Technology advances, so do students

[neveramazed]

Sorry some posts were made that address some of my points while I was typing. I sure wish I was offered a typing class when I was in school

[Swimmy]

Alright!!! Another Linux affectionado!

NeverAmazed, I think that was the point of my last post. Use the technology to supplement the subject matter, not to replace it.

My undergraduate school is turning more to Linux each year. After I graduated, they started to play with Linux and virtual machines for their computer science kids. I find you can do a lot more with Linux, and you can customize it to your tastes, not to microsoft's.

You wouldn't happen to know of a Utica-area LUG, would you?

[clarencebunsen]

Technological change is a given & the rate of change continues to accelerate. How to balance that with the need to understand fundamentals will continue to be a major educational challenge.

Using slide rules forced us to be very good at mental arithmetic. It drives me nuts to see basic power of ten mistakes. Some recent examples from OD articles:
If you read the story about salt storage & prep for winter storms (where else would that be front-page news) Utica has enough salt on hand for a couple centuries based on our reported per winter use & amount on hand. I didn't know which number was wrong, but one had to be.
In the story about ER usage, the number for Faxton Urgent Care was low by a factor of 10 and that for St. Lukes ER was one day not one week.

However, when I bought my HP-45 the slide rule went into the drawer. Even though I still have it, I can't imagine actually using it. The problem for me has been, how do I teach my kids to look a a string of numbers & see that their product should be about 100, not 1000 or 1 million. Or look at a structure or a machine & see the forces as vectors and if they balance. An old engineer once told me (back when I was not old), "When in doubt, make a scale drawing. If it looks wrong, it probably is." CAD programs and Finite Element Anaylsis are much more accurate, but the sketch pad is still needed.

[frankcor]

swimmy, please read the next three paragraphs as my response -- all the rest is fluff.

what I hear you say is you don't mind them teaching computers, but they have to focus on the basics.

What I am saying is that in good practice, very little time is spent on "teaching the computer." I mean, we're talking kids here -- you show them the mouse and 15 minutes later they're teaching you things.

Rather, in the good examples that I have witnessed they USE the computer to TEACH the basics.

We're in perfect harmony when it comes to NCLB. It's just another proof that when federal dollars are dangled in front of educators, no real benefit comes of it. The proper federal role in public education should be strictly as a clearinghouse for best practices throughout the nation.

As to your observation that kids aren't learning today, I think there are a number of factors involved.

I am in the process of meeting with high school seniors in Oneida and Herkimer counties who have applied to my alma mater. I volunteer as an admissions ambassador (that way I don't feel so guilty for not donating a building to the campus like some of my former classmates). I gotta tell you, some of the kids I talk to will blow you away with the depth and breadth of their knowledge and with the skills that they have acquired. And not all of these kids are from New Hartford or Clinton. Our best and brightest have received public educations that have prepared them to compete globally and be very successful. It's the middle- and lower-level kids that concern us all.

Part of the problem is that the kid who can't make change at McDonald's today would have been working in a factory or linen mill 30 or 50 years ago. Those jobs are gone. But no one cared that Johnny couldn't read as long as he could operate a machine. In 1965, my best friend dropped out of high school on the day he got his driver's license to go drive a bread delivery truck. Yesterday at Price Chopper I eavesdropped on the bread delivery truck driver as he demonstrated the benefits of decreasing the width and increasing the height of his brand's display shelves by 5% to the store manager, using a market study spreadsheet on his tablet pc with a wireless satellite link.

There are serious problems in public education today. I am nearly convinced we are incapable of overcoming them without a revolution. But using computers in the classroom is not one of them.

[Swimmy]

frankcor said:

It's the middle- and lower-level kids that concern us all.

I agree, those students are the ones who concern me the most. I did not mean to imply that none of the students are stellar.

After just reading your first three paragraphs, I think we are in agreement as to how technology should be used. I couldn't agree more with you about using technology to teach the basics. My fears lay in the area where the technology is used to replace teaching the basics.

But I think you and I see eye-to-eye on what you're saying.

[nhcitizen18]

neveramazed,

Great post. I hope to someday hear stories about how my daughters have used technology during the school day in teh way you describe.

[strikeslip]

A fellow blogger had this post a while back:
cnycircus.com/2007/05/04/bye-bye-laptops/

There is a great NY Times article attached about Liverpool's experience.

