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White House Calls On Kids To Film High-Tech Education
theodp writes "Over at WhiteHouse.gov, Bill Nye has issued a call for entries for the first-ever White House Student Film Festival, a video contest for K-12 students, whose finalists will have their short films shown at the White House. From the website: "The President has an assignment for you: Our schools are more high-tech than ever. There are laptops in nearly every classroom. You can take an online course on Japanese — and then video chat with a kid from Japan. You can learn about geometry through an app on your iPad. So, what does it all mean? We're looking for videos that highlight the power of technology in schools. Your film should address at least one of the following themes: 1. How you currently use technology in your classroom or school. 2. The role technology will play in education in the future."
Competition is good but if the government is doing it this must be socialism.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Some group of kids should get together and do a film on biometrics and RFID tracking. Call it, "getting ready for the future of safety!"
There were high-school computer classes already in the 1982. I know, I attended them. Now, more than thirty years later, with the advent of the internet on top it, schools and politicians still speak of computers as high-tech? In my world they're commodities.
Also: The wonders of technology have fixed HealthCare.gov! More jobs repairing all the student-broken laptops in schools! More people following GPS blindly into death zones!
The people that think technology is the problem with our schools aren't addressing the real problem: The fact that our culture is anti-learning, anti-education, pro-sky-fairies and anti-critical thinking. You need to get kids to enjoy learning, get them reading and writing, then get them to learn to think rationally and analyze things critically. Without learning the scientific method and a disciplined approach to problem solving, at best our schools will be producing burger-flippers and some astonishingly terrible low to mid level managers.We also need to get kids to ENJOY learning. The problem is, our education system isn't built for learning, it is built for indoctrination. The only rule consistently enforced throughout a child's formative years is "listen to authority and obey and accept what they say without question." Everything else is subservient to the goal of drilling that into their heads. Critical thinking and the joy of learning come into serious conflict with that. Until there is a big cultural change in the US, most schools will continue to be that way.
That said, technology can be a good supplemental learning tool for certain things, especially if they get the kids excited about the topic. I just believe this fixation on technology is a distraction from the real problems in our schools and society.
I wonder how many of the subsequent examples will turn out to be shams. It has to be possible for technology to help education. For example, I routinely interact online with people from the rest of the world. But in practice, I've had mostly negative experiences with technology in the classroom.
The positive experiences I recall: displaying complex data like charts and such and enabling a professor bound to a wheelchair to project their written words on a screen (both which incidentally could be done with an overhead projector). I've also had some positive experiences with remote teaching and computer lab classrooms which are oriented around study of particular software.
The rest just seems like a very expensive way to implement cheap technologies that already work. It's a way to turn a thousand dollar blackboard into a ten thousand dollar blackboard.
As swine like Zuckerberg lobby for the government to allow
workers from other countries to take jobs which US citizens
could have done, these students will have the chance to
film themselves waiting for the next round of unemployment
benefits.
Or perhaps they can film their lifestyles as homeless people.
Perhaps some budding Michael Moore might want to contrast the technology available to the President's kids at the $35,288-a-year Sidwell Friends School ("The number one blessing for this [iMovie] project was the delivery of noise-cancelling headphones for each child") to the tech available at rural Appalachia schools (avg. family income $40,000). Sidwell Friends is also living-the-cyberlife as a charter member of the elite Global Online Academy, which boasts that "classmates in Washington, D.C. $35,288, and San Francisco $38,900 work on projects with peers in Madaba-Manja, Jordan $38,272, and Portland, Oregon $25,850. Students in Hawaii $19,950 (President Obama's alma mater) and Chicago $29,985 discuss global health issues with students in New York $40,220, Seattle $28,500 (Bill Gates' alma mater), Boston $46,700, and Jakarta, Indonesia $30,200."
