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Education Technology

Good and Bad Uses of Tech in Public Schools? 143

Posted by Cliff from the what-have-you-seen dept.
skot asks: "I am a high school math teacher and recovering journalist working on an article about innovative (and insane) uses of technology in the classroom. I have seen schools plunk down thousands of dollars on handheld computers that teachers and students basically use as notebooks - fancy, expensive notebooks. I have also seen teachers try to forbid their students from using the internet in a research project. I'm sure many Slashdot readers have lived through experiences like this - and more. If you want to share your stories, I'd love to hear 'em."
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Good and Bad Uses of Tech in Public Schools? More

Good and Bad Uses of Tech in Public Schools?

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  • Damn kids (FP!) (Score:2, Informative)

    by F1_Fan ( 255672 )
    Kids today forget how to use a library and rely on internet sources that don't receive the peer review of real books.

    I've seen it first hand... inaccurate facts in papers... "but it was on the internet!"
    • Books can be as misleading as any other periodical, website or interview. Code books w/ mistakes, articles with incorrect facts or people just saying wrong stuff.

      Trusting where your sorce blindly is just plain bad.

    • umm... yeah... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Fareq ( 688769 )
      Well,

      see, I have encountered the opposite problem. Professors who say "information gotten off the internet is less good than information in books"

      and therefore, my printout of a Supreme Court opinion (from the Supreme Court Website, mind you) got me docked, because this source would have been better gotten from the library reference series that contains these things. Incidentally, since the case was very new (the opinion about 2 weeks old -- from MPAA v 2600, by the way) it was not available in printed

  • Good use vs. Bad use of computers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <<ben> <at> <int.com>> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @05:46PM (#6447083) Homepage
    Good:
    Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

    Bad:
    Holding a lecture in a computer lab and having the class "follow along".

    Good:
    Requiring that students use a mix of sources in thier papers, including electronic and print.

    Bad:
    Not grading them on their sources "Bob's Website of SuperFun Stats says that..."

    Good:
    Requiring that students turn in a digital copy of thier papers along with a print version for markup.

    Bad:
    Not running plagarism checking software on those digital copies.
    • Good:
      Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

      Bad:
      have the teacher try to give a powerpoint presentation, but not get power point, or just being really unfamiliar, and thus slow.
      i really hate poorly done powerpoint presentations that teachers just done because they feel they have to
    • Good: Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption

      I had too many business classes that were taught on PP Slides that were RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER. I mean...why even pay the professor when he is just an intermediary between us and the publisher.
      Those classes were skipped whenever possible. All you had to do to get a 4.0 was to show up on review days and see which slides to study.

      • Erh, believe me, if the professor wasn't needed on top of the slides, he wouldn't be standing there, sonny. Surely s/he'd rather be in his office surfing the web for pr0n^H^H^H^H research material than stand up in front of students with an attitude like yours.

        By the way, have you ever thought about the fact that most courses use textbooks RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER, instead of in-house notes? Why is it acceptable for the textbook but not for the PP slides?
        • It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us. This was in my business and MIS classes.
          In my CS classes, the teachers HAD PREPARED their own notes, and the textbook was just a reference (sometimes obscure).
          As to my attitude, school becomes more and more expensive every year (it isn't inflation, it's lack of state funding in MN). Yet, we still just get powerpoint presentations for lectures. No wonder classr
          • It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us.

            The don't do that simply because books are meant to be read on your own, but PP slides have been designed to be used, guess what, in front of an audience.

            If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic, embellish them with well thought out colours and charts, made expensive animations, why would that be inferior to some slides put
            • If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic...

              I view professors as a way of getting another viewpoint. If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book, you're missing out. Sometimes information has to be presented in two or three different ways before you really get it. If you can't follow the textbook, the class with the publisher's PP slides won't be any better.

              The fact that it was that way when you went to school does n
              • If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book,

                Sure, and if the slides are awful one shouldn't use them either. However (1) slides are usually prepared by somebody other than the author and (2) what the professor _says_ is still a lot more than what is written on the slide.

