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Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the tech-savviest teachers in the United States teaches third grade here at Mapleton Elementary, a public school with about 100 students in the sparsely populated plains west of Fargo. Her name is Kayla Delzer. Her third graders adore her. She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up. She remodeled her classroom based on Starbucks. And she uses apps like Seesaw, a student portfolio platform where teachers and parents may view and comment on a child's schoolwork. Ms. Delzer also has a second calling. She is a schoolteacher with her own brand, Top Dog Teaching. Education start-ups like Seesaw give her their premium classroom technology as well as swag like T-shirts or freebies for the teachers who attend her workshops. She agrees to use their products in her classroom and give the companies feedback. And she recommends their wares to thousands of teachers who follow her on social media. "I will embed it in my brand every day," Ms. Delzer said of Seesaw. "I get to make it better." Ms. Delzer is a member of a growing tribe of teacher influencers, many of whom promote classroom technology. They attract notice through their blogs, social media accounts and conference talks. And they are cultivated not only by start-ups like Seesaw, but by giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, to influence which tools are used to teach American schoolchildren.
Trump University taught this lady to grab education by the pussy and make good deals.
nt
If she leaves for "Silicon Valley", that would be a win for Fargo.
If the kids are doing well out of it then more power to her
Nullius in verba
I'd rather follow this woman on twitter that the Karidiashans.
Has a brand image like the kardashians? #donotwantasteacher
Seriously there is no place for this in public schools except as part of the segue from authoritarian acceptance to corporate authority acceptance. How this hasn't been frowned on by her school administration/district board is beyond me.
"She is a schoolteacher with her own brand"
No. She should be fired.
giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft,
The whole computing education system now seems like teaching kids "The Fun and Excitement of McDonalds Happy Meals", rather than good nutrition and how to cook healthy meals themselves.
Why are we permitting corporate financially motivated intrusion into classrooms? We shouldn't be teaching kids $BIGCORP $TOOL $VERSIONOFTHEWEEK, we should be teaching them computing concepts, critical thinking, and deep understanding. It can start early, and need not to be too advanced for the age, but the goal should be those things, not enriching corporate coffers and breeding more learned helplessness.
There are more than enough good open source tools to teach programming with, instead of corporate lock-in proprietary tools. Instead of "teaching them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts", how about we teach them to make their own blog in HTML? How about we teach the value and freedom of open standards and the risks and mass subservience from proprietary locked down "cloud services"?
Because this dumb cunt is already brainwashed. She must now "cultivate" fresh minds.
Creating small-souled consumerist bugpeople, one gape at the screen at a time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Ms.
MIZZ
AKA perpetually available for casual sex and cat adoption
TFS calls this a teacher. She is not. She's Facebook. Her kids aren't the customers, they are the product. She's selling brand indoctrination to young children and charging the companies for it.
What the hell does a child learn by using Twitter? To be a worse person? To avoid having a self-developed opinion? To jump on the harassment campaign because it's fun when it's not coming your way? The joys of death threats? To always share everything all the time and never read a book or introspect?
Instagram? That service that causes the most depression in its users? Yeah, that's a great tool for kids. Nothing says well-developed like hiding all the pictures of your life that aren't perfect. Nothing teaches you self-respect like living for "likes". Should we really teach kids to be emotionally dependent prostitutes?
This isn't a teacher, this is the incarnation of greed above humanity and technology replacing instead of supporting mental growth.
with suport from the likes of google et al. this is just another way to inculcate cultural marxism into the next generation
This is a teacher, I DO NOT WANT my kids to be evne near. She is not teaching. Texting and Blogging is not teaching. She is creating zombies.
Give aa teacher that shows how real world works. How to REALLY sivle puzzles (problems). Get pumped about biology or physics or math.
Who can write 140 character note... is crap.
"J'ai un compte sur Twitter donc je suis"
Translation: I have an account on Twitter so I am.
Try to explain Levinas "alterity" (otherness) to those kids and first thing that will cross their mind is if he ever got a "like" on Facebook.
Or confirmation of scientific theories by the amount of followers on the account of the researcher...
race, gender??? what is she/he/they doesn't identify with such restrictive labels? or what if she/he/they does identify with such labels but only in the safe space of their home, and wish to be exempt of such controversial talk when they are in the public sphere of their journey?
lucm, indeed.
Apple has been (in)famously doing this for decades. It was just a matter of time before every other business realized that they could bribe teachers to advertise their products to captive audiences too. (This history lesson brought to you by the Coca Cola company.)