You can have all the laptops that you want in a classroom but it still won't change the shitty federal education program that is practically mandated throughout the country, and terribly designed standardized tests that not only do worse for children but also for teachers. There's absolutely no way I would allow my children to study at a public institution in the US unless it's highly reputable and those are too few in between to even count on one hand. The system was designed to pass ignorant children and there's nothing teachers can do about this, unless of course they value their job that is. But of course, none of that matters because most classrooms seem to have laptops and big TV/projectors while ignoring the core problem and the fact that we're in an unrecoverable amount of debt. Oh wait, that's nothing to be proud of as well. Is there anything good we can say about the public school system in the US? Third world countries have beaten the US in education by miles and most places in third world countries can't afford a computer lab. What does that have to say about technology in the classroom? It's absolutely useless if you don't have a solid foundation to begin with. I suppose that's to be expected from a country that treats everyone the same (except if you're black, you don't get an IQ test and can't be disciplined by law) and forces everyone through the same curriculum no matter how smart or stupid they are. M'erika!
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/
While the USA spends more on education, we still aren't learning better then anyone else.
Funny how Lincoln educated himself with a piece of coal and a shovel to write on (according to stories I was told in school), yet today kids have to have an tablet to learn?
Maybe the kids could do a high tech film about how throwing money at technology doesn't actually improve education.
Be seeing you...
No kidding. Video chat? That's been available to the average PC user for over 10 years. What kids should be doing right now is interfacing their PCs and microcontrollers with the real world: Making robots, drones, 3D printers, automated beer brewing systems, fabricating their own parts, etc. The information on how to do these things is all over the internet. It's easier now than it ever was.
Do our jobs for us because we're clueless.
In some schools, it's still 1982....
When I graduated HS in 1997, they were still using Apple II computers to teach typing class. That would have made a great video, a bunch of students using computers that are almost as old as they are.
We also had a "modern" IBM PC network lab, using diskless IBM PS/2 model 30s (8088 cpu) with IBM classroom-lan on a 386-based server.
when I was in high school the place was loaded with computers, you were not allowed to do anything with them but they were there collecting dust and acting as jewelry
that was in the 90's
More importantly, why are we wasting time and resources asking children to propagandize implementations of technology in education for the sake of it rather than worrying about the quality of education, itself? If technology itself somehow inherently improved education, you wouldn't need to promote it. Steve Jobs understood this ages ago.
That assumes they can spend any time at school doing anything besides preparing for their next standardized test, and have access to resources at home to accomplish these things. And that they like tinkering with stuff, too, which probably means that we need to get their parents to like it so they'll instill it in their kids.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
More importantly, why are we wasting time and resources asking children to propagandize implementations of technology in education for the sake of it rather than worrying about the quality of education, itself?
Because kids who are excited about their own education can get more out of it, regardless of school condition, than those who are just passing time until 4 PM. Hands-on applications like these with a deadline and goal help build that excitement.
But if you think getting kids excited about learning is a waste of time and resources, there's little point in trying to improve the quality of an education that the kids won't care to learn.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
if the government is doing it this must be socialism.
You misspelled "propaganda".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sort of wondering what the overall purpose in this competition is.
The government has no idea what to do with technology in schools. They are hoping kids can figure out some use for it and show them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is about getting kids excited about making a video.
. Or on any computer, via khan academy. Why is the white house advertising apple?
Seriously. Even though I'm sure there are some great uses of technology in schools today, the education systems that I have worked with made two critical mistakes.
1. Deciding that technology should be integrated into the classroom, rather than being a dedicated subject. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, very few teachers have computer skills beyond word processing and web browsing. This means that kids are typically exposed to computers as writing and research tools, but little else within the core curriculum.
2. Promoting a philosophy that kids know more and are more adaptable to emerging technologies. This is only true because schools are unwilling to hire people with the skills necessary to teach courses using the contemporary tools. Even then a teacher with a couple of hours of professional development will have more computer skills than most children because adults have a nasty tendency to confuse seat time with proficiency.
Don't get me wrong. I'm confident that some great videos will come out of this competition. There are excellent teachers and teachers who excel at integrating technology into the curriculum. But I would not take these videos as representing the norm. They are actually representing an idea.
Mr. Nye, we are not your (government's) employees, nor do we donate our labors to the government. If you want multimedia records of our children's excitement about their technical education, go out there and record it yourself, on your own dime. Our children are not your property, and they do not take orders from you.
The #1 lesson in "good citizenship" you seem to treasure for our children, is how to say "piss off" to self-important government bureaucrats.
Piss off.