                I agree that certain things should be done live on the board to get the true feel of it. By the same token, other things such as animations of an algorithm or the chart of a function are mu

    • Sources (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:55PM (#6447742) Homepage Journal
      Bad: Not grading them on their sources "Bob's Website of SuperFun Stats says that..."
      This is a particularly important point. Some teachers who don't like the web as a research tool point to all the web sites with a conspicuous bias. But fact is that all sources have biases. It's just that the bias is a little less conspicuous in the Enclyclopedia Britannica [infidels.org] than it is in, say, the Green Nazi web site [nazi.org].

      That's one of the most exciting things about the web. When I was in K-12, it always bothered me to see my classmates accept everything they found in standard reference works as the purest gospel. Nobody recognized that dictionaries and encyclopedias are written by fallible humans, subject to peer and political pressure, cultural bias, and a permanent tendency to oversimplify. When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I envy them a lot

      • When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I laugh when they quote horribly inaccurate sources.
        • Do you then try to explain to them why their sources are bad, or do you just wallow in your comfortable superiority?
    • I tend to agree with many of the above points. However, I would like to extend my experiences with one of them. I attended a two day seminar in the newly designed (at no small expense, mind you) classrooms at my university [uark.edu] and participated in a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to evaluate the effectiveness of using the Internet to instruct collegiate-level students. I managed to graduate Summa Cum Laude, so don't give me any of those "you're just a [stupid|cracktarded|etc.] person" r

  • Begging for cheaters. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @05:47PM (#6447090) Journal
    I have also seen teachers try to forbid their students from using the internet in a research project.

    This brand of stupidity exists independant of computer technology. I've had professors give take home exams that were:

    1) Closed book, and
    2) To be completed in 1 hour, honor system.

    That's the teacher's way of saying, "Honest people deserve lower grades in this course." Situations such as those are the only ones in which I've ever cheated in school. I don't consider it to be any morally different from cheating on an in-class test, but I certainly didn't hesitate to open up my text book and find the answers.

    Anyway. I realize this has nothing to do with technology, but there you are.
    • Your moral compass is spinning wildly... it's making me dizzy. What a rationalization.
    • Ok, now this is interesting.

      I am a student at Univ. Calif., Irvine

      at UCI, this sourt of honor system would not work, in my opinion, as well as that of many of my fellow students.

      At Harvey Mudd (sp?) in Claremont, CA. it is a common practice for final exams to be given this way. I have yet to find a student that would admit to having taken even five minutes longer than allowed, or having opened a book or looked online, or asked for help.

      Also, nobody admitted to ever being asked for help on such an exam
      • Morally, cheating is cheating. Do what you will, rationalize it how you like. I'll take my B and know that I have some small degree of integrity, thanks much.

        You go ahead and get your A. I won't really be mad at you, but you'll know that you cheated, and I will to. And that really makes the difference.

        I agree completely. I'd still prefer a system in which we all get grades that reflect our understanding of the subject material.

  • Fiber (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PsndCsrV ( 80030 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @05:49PM (#6447103) Homepage

    My mom teaches at a public elementary school, and they have a "technology committee" that decides all things technology for the school. That's ok, except that none of them are career IT'ers, and none of them have much training in IT except a seminar or 2 about things, or maybe a couple cisco classes.

    So lately the committee has decided that in order to solve all it's network ills, they need to install fiber throughout the entire school! Woo hoo! Right? Theoretically it's a good idea, but in reality, they don't even need it. They're external internet is a T1 (1.5mb), so even a 10mb network will swamp that. Internally they don't even use the network for much besides the internet... just a little storage for the teachers who know, and a few apps here and there. Stuff 100mb ethernet would handle fine.

    Seems pretty stupid to me, and a big useless expense. Especially with all the layoffs and budget crunches going on. I'd rather see them spend the money on a new PC for each teacher, or some classroom spending money. <sarcasm>But they're the technology committee. They know what's best.</sarcasm>

    • Is that fiber to the classroom, or just between closets? Fiber to the classroom is still overkill, but between closets is certainly not unreasonable, especially since it'll give plenty of bandwidth for growth.