As Claude Littner one said "You're not a brand. You're not even a fish!".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
how about we teach them to make their own blog in HTML?
most kids won't give two shits about code. If this discussion was taking place on a site for accountants, your alter ego there would be asking: "why don't we teach kids how to properly amortize intangible assets" and he would be as wrong as you and your html.
lucm, indeed.
Our money system demands it of course!
"Dictated by currency flow"
Coming to you this Autumn.
i can see why this appeals to teachers. It's been a fact of life that many teachers - even in reasonably good schools - end up spending a fair bit of their own money purchasing supplies on a regular basis. The lure of someone providing what the school district can't (or won't) is compelling.
But, on the other hand, this is concerning. These companies ultimately aren't interested in making the best choices for students - they're motivated to sell as much of their product as possible. Plus, based on what I've seen of various popular online "influencers" in many fields... they're not necessarily good at their jobs, they're just really motivated to self-promote and are good at talking (like the old traveling salesmen who peddled snake oil). These guys are likely just parroting whatever their patrons want them to say.
"Teachers have really responded well to feeling like they are being listened to," said Carl Sjogreen, a co-founder of Seesaw.
I fear this is all there is to it - the feeling as if they're being listened to, but with no actual listening happening behind it.
#DeleteChrome
most kids won't give two shits about code
Most kids don't give two shits about math, history, physics, literature, art, or chemistry, either. We teach those things because we are trying to create well rounded and flexible citizens capable of rational thinking and making informed decisions in their community, not indoctrinated corporate consumer-drones.
Technology is so ingrained in the modern world that we must have a technically literate public capable of understanding computers on a basic level. No, not everyone will grow up to hack on the Linux kernel, but schools need to teach fundamentals, concepts, and reasoning, not corporate indoctrination to the privacy-harvesting worlds of Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
they are teaching your children to disregard any privacy or the value of their personal information and to be a happy consumer of course!
(Obviously, I haven't RTFA.)
Well, it depends a lot what they are using these technologies to do. One of the problem we have in classes today are relating to engagement. Being able to do something you want to show your mom or your roommate is valuable in term of education.
If these platforms are used to engage the student with more people and get more feedback, more power to them.
If these platforms are here to sell-out the students for the benefit of the instructor, then that's not right.
The headline mentions an ethical concern, but the summary doesn't. What's the concern? Please state it clearly.
Please also consider that not everyone hates commerce. So if your ethical concern is "commerce may occur", you might want to explain how that's an ethical problem.
Teachers in government schools are rarely held to any standard at all. So if your ethical concern is that one teaching style might not meet some standard, please show how that standard would be otherwise enforced in classrooms.
Thanks in advance.
Why not? We already permit ideological intrusion of the far left..
This is a PUBLIC SCHOOL teacher, according to TFA. The whole point of Federalizing "Public" education was to provide uniform access to a uniform education for all. This came with a legal mandate that all children must attend schools, in addition to massive amounts of tax dollars.
Trump-U, like most Universities, was a Private school. Nobody was forced to go, and tax payers were not forced to fund it. If those kinds of schools fail, people don't pay to attend and they end up out of business. Hence, what happened with Trump-U was expected and normal market place business.
I'm all for making improvements, but isn't this the flat out rich vs. poor bias that people are claiming to be trying to stop? We can get to whether or not this is successful after we see some long term grades.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's better than begging on the streets for school supplies because your school district "can't afford" them. Seriously. Teachers around here have gone to cardboard signs at intersections begging for funds to buy supplies.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
state governments continue to defund public education. the public continues to deny local district referendums to make up the difference. THIS is what you get when that happens.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (1985), he describes and analyses exactly this kind of problem. Politics, religion, and education is transformed into entertainment, and thus loses its original context, value and meaning. Instead, entertainment serves its own purpose - to entertain and keep distracted. Often, or most of the time in today's media world, it also serves the purpose of showing advertisement, as is described in this summary. Your teacher is no longer there to give you an education, but to sell her own brand and promote others.
1) Because without their contributions the schools can't keep the lights on, because funding education through taxation is communism which will lead to compulsory gay marriage, death panels, and Venezuela type shit.
2) Because preventing any corporation in any way from doing anything it goshdigglydarn wants is communism which will lead to compulsory gay marriage, death panels, and Venezuela type shit.
tl;dr It's the queers' and the commies' fault, just like it always was.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why are we permitting [government] intrusion? Why are we permitting [idealogical] intrusion?
