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.
De-facto, I suspect that a lot of stuff goes home english-only(teacher pounds out a once-off handout, runs off 30 copies, are you going to get a translator in there?; but for more serious stuff schools frequently will ensure native-language access. I don't know if the requirements are as strict as for hospitals; but if it needs to get translated, you'd be impressed how many languages are available to some districts if they lean on the ESL teachers...
Aaaaah! It burns! It burns! The brackets/parentheses opened and I waited for them to close, getting more and more anxious as the paragraph progressed but the close never came! Oh God I'm going to be sick!