      • It's fiber to the classroom, AFAIK. I agree, running fiber out to the farther buildings would be reasonable, especially looking at growth, but the school district is in a town of 10K people, and isn't growing very rapidly. I think the whole reason they're wanting it is because a lot of the existing network is chained hubs, running at 10mb. It's a little slow for intranet stuff sometimes. But instead of just upgrading stuff to 100mb (hubs/switches mostly), they want to replace it all with fiber. It's overki

    • Re:Fiber (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Chasing Amy ( 450778 )
      That's an example of why I advocate a much more old-fashioned education program than most here would like. Believe me, I love computers and find them to be an important part of my life, a hobby and passion as well as a tool. However, I believe they deserve a limited place in our schools because the money could better be used on more teachers for smaller class sizes, and higher teacher pay for attracting and retaining better teachers.

      Basically, elementary school kids IMHO don't need to be using computers
      • Hear, hear. We definitely need to shift the teaching focus away technology, and onto learning. It really bugs me to see classes being taught MS-Word in elementary school, as opposed to "wordprocessing topics", for example. Or how to use Internet Explorer, as opposed to how to use the web for research. We are moving more and more toward an application-specific teaching system, and away from a skills-based teaching system.

        I definitely agree that we should pull computers out of primary schools (K-3), pos

    • Re:Fiber (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dkizzier ( 626158 )
      Let's take a look at the problem here. First of all, I don't think you probably have all the information that the tech commitee had when making their decision. There are a lot more factors to take into account than just internet access. I am the I.T. department for a K-12 school. We have fiber to the desktop in about half of our building. The rest of the building has fiber connections, but we are still using CAT 5 for the network. BTW, I do have a bit more than a couple of Cisco classes under my belt. You m
  • The handheld vs notebooks argument seems strange since most Palms and Pocket PCs are cheaper than almost any notebook.

    Jason
  • Most of the arguments for no Internet research, palm notebooks, and such are based on bias.

    So what are those biases based on?

    The net seems to obscure the fact that many people contribute to an idea. This is especially true of research.

    As for the palm computers, many people think that they are being thrifty if they get something for one purpose. But everything is backwards in terms of computers. The more general the cheaper the product, yet the more general the more powerful it is.

    • Because publishing a book takes a certain amount of effort, and it's thus likely that someone with at least half a brain cell at least skimmed through the contents once, unlike most of the crap you find on the net :-)
      • Publishing a book costs much more than holding a blog for anyone to critique.

        And I happen to do tech writing. I can tell you first hand I've seen nothing but plagiarism from partners in certification manuals. Big time partners.

  • LTSP, filtering proxies and mail server upgrades (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stanwirth ( 621074 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:01PM (#6447227)

    One school here in NZ has their mail server set up to reject all mail from .com domains. Decent spam filter, but it makes it difficult to communicate with the principal about converting it to linux and putting more effective and accurate spam filters on it!

    One request I've seen is for a configuration of squid (or some other cache/proxy server) that can (a) cache a large number of pages on a certain topic (gathered by hand if necessary) and then limit the access of the students to only those pages.

    Another popular item for schools is an ltsp setup [k12ltsp.org]. But you *have* to let them know that despite the word "terminal" in the title, these are not dumb terminals per se, but rather a thin client arrangement, more along the lines of the old diskless sun workstations! You don't want them going out and getting a bunch of old VT100's and thinking they'll be able to bring up a graphical display on them! (well, maybe if you put them in tek4014 emulation mode, but it's it's not exactly what they expect!)

    At the NZ Open Source Society [nzoss.org] we're focussing on schools as a highly appropriate place to place open source deployments, on charity. Think about it. If you donate your time at market rates, you can claim it back on your taxes at a rate that's still a living wage. This is an excellent way to reduce your tax burden from a windfall in previous years, keep busy and expand your skills in a lean year, and do something good for the community--all at the same time.

    A friend of mine's kid uses linux exclusively at home, and when the kids on the schoolbus found out, they backed away from her in shock and informed her that linux "was illegal" and she could be arrested "for being a hacker using that." An idea brought to a school near you by the MS FUD Factory.