Corporations, governments, and ideas are real. Are classrooms supposed to teach about reality or hide children from reality?
If you want to censor one set of ideas from classrooms, that's a good argument for getting rid of government schools and letting people like you and other people unlike you have separate schools dedicated to whichever one-sided ideology each of you favor.
In one form or another, social media is here to stay, there is no escaping it. It is the natural result of connecting people.
So we might as well integrate it into education rather then turn a blind eye to it.
All the things you blame twitter already exist on school grounds. Bullying is a thing. Self-developed opinion? Just try not having the same tastes as your classmates and you will end up being the bullied. This behavior now spills on Twitter and Instagram, but unlike with school, there is no adult supervision, so I don't consider it a bad thing if the teacher is present here too. Unfortunately, parents seem to be overwhelmed by this technology and they either demonize it or act like kids themselves. Very few manage to use it like responsible adults and teach their kids to do the same.
These are all wonderful tools. We just tend to use them like idiots.
She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up.
Let me translate that for you:
She indoctrinates them to provide free personalized information to marketers, corporations, and governments, and brainwashes them into believing that 'sharing' (i.e. not preserving your very much human RIGHT to privacy) is 'normal' and 'natural' and that 'hiding things' (i.e. 'exercising your right to privacy') is WRONG and BAD.
These kids will grow up, even more so than Millennials, to believe that anyone who doesn't have so-called 'social media' accounts, and doesn't share everything about their day-to-day lives with the entire WORLD, must either be suffering from a mental illness, or is some sort of criminal.
Because without their contributions the schools can't keep the lights on,
Bullshit. US schools spend more per student than almost any other nation.
"When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system — more than any other nation covered in the report."
Try again.
Protip: Read a linked article before citing it.
The key word is "after".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
False dichotomy palsy. Eating like progressive equalitarian propaganda is non-productive at base, but intrusive corporate involvement may be productive proportional ... like any business ansatz ... to the money invested ! 500,000 10 yo Visual-basic programmers are more worthwhile than 500,000 jonny-B-good ghetto nibbers spouting MALCOM-X.
Still counts, and even before, the US is way up there. Every major survey no matter how they slice it finds the US spending per student in the top 10% world wide.
No way can you claim there isn't enough money given to US schools. On the other hand, if they spend it on shit like Apple and Google products, well, that's not making very good use of it now, is it? That's not how much money there is, that's how it's being spent.
Education has been taking back seat to commercial enterprise for many years. If you haven't heard the term, Educational Industrial Complex and learned about Pearson, Common Core, Charter Schools etc... check it out.
The big difference is that new players are trying to wriggle in and get a piece of the pie vs. the current monopoly players.
Is this even legal? None of these kids are old enough to agree to the terms of service on these services. I'm fine with classroom chat on a closed site and similar appropriately limited things, but commercial social networking sites like twitter are no place for children. There are ways to do this right which don't violate the children's rights. I don't think this is what it looks like. You can even self-host social networking and microblogging without selling the student's souls to the marketers.
The teacher is in Fargo, North Dakota though. If you know anything about that part of the country it's that it's about 20 years behind the coasts when it comes to the cultural zeitgeist. I think the kids there are still playing with Pogs at recess and telling their friends how fly it is. I'm sure they'll get around to it long after the rest of the country has moved on to something else.
There is tons of educational software out there. Having an unbiased, informed individual reviewing these systems for other teaching is very valuable. If her blog is popular, then that's a good indication that she's doing a good job of evaluating the software.
Our kids were using Think Through Math last year. Reflex Math this year. Both are basically automated quiz systems that provide some instruction, quiz the students, give them feedback, and make the results available to the teachers. Our kids were using A-Z Reading last year. It provides downloadable books, various assessment options, and keeps track of what level each student is reading at. Teachers used Google Docs as one way to communicate with the students. None of these included any advertising.
All of these were used by the teachers as mechanisms for homework. The teachers also used more traditional paper-based work.
As a parent, these individual systems seem useful. However, it can be very confusing keeping track of multiple systems for multiple kids, along with keeping track of what each kid is expected to do when.
There's a reason my kids don't have smart phones, and that I keep them off FaceTwit.
I'm not going to be happy if they are legally required to go have some bimbo (paid by my tax dollars) "teach" them to use all these stupid marketing services.