Sincerely,
ChipMonk
Technology is not going to fix the problem of parents not being involved in their children's education. People learned how to spell and add numbers before there were computers, tablets, Ipads, etc. Somehow everyone thinks that spending more on technology or blaming teachers in going to fix education. The problem begins and ends at home with the parents getting involved in their kids education to motivate them to learn. One of my favorite quotes regarding this is "The man who learns only when and what he is taught in school has truly learning nothing at all." The main problem with education is motivating students and that cannot be solved with teachers, small class sizes, or technology. END RANT
So, Emperor Barak Hussein Obama employs the youth of the U.S.A. to satisfy his thrust for pornography is now out in the open by the other than the White House Staff!
On a recent note, the White House gave an "All Clear" to the HealthCare.gov website troubles, Trouble is this quote "Moving forward, technicians will focus on fixing the systems that send data on customers and federal subsidy payments to insurers, federal officials said on the call. Those systems, centered on a standard transaction form known as an “834,” are used to transmit key data about new customers to insurers." Dear God indeed!
The Obama "Fix" as suspected is nothing more than cosmetic! Now in boasting they telegraph to all "transaction form known as an “834,” are used to transmit key data about new customers to insurers" gives the key to the "Store" to the thieves, just as Obama ordered it. Question: how much to the thieves give to Obama?
Even the Internal Revenue Service of the Department of the Treasury is under lock-down to reveal to the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. Obama's sources of "income!"
Fancy that.
QED
Of all the things there are to blame Obama for, sending his kids to a private school is not one of them.
Actually it is.
DC had an awesome voucher program going, that helped poor kids attend good schools.
When Obama came in, he nixed it.
So his kids should attend the same schools he made the poor kids attend when they didn't have to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
....a video about ways they learn at school. Though, honestly, getting kids excited about anything intellectually challenging is a success.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
No kidding. Video chat? That's been available to the average PC user for over 10 years. What kids should be doing right now is interfacing their PCs and microcontrollers with the real world: Making robots, drones, 3D printers, automated beer brewing systems, fabricating their own parts, etc. The information on how to do these things is all over the internet. It's easier now than it ever was.
Are you kidding me? Shit, you can't even do your chemistry homework these days without the fucking DEA showing up to ask about why you're purchasing lab equipment, the ATF showing up to ask why you're purchasing chemicals, and the FBI showing up with an NSA tip-off that you just used the word "school" in conjunction with words for potential terrorist materials.
Solution? Ah, we'll just make that an elective.
A lot like how kids in Texas are doing so shitty in math that they've decided the brilliant solution is to just not require Algebra II for graduation at all.
We also had a "modern" IBM PC network lab, using diskless IBM PS/2 model 30s (8088 cpu) with IBM classroom-lan on a 386-based server.
Ay and we were grateful. In my school, they cut us in two wit' a bread knife...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes, the old computers got passed down, so that's not surprising. In the 80s, those Apple IIe computers were expensive investments, and they were passed from the computer science class to the math classes to the English classes (I used AppleWriter on an Apple IIe in 1989, to learn word processing, when the industry standard then was WordPerfect 5), to the typing class. A 10-15 year lifespan for an expensive investment isn't out of line, although by 1997 the Apple II series was well beyond its lifecycle.
From what I've read over the past few years, the reason the education industry is pushing technology in schools is to have and end-to-end solution for DRM, so they can sell digital textbooks and other content to schools. That's why there are iPads in schools. No one is doing this to expose kids to technology so the kids can learn about it. They're doing it so they can get money from schools. They don't even have to print textbooks. I haven't seen a single technology initiative yet that wasn't tied to a copyright-industry publisher pushing digital content.
This is all about renting content temporarily, so the same content can be sold over and over. I still have textbooks from the 80s. Future generations will only get textbooks temporarily while they are in school.
I don't know why you keep blaming "left-wingers". look at the platform of the texas gop, they oppose critical thinking skills. Also they don't want evolution to be taught in schools. The problem is you keep blaming teachers and "left-wingers" when the problem is that parents are not being involved in education. All other developed countries have public schools and they don't have indoctrinated citizens. Stop your mindless bashing of ideologies.
Unless you're a member of the Executive branch of the Federal Government, the proper response is "You mean a request, don't you?"