    This is the level of misunderstanding of open source in the schools, so it's an important mission to at least dispell some of the FUD surrounding it.

  • Frankly.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:08PM (#6447298) Homepage Journal
    At the risk of quoting the Backin-Myday act of 1901 [catweasel.org], I'll list my own take on the whole thing.

    You should know how to do things without the machines (IE, by hand) before you learn to do things with.

    A good example is math. Many people know how to do "2+2=" on a calculator so it spits out 4, but these days I watch kids freak out as I work (say) 3/492 on a piece of paper. They are awed; I am scared.

    • // pretty simple actually.

      int x;
      int y;
      int z;

      x = 3;
      y = 492;
      z = x / y;

      cout "z = " z;

      - : output : -

      z = 0
      • Hope they don't change the X and Y to something not Integer divisible... maybe a better idea would be to use

        float x;
        float y;
        float z;

        to ensure flexibility in your knowledge base?
    • So I am old school and learned how to do math in my head for the SATs etc.
      My younger co-worker (who will probably read this and laugh) and I play darts. He is young enough that he could use a calculator on the SATs so didn't need to do math in his head. Bottom line is that I do the addition because it is not a trained skill for him. As far as I can tell the only disability suffered is the ability to do simple math in his head. I would bet he can do more complex math than I can anymore because it has be
      • So I am old school and learned how to do math in my head for the SATs etc.

        I was punished repeatedly in school for doing math in my head. Often I had correct answers marked wrong because I did not show my "work".

        The school system is only an instrument to keep people dumb.

        • Heh, heh, been there, done that.

          I used to get in trouble for having my hand up with the answer before the teacher had finished writing the problem. "There's no way you know the answer, you haven't written anything down yet."

          I used to fight with teachers over showing work, because I tended to group multiple steps together. Why show 10 steps to solve an equation if you can do it 4?? Got to the point where I would write a generic example with all ten steps at the top of the page, then just put a note "See
    • Here, Here!

      I agree whole-heartedly (as if my heart has anything to do with the process except providing my brain and fingers with blood)

      I was greatly disturbed when my highschool math instructors informed me that, sans a TI-82 or better calculator (at the time, about $75 - $80 -- its a graphing calculator) that I would be at such a tremendous disadvantage that I'd likely not pass the course.

      See, we learned how to do matrix multiplications, we learned how to graph some pretty spiffy functions, we learned
      • Ooh. Me. In the back of the book there's this big table... :) Or there's this nifty log rule, lemme pull out my slipstick.. :)

        Honestly, it was covered back in alegebra II, but it wasn't used much. One or two tests, then on to bigger and better things. When you get a scientific calculator for $10...

        Last time I had to do it on paper I used an iterative method, fairly slow but workable. (This BTW, was on a physics final where my calculator was broken on the way there... I managed to pass. Lacking trig tables
      • I'm 19, and I learned how to take a large square root by hand years ago... I still use it fairly frequenly, as I tend to forget to take calculators to things.
      • See, we learned how to do matrix multiplications, we learned how to graph some pretty spiffy functions, we learned how to find the roots for all sorts of goofy functions, we learned to take logs and nth roots.

        Or, at least, we learned the commands to do so on the calculator.

        My Algebra 2/Precalculus teacher did it right. He made us make sure we knew how to do it without first (multiply rows by columns, a logarithm is an exponent, etc), then show us how to use the calculator.

        The funniest part was his exam
      • I had an organic chem instructor and she used to guess the cube roots of 4 and 5 digit numbers in her head in front of the class, then ask some one in the class for the calculator answer; she was always amazingly close
    • I'm not advocating that the calculator requirement is a good thing; but...

      I'm one of those (rare?) people who was nearly held back in grade school for math (had to get tutoring after school), still can't do the basic math (add, subtract, mult., divide, etc.) well, yet have NO problem at all with the advanced stuff...

      speaking to you with Physics degree in hand...

