pen but that the design is not easy to copy.
How do you positively validate the identity of a parent in a household where the student is the most computer literate (and perhaps the only English speaker), thus responds to all of the parent's email? Give the parent a secureID dongle and hope they don't share the PIN with their much more computer savvy child?
Not just poor people.
Not everyone can use e-mail. My mother, who would get custody of my children if I had any and something happened to me can't manage e-mail. She can cook and clean and drive, and she doesn't have Alzheimers, and has a decent pension income, but computers and e-mail are simply too complicated for her. Programming her VCR is too complicated for her. When I lived in the same city as she did, she could sort of manage, if I came by every day or two to help her out, but now that I'm 4 hours away it's simply not realistic.
If anything in that situation it would be the kid running the computing in the house (as happened even when I was in high school). Neither my mother nor father got to the point of using e-mail at home, although my father used e-mail at work and picked it up in his retirement, my mother, not so much (divorced).
Computers are any or all of expensive, complicated and insecure. Poverty is certainly a major issue, on both ends, running reliable IT systems isn't cheap, and if your e-mail system is down for the day does that mean you're not 'effectively communicating with parents' or some other regulation? A lot of guardians for children lack the capabilities to effectively manage any sort of electronic communication, and by extension that may make the system insecure. Paper isn't secure either, but e-mails to parents is the sort of thing begging to be hacked by some industrious students.
Blaming the teachers' unions proves you are a fucking retard who listens to too much Rush Limbaugh.
Where you should blame are the fucking Retardicans who demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a fucking dime of taxes to support it.
You want to know why school IT is "bottom of the barrel"? It's because the schools themselves are physically falling apart. Class sizes are 35 kids or larger now, up from 25 a decade ago, despite decades of studies showing that education quality declines with larger class sizes. Most schools have computers that are 6-7 years old and barely holding together, school infrastructure for email and web outreach is likewise a joke, and as likely as not it's all administered by the one tech-savvy teacher on staff who gets a measly 8-10 grand bonus per *YEAR* to spend an extra 20 hours a week trying to hold it all together with duct tape and baling wire.
They can barely convince teachers to keep teaching in the system as it is. Why? Because it's shit wages forever, you have to spend at least 5 grand a year on "continuing education" and take outside classes on your own just to fucking remain certified, you have to spend your own money on any classroom materials other than the books chosen by the curriculum administrators and the chalkboard or whiteboard in the front of the room, and then when the next budget crunch comes around, all the teachers in the state have to take a pay cut and then get blamed for being "the problem", like the fucking Retardicans and that college failout retard Scott Walker in Wisconsin pulled recently.
You want to have schools that teach well and give all kids an opportunity for a good education? LEARN TO BE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. The US educational system, thanks to the Retardicans, is like trying to pay Yugo prices for a car but expecting you'll get a Lamborghini. NOT. FUCKING. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.