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SIIA complains schools don't buy enough software
John writes "CNN is reporting on study by a software trade group which seems to claim that schools aren't spending enough on software. This begs a few questions. One of them is, what sorts of software is useful for schools? (Other than Oregon Trail, of course!) " *sigh* How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
We have a mailing list, seul-edu, and a website, http://www.seul.org/edu/ that are dedicated to fostering educational applications for Linux. We have a number of programs both pedagogical and administrative and documents (HOWTOs, on-line texts) under development which I think you might find interesting. We can always use help and feedback. Please take a look at what we're doing and then join us!
Doug Loss
This just goes to show the inefficacy of computers in the classroom. Schools are given the computers because of course we have to have computers in the classroom, the president says so. Then the schools have to figure out what to do with them.
They could install all the latest whizzbang software at $500 a seat, or spend nothing and get the same end result. Guess what happens?
Computers don't teach kids. Teachers do. I am not convinced that a computer as a teaching tool is any more effective than a good teacher showing a videotape. The computer is a media tool, just like TV/VCR or an antiquated 'film-strip'.
I had a teacher once who did not know how to teach so he would sit us all down with a film strip, ignore us, and grade papers. We learned nothing. The same thing can happen with a bad teacher and classroom full of pentiums with an 'Explore the rain forests' CD-ROM - its just a hell of a lot more expensive.
Stop wasting money on computers/Internet in the school. Spend the money on paying teachers a respectable salary instead.
-josh
How do you explain that money doesn't enumerate all value?
:)
oh, but there is correlation! if people buy something, that means it has value to them!
but that's not the main point. the problem is not just schools not spending much, but also the industry not providing much of interest.
case in point, i recently talked with an old high school teacher of mine, and at one point he started telling me about the college-level calculus courses they're planning, and the difficulties they have finding the right software. his experience was that the market is pretty much split into silly puzzle-style programs on one end, and mathematica on the other - nothing in between. college freshmen trying to find good tutoring software to help them with calc can relate, i'm sure. no wonder people don't buy programs, if there's little available.
and secondly, regarding the poor quality of school software - i've worked for a while in one of the big public school systems, and educational software costs a lot. depending on software, it can get into upper double- and triple-digits per machine for a specialized program (times several dozen machines per lab). on one hand it's understandable, because a limited-market title is naturally going to be more expensive to offset production costs - but if you're an educator faced with a choice of spending your entire yearly software budget on one or two specialized titles, or several types of general productivity and math/statistics software, which one will you choose? considering present pricing and selection, no wonder we have curricula based around m$ office and mathcad.
which is not to say educators are not to blame. all too often they mistake typing and ms office classes for 'computer science education' - a distinction which i'm afraid is also often lost on college freshmen trying pick a major. labs are often run by people without much it training, who learn as they go. but that is more excusable. teachers are primarily educators, and shouldn't be expected to be necessarily computer savvy. somewhere higher up in the administration there should be people who keep up with technology, evaluate educational software, and advise the teachers, but we've still a way to go until then.
which brings us right back to not having good software to begin with.
My other car is a cons.
It's a software TRADE GROUP. They're representatives of the companies that make and sell computer software. Companies like Microso~1, Borland, Adobe, etc. These companies make money by selling software.
This "report" was constructed solely for the purpose of generating revenue for the companies that sponsor the trade group. It's ridiculous. Most intelligent people will completely ignore it. However, some idiotic school board administrators will likely see the report and say, "We should spend a chunk of our budget on new computer software."
And you know what sucks about this? It's OUR money. We pay property taxes that go to the school districts. Even if you're renting, part of your rent goes to the property taxes for the building you live in. Arghh.
Well, I think it is obvious to the free sofware crowd that the money spent by schools on software is a lousy measure of of their dedication to computer education. I think a better measure is to check the class sizes of real computer courses and the number of machines available per student in such classes. Also, to note the fall of computer science type classes (read: programming) and the rise of application classes. I think, seriously, that your average computer class these days is an overglorified version of typing 101.
When I was a kid we learned BASIC in junior high and assembler and PASCAL in high school. I was in a high school recently that had no programming classes at all. However, they did have 90+ PC's in their Business Ed department, all running Word and Excel.
Obviously something is wrong here.
I'm a 15 year old Sophmore at a school that is considered "rich" in Amarillo, TX. Your tax dollars and the computers that it buys are being wasted. We have about one Macintosh computer per classroom, and the teachers are the ONLY one's who ever use them. The only times I have ever used a computer at school is in the library, and for Keyboarding IA. I'll be taking Computer Science next year, on 486 Wintel machines. The one's for keyboarding class are I think 386's, possibly 286's running Windows 3.1. All the burcratic crap about a computer in every classroom is a lot of bull. Almost all of the teachers just use them to compile our grades, that's it. And most of them have no clue how to use them. A few do need/know how to use computers, but it's a small minority. We have, I think, 4 computer labs, two of them are for just any classroom that wants them, the other two are for computer specific courses. Everyone of those computers suck, and run outdated software. For example, we have semester tests coming up, so my Spanish teacher decided to go to the computer lab to run some Spanish programs so it would help us study. Needless to say, the programs are incredibly uninteresting, and do not help in the least bit. I would learn much more if the teacher just reviewed us. As for internet connections, I've only been on once during school. Our whole class went to the library (the only place where you can get on the net) to look up housing prices in Houston for a project. I guess it was useful, but geez, I'm a sophmore and only used the internet once at school? I thought that I would get on a lot more than that listening to Congress. The computer situations in schools suck right now. They rather give their extra money to the athelets than the computer nerds.