      • At the risk of sounding like an idiot, perhaps an abacus is an option? Yeah, it's old fashioned and ridiculously antiquated, but at least one sees the mechanics of 2+2, rather than feeding the request into a computer and getting a response.
    • surely you jest, you need paper for 3/492? If you use a calculator, don't you at least have to be able to estimate the answer in your head so you know you didn't hit the wrong key?

      technology is not an excuse for ignoring the literacy part of computer literacy or following directions or critical thinking.
      • surely you jest, you need paper for 3/492?

        If the point is to awe kids these days, yes, I need paper. "Wow, you know how to do that without a calculator?!" And if I'm still not sure, I break out the calculator and then run the problem. (Then again, that's something my dad taught me....)

        We're basically talking the same crowd who never learned to read an analog clock because they've always had digital clocks to tell them what time it is.

        • read an analog clock
          I had trouble figuring out if the big hand was the short fat one or the long skinny one, they both had about the same surface area!
      • Considering the answer is .006097560975..., yes, I sure do need paper.

        With some of the responses in this part, it seems people have forgotten that you divide by the number to the right of the "/" sign.
    • Even though I could just fire up Calc to figure out the answer to your mind-boggling math problem I'll just reven in knowing that I am one of the people you describe.

      3/492 on paper? I stand in awe in your presence!

  • Start as you mean to go on... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fingal ( 49160 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:23PM (#6447461) Homepage

    I had the honour of being introduced to computing by Francis Glassborow [accu-usa.org] back in '84 who (among other things) was responsible for:-

    • Starting us off with a version of Forth running on a Sinclair Spectrum (written by himself, 1K core kernel, 4K if you wanted an editor with emacs compatible key bindings...)
    • Moving us onto Pascal as soon as we started getting too attached to being too low level
    • Made anyone who showed the slightest aptitude for cracking systems into system administrators and held them responsible if the network was compromised (resulting in a very low incident rate)
    • Insisted that there where only two rules to programming (and pretty much anything else):-
      • If you really don't know the answer to something then you should ask an expert
      • An expert is anyone who knows more about something than you do.
      This would quite frequently be accompanied by the assigning the more competent members of the class to teaching / bug fixing coding for the rest of the class (you very quickly discover that there is a difference between being able to sort of hack something for yourself and understanding it well enough to be able to give a reasoned explanation to another student)

  • Been in education for 13 years now... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by millia ( 35740 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:31PM (#6447540) Homepage
    It still hasn't killed my zeal, but it does get tough. It's the only industry left in this country that is perpetually understaffed with regard to IT staff. How many 1,500 employee person corporations would have a 5 person IT department?

    My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

    Only in the last several years has there been a clear move to use the computer as an integrated tool, and not to use it as a reward or a game machine.

    Disclaimer: I work at a regional center in Georgia that teaches such integration.

    Towards that end, I've seen a lot of neat uses. It takes more than just a powerpoint slideshow to actually enhance learning, though. Having the students do research and then create their own powerpoint is more effective. (as long as they don't use a sound effect for every letter entry...)

    The key element is to get the students involved. The instructor can use a tool such as Inspiration to do concept outlines, and then make those available as notes.

    I'll think of more examples later...

    • My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

      Or you could simply use any standard $2 calculator, a pencil, and some graph paper and have the kids plot the function themselves. The kids would be responsible for using as many or as few sample points as they needed. Instead of mindlessly typing in an equation and watching the gizmo do its thing, the repetition of manually evaluating

      • You take the name "graphing calculator" too simply. Modern graphing calculators are computers at heart, capable of doing things in seconds that would take hours, if not days or even weeks, to do by hand.
      • a) yes, people should learn how to do it by hand first. amen. people also should learn their times tables and how to divide longhand. i'm with ya.
        however, i think after that point has been reached, there are some legit educational uses for a graphing program or calculator.

        b) i came along after all the fancy calculators came out, and didn't use them in college, so i can't speak for anything but their use in K-12. it would not surprise me that they are better suited at a higher level than general software on
      • What about graph-sketching? Is it no longer required? Just taking sample data points is a pretty poor method of drawing graphs in many cases.
      • Or you could simply use any standard $2 calculator, a pencil, and some graph paper and have the kids plot the function themselves

        That's fine for learning how to graph (which is middle-school level math) But after that, esp once you get into advanced classes, it is a pain in the ass and a waste of time to do things by hand when the graphing part isn't even the problem you're trying to solve
    • My personal pet peeve is graphing calculators. Why pay over a $100 for a calculator, when for the same money you can get a palm and load on graphing calculator software?