Sounds like pharma in the 80s. Company offers some "samples" and maybe some kickbacks in return for good recommendations to the patients/students.
Today at least you have to keep it on the down low. In medicine.
The lure of someone providing what the school district can't (or won't) is compelling.
Bingo.
Examine this photo, and tell me what you see. I see a classroom that's about half the size of a modern elementary classroom. I see blackboards. I see a radiator. I see a wall-mounted A/C unit. And I see hanging florescent lighting that was not built into the ceiling. With that alone, I'd place the age of the building somewhere between 1920 and 1930. That alone tells me how much a struggle it must be for this teacher to support her program, and how much work she must do to get what she can't from the district.
It just so happens that I grew up in the West Fargo school district, which Mapleton's a part of. Mapleton's a small satellite community; kids living in Mapleton go to Mapleton Elementary through sixth grade, then drive six miles east to West Fargo for middle and high school. The school is small, old, and has never been on the district's growing list of priorities to fund. (As opposed to a new middle school and new high school in order to feed the exponential growth in population.) Also, last I heard, West Fargo still does not have a 1-1 program. (Which is interesting, because they passed a technology levy back in 1995 which paid for truckloads of computers and our district's T1 line back when no other school in the area had internet access.) All which reinforces the point that resourceful teachers will do everything they can to provide what their districts cannot.
Do you mean that under the guise of educating children, Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are brainwashing the future consumers of their product.
It's interesting to note the organization you mention chose to turn 'Military Industrial Complex' into the phrase 'Educational Industrial Complex' when in the same farewell speech where Eisenhower coined the phrase 'Military Industrial Complex' he also warned of the risks of the rise of a scientific-technological elite. Which has always been soft-pedaled or ignored by the pundits who carry on incessantly about the M.I.C.
http://www.home-school.com/Art...
"Let me begin by characterizing where I'm coming from. I taught for thirty years in the Manhattan Public School. It was never my intention to teach. It happened by accident. I expected only to teach for a year or two. I got caught up in what seemed to me inexplicable problems that were so interesting that I would ask, "Would you mind if I stay an extra year?" When I woke up, thirty years had passed. After I got out, I still didn't have the answer to these puzzles. That was almost exactly nine years ago, and I set out to answer my questions. Had I known that it would take nine years to do that, I might very well have gotten a new set of questions. But as it was, one thing led to another, and I began to see that schools were functioning exactly as they had been designed to function, and that just puzzled the heck out of me. I said, "How could this happen? What purpose would explain schools being the way they are?" So I've been on a detective hunt for nine years. And what I'd like to say first of all to homeschoolers in particular - because they're right on the front lines, and they have to depend largely on themselves for courage and for inspiration - is that you made the right choice. You've made a choice to free your children to be the best people they can be, the best citizens they can be, and to be their personal best. But had you allowed those kids to remain in the grip of institutional schooling, the kids would have become instruments of a different purpose. People should understand that the local insanity that they think they're reacting against, if that's in fact their motive for homeschooling, is institution-wide, it's quite intentional, and it leads to an end that's useful to somebody [just not the school kids]."
Homeschooling costs one parent not being in the workforce though -- which means six figures a year in a place like Silicon Valley if both parents could work at professional jobs.
Wrote this about NYS around 2009, but is would apply to CA too: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it b
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What does a child learn by using Twitter? To interact with others and to be comfortable with computers. Seems like fine things for a 3rd grader.
At this age, computer class should be at least partly about teaching people to enjoy computers, just like reading should be at least partly about teaching people to enjoy reading. Social networks are a shallow use of computers, but 3rd grade books are shallow uses of reading too.
This kind of commercialism and self promotion has no place in the classroom. Why can't US politicians get a grip on providing a decent education system for everyone?
Reminds me of an episode from years back.
John_Chalisque
all the other schools.
I know some elementary school teachers who insist that they are seriosuly overworked these days because they are teaching so much more material than they used to teach. Instead of giving kids a great core education (math, english, science, history, etc) which would enable the kids to go on to learn anything else on their own or in higher ed, they now are teaching all sorts of extra stuff - like "computers".
I asked exactly what they were teaching about "computers". Were they teaching electroncs? ACTUAL programming (like assembly/C/C++ an the bare metal where understanding the hardware was required) or script crap and web page design? etc. Turns out that most are just teaching the kids to use web browsers to surf the web (something apparently no kid could figure out on his own...) and teaching kids to use various commercial products. None of these teachers who are "teaching computers" is teaching ANYTHING a kid could not take-up on his own or that is not a commercial product that likely will be supplanted by something else in the years before these kids enter the workforce. It's like if math class was not teaching math at all, but teaching how to use a particular brand of calculator and phys ed classes were just teaching kids how to shop for nikes.
