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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.
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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.
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.
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...
Of all the things there are to blame Obama for, sending his kids to a private school is not one of them. His kids are not public property, and his duty as a parent is to get them the best education he can afford.
That being said, he's a flaming asshole for throwing his weight into killing DC's voucher program.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
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.
Well, yes. But that's compulsory schooling for you. Kids are forced to sit in boring classrooms for the best part of twenty years being indoctrinated by left-wing, unionised government employees so they'll vote for left-wing governments who'll demand higher taxes to pay teachers more.
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.
Kids naturally enjoy learning and want to learn as much as possible. Takes years of teaching to beat that out of them.
What these people really don't want to hear is that 'high tech' is making schools themselves irrelevant when a kid who can read can find just about any information they want either online or in a good library.
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
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.
For the president's kids, certain logistical considerations make this nigh impossible. Consider that those kids are way up near the top of the list as the world's juiciest kidnap/assassination/crazy-whackjob-murder targets. If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to be going to the same public school as the president's, because any such school would necessarily need to be utterly isolated and cut off from the outside world, under constant heavy guard and severely restricted access.
I do certainly favor the general principle, though --- and, in cases where the complicating logistics of being a super-high-profile celebrity do not exist --- I think it's highly hypocritical when elitist goons with kids in private school infiltrate school boards and the upper public school administrative chain, for the specific purpose of destroying public schools to save on taxes.
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
I was with you until the 9/11 and secrete FISA courts. The Secrete FISA courts were instituted during the 70's with the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that came about because the cops were using the government's ability to spy on foreigners to get taps on citizens without warrants that the supreme court finally said was needed in the late 1960's. The idea of keeping them secrete was that spies couldn't use public records to piece together who and what was being looked at and the data processing capabilities wasn't capable at the time of finding patterns in every single court in the US to determine this without exposing someone actually trying to do so. In short, the secrete courts was a way to get warrants without tipping off the spies trying to find out how much we know and where we were getting our information from.
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.