      Never used a Hp48, the real deal, have you? :-)

  • Crazy teacher (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aeinome ( 672135 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:34PM (#6447567) Journal
    We had a crazy English teacher in freshman high school. One project, we were not allowed to use a computer to find information. Now, this seemed okay at first, because there's a lot of information in a library. However, she really took the "no computer" as far as it could go - we couldn't even look up a book on the library's online catalog! And since the library didn't have a card catalog anymore, we had to find the books by scanning the shelves.

    Needless to say, I didn't really like that teacher much.

    • Re:Crazy teacher (Score:4, Funny)

      by MerlynEmrys67 ( 583469 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:46PM (#6447668)
      You are lucky... My first computer assignment in college (circa 1985) had to be turned in Punch Card format.
      Now the interesting thing is that there was 1 working punch card "puncher" and one working punch card "reader" left on campus... of course there was an approximate 2 mile walk between them, so your edit compile debug cycle was
      1) walk to puch card writer wait to type up your punch cards
      2) spend 15 minutes walking across campus to reader, submit job to perplexed operator
      3) take output to quiet room to figure what the hell was wrong
      4) Walk back across campus to the writer
      I got a good impression on how bad it used to be, so I have learned to take advantage of all of the modern tools in the world to help me do my job. Turned out to be an interesting class, just don't get me started on my assembler classes where I wrote C code, and turned in the compiled output

      • Mod parent up!!! It was actually worse than that!

        For example, you left out the step where, after walking across campus in the freezing cold, you have to wait on line with 200 other freshmen (half of whom have the flu--several different varieties brought back from Thanksgiving holiday) in a stuffy, moldy, underventillated, overheated basement room to submit your cards to the card reader.

        And the other step where the person three ahead of you in the queue had one slightly bent card, that (because this

        • No, it was in texas, so it was boiling hot, but at least it was flat (no comments about uphill both ways)
          Yes I did get away with it, all though I used an early optimizing compiler that generated some cool optimization that I had to explain to the TA why I did it (think fast young padiwan). But no, not straight .asm files either... did doctor them a bit to remove function call overheads, etc.

          • This reminds me of the Monty Pyton sketch "When I was in college, we used to live in a shoebox in the middle of the road..." "LUXURY! We DREAMED of a shoebox!" etc.

            Or the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert says that when he started out, they had to write all their code in ones and zeros -- and Wally answers that when he started out, all they had was zeros.

            But the story about letting the C compiler do the basic conversion to assembler for you is a good one! Think fast, young padiwan, indeed!

        • ...where you were so tired from staying up so late punching cards, plus after carefully walking them across campus in the snow, and down the stairs - on the last step into the basement you stumble - and your cards go everywhere (at which point you either find a card sorter, or you sort by hand - arghh!!!)...
          • Ah, that's why you took that big thick highlighter pen and put a diagonal stripe along the edge of your card deck! So you can sort them more easily in case of this particular mishap!
          • My favorite story is of a friend who had two 3-inch tall stacks of cards (about 800 cards I think) sitting on his desk in his dorm room. They were carefully rubber banded because they were not numbered or marked.

            His room mate (a jock type) walked in, saw the cards, unbanded them, shuffled them, banded them back up, then left. My friend sat there for about 5 minutes with his mouth open then crashed his head to the table. I almost thought he was going to cry. I didn't stick around to see what happened n

        • (Remember green-and-white striped pinfeed fanfold paper with that highly professional looking ALL CAPITALS dot matrix font? Fetching!)

          you sir are an obvious troll, those printers were chain printers, the characters were on a steel tape that circulated and were struck with a hammer when the character was over the correct column position sort of like a daisy-wheel printer. The printer had 132 hammers, one for each column except the last which was for the linefeed character.
      • 1) walk to puch card writer wait to type up your punch cards
        2) spend 15 minutes walking across campus to reader, submit job to perplexed operator
        3) take output to quiet room to figure what the hell was wrong
        4) Walk back across campus to the writer

        Solution? Get an English degree and sleep for 4 years.