[Ralph]

I didn't mean to do away with technology either, but I think there should be some fundamental stuff to give them a base for the rest.

If I didn't understand the hands on fundamental basics of the darkroom, then Photoshop would be a mystery and a whole lot harder to get through.

[frankcor]

Ralph, that's a great example of the importance of a firm basis in the fundamentals. I know one math teacher who still uses a slide rule to teach logarithms.

[frankcor]

Wow, I missed your excellent message when you first posted it. Your point about ease leading to abuse is something the best teachers already know. And it doesn't apply just to computers. Usually they present material in different ways to get the message across to all the students.

And yes, my suggestion to save money by not buying computers was absolutely dripping in the most acerbic sarcasm I could muster.

[Swimmy]

Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Seeing no Progress, Some Schools Cut Laptops

That's an interesting conclusion to their study.

[frankcor]

Kewl, so now we know we can't use the same approach on every kid. Uh ... wait a minute ... I thought we knew that before.

Does anyone other than me think it's odd to see a high school kid wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "I'm a drinker" in school?

Maybe a lack of discipline and supervision in Liverpool contributed to the lack of progress?

[Swimmy]

No, i was thinking the same thing.

[dgriffin]

I'm a little late, but I'd like to weigh in on this, since after my main career, I headed up a department at a local school system, bringing it out of the stone age as we installed networks throughout the 6 building district and computers in every classroom. I developed curriculum, taught the teachers, stumped for technology around the district and in general successfully got everyone on the Internet in the mid 1990's, well ahead of the curve.
The research shows what someone else has pointed out: no measurable gains have been made in educational goals through use of technology, be it slide projectors, ed TV or computers.
Teachers were the largest part of the problem in trying to implement technology in education. Some were box-headed and hadn't tried anything new since college. Some were quite selfish with their time and did not want to invest it increasing their skills. Many were unwilling to adapt their curriculum to the use of technology. After you teach something for 20 years, you are loathe to change anything. But many teachers were enthusiastic and got on board. They really worked hard to give their students the opportunity to use a computer for their studies.
From my experience, here are a few points:
1. Computers as teaching machines are worthless; the software for such activities is out of date, expensive, tedious and anathema to both students and teachers.
2. Word processing, for which students used computers quite often, is a skill most students can teach themselves, and they did.
3. The Internet is everything, a vast resource of knowledge that can indeed effectively enhance the curriculum for most classes. When used well, of course. Access to the Internet is the value of networks in schools and any school with computers, but without this capability, has wasted a lot of money.
4. Alas, school systems cannot afford to keep up with technology. By the time I finished our three year installation and implementation plan, most of the systems and technology were out of date. Anyone who has owned a PC over the past 15 years knows this scenario very well. Manufacturers very carefully roll out technology to keep a revenue stream coming in the future. The only reason why today you are seeing a slow down in that roll-out in PC lines is because computers have become a commodity business with small per-box profits. So Dell, IBM, etc., are concentrating their efforts in other parts of the business where they can make some money. This is often in the early-wave stuff, like the new plasma TV's, etc. No one in education knows how schools will be able to afford to continue to follow technology as it grows like topsey. Perhaps cheap solutions for Internet Access in central parts of the schools will work best.
5. Technology is political. A child from a middle class family will have a computer and access to the internet in his household. He will teach himself to use the computer along with his friends. He will become an expert quickly (I used to end my classes by telling teachers, "If you have any questions in the future, call me. For really good answers,ask any kid.") A child from a low income family will not have these technology advantages at home and educators and politicians worry about a "technology gap", a knowledge gap between the economic classes. They feel the solution is to place the technology in the schools so that the gap doesn't get too wide. But as I said, being able to afford to do that in the midst of taxpayer revolts will be difficult.
So, my opinion about computers in the schools cannot be stated in blacks and whites. I will say one thing, many of our children probably will learn much more technology AWAY from the schools. And those who learn and use technology ONLY in school will be a measurable distance behind.
Dave

[dgriffin]

Oh....one more point, of the schools I'm aware of, many are indeed giving up on laptops for an interesting reason. They cost a lot more than a desktop and unfortunately disappear, get damaged and and are more fragile. They are a small high-resale item perfect for stealing.
Dave