Bad news all around. This should not be deceptively labelled as "teaching computers", it should probably be branded and the teachers should be wearing NASCAR-like garb covered with sponsor logos for the products they are indoctrinated the youths to use. In this regard, the teacher at the center of this article is actually being more honest than most {sigh}.
Seems to me like what's she's teaching the kids is to be modern day narcissists and not just by example.
Then again we do live in a society where we're told that everyone is special, no matter how stupid, untalented, lazy or ugly they are. Thus it's probably only to be expected that the logical end result of this is that just about everyone becomes a narcissist and narcissism starts to be seen as a desirable trait rather than the serious personality flaw that it actually is.
If this type of teaching becomes the norm it sadly wouldn't be the fist time actually learning something in class takes a back seat to something the kids find to be more fun than actually learning something.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
A friend once told me that being a kid means having to make two daily decisions: who can I play with and can I ride my bike? Remember those days? It appears this teacher is pulling these children into adulthood. These future consumers will have 40+ years of being barraged by advertisers. Give these kids break!
Get the fuck out of here
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
The proper comparison would be using mint.com vs quickbooks or mayb gnu cash.
Cheap storage VM.
Volunteer with your school, how much have you provided for your local district?
Cheap storage VM.
I am certain that my nephew's kids, who are homeschooled, get out into the world to mix with other kids. Maybe not as many playground bullies, but the have friends outside the family. Homeschooling parents work at this.
My Mom has run the computer lab at an elementary school in Santa Clara, CA for over 31 years. No one will ever do as much for children as she has, teaching everything from the basics of what a computer is to programming. I guess the difference is that my Mom's background is in science instead of social media.
I would not ever want my kid posting to Twitter or anything like it until he/she was old enough to know what the hell was going on. So like 40 years old. I sure as hell don't need a schoolgrade teacher telling them they have to use those social media sites. At the least, they better have a bunch of fake names and all that established so it's not an outright violation of privacy.
That's a cynical view of it. She's offering a blindly optimistic view. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The first to try something like this might not run afoul of all that cynicism, but you can bet your ass that if this sort of thing becomes popular it will go to corporate dystopian hell in a cyberpunk handbasket faster than Keanu Reeves in bullet time.
Holy fucking tl;dr batman!
You're living proof of whatever point you're trying to disprove!
I feel sorry for your kids, hopefully through a lot of hard work they can avoid growing up to be wackos like you.
Ah, the classic Ad Hominem fallacy -- nothing constructive to say so one resorts to childish insults.
Gee, even a Mathematician is saying that rote learning is a HORRIBLE way to "learn".
* A Mathematician's Lament aka Lockhart's Lament.
But go ahead and keep sticking your head in sand over how shitty the education system is.
* The Underground History Of American Education Book
--
Atheism, noun, a blind mad trying to tell the rest of the world that color doesn't exist.
I grew up with Spectrum, Commodore, arcade games and pocket calculators. I don't think I turned out bad. Our teachers talked to us, inspired us with their performance. I used to have my favourite teachers according to that. There are people who just can't be teachers and there are ones that are born teachers. I tried to be a teacher and after just a couple of months I realised I wasn't up to it. You have to have a certain trait to be a teacher and I'm not that. Anyway, my point is, I don't think new technologies can make teaching any more efficient. It's true that making your teaching more interesting will make your students more attentive, but if you're a *real* teacher you can make your classes very entertaining just by your interesting narrative. I guess you have to be a really genuinely interested in teaching to be able to do that. That's true for any other vocation to be successful at it. If you're not, you will end up trying other techniques. Sounds familiar? I think traditional techniques work extremely well. Aside from the physical punishment, that is.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
My son is in 3rd grade, and every year the school or the teacher has had some kind of social media account that they posted school assignments, announcements, or pictures of the classroom. On one hand, it is actually really nice to see picture of them working on a project, etc. On the other hand, I refuse to sign-up for social media account du jour. It wouldn't be so bad if they picked one, kept it closed, and used it again the next year.
Slight aside: This is why people aren't using email any longer. They have signed-up for so many social media accounts with their email address, that their inboxes are filled with junk mail. They just use email to sign-up for more stuff.