    • Re:Crazy teacher (Score:3, Informative)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 )

      We had a crazy English teacher in freshman high school. One project, we were not allowed to use a computer to find information. Now, this seemed okay at first, because there's a lot of information in a library. However, she really took the "no computer" as far as it could go - we couldn't even look up a book on the library's online catalog! And since the library didn't have a card catalog anymore, we had to find the books by scanning the shelves.

      This is just so sad. Not how "crazy" your teacher was but

  • Back to basics (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @06:36PM (#6447576) Journal

    I don't have any first-hand experience with technology in the classroom but I would like to point out that although American schools have the best technology and computer equipment available to students, we still rank pretty much dead last in terms of math and science education amongst the industrialized countries. I think that fact by itself pretty much wipes out any arguments in favor of cramming our underfunded public schools full of gizmos.

    If I were running a high school, I'd concentrate on making sure the kids learn basics. Like how to think. Deep thinking. Independent thinking. Creative thinking. Critical thinking. This can all be accomplished with pen and paper. Give these kids a solid foundation of how to use their brains and they'll be able to pick up application skills more quickly. I'd also ditch all the so-called "advanced" subjects that are all the rage in high schools these days. No more Psychology classes for high school juniors. No Film Studies. Philosophy might be useful since it teaches logic -- a skill missing from most people these days. Math. Science. English literature. History. That's all you need. If they need to do research, then they haul their lazy asses down to the public library. I'm sure some people will claim that there's a lot more information available on the internet than at the public library. The fact of the matter is that high school students aren't going to be doing research at such a deep level that they have to worry about limitations of their public library system.

    I know my post isn't what you were looking for but I think these are things that anyone considering the role of technology in classrooms needs to keep in their minds. Learning isn't supposed to be a gimmick. Just use basic tools and work hard.

    GMD

    • although American schools have the best technology and computer equipment available to students, we still rank pretty much dead last in terms of math and science education

      Can you provide a reference to American schools having the "best technology and computer equipment"?

      I work closely with a couple of school districts in Canada (who ranks in the top 10 WTR science and math), and they have a very LARGE contingent of computer and technology equipment - new computers, networks, etc - including wireless acce
    • It has nothing to do with mastering subjects. The real education is a sort of metalesson in conformity and obedience.

      We've known for 100's of years that the way to teach science is to do science. The way to teach writing is have students write.

      Instead, we warehouse kids. Schools solve the same problem as prisons, which is "how to you contain and control a population". The problem of how to develop thinking skills is a distant second or third.

    • The fact of the matter is that high school students aren't going to be doing research at such a deep level that they have to worry about limitations of their public library system.

      Some of us live in districts in which mantaining a well stocked library is not a primary concern of the town council. If a reasearch topic is something relatively new, there may not be any books on it. Then what?
  • I work for a company called Co-nect that tries to teach effective use of technology in schools. While our website may suck, our products don't. Honestly. We have something called "Co-nect Tech" (yeah, imaginative naming, I know) that is specifically geared towards teaching teachers how to use tech (whatever tech they have) effectively. You can check it out here:

    Co-nect tech product page [co-nect.net].

    We usually work with 'failing schools' that qualify for some kind of government grant, although the tech product is ge

  • My school (a 950-student Catholic school) is investing in 50 tablet PCs that will allow 50 of the CP freshmen (College Prep is the low classes, then Honors, then AP) to take part in a test program. They'll be split into two groups of 25, and have all of their core courses (religion, english, algebra, world history, gym/health, biology) together. The teachers will be taught how to have them effectively use the tablet PCs and wireless network connection.

    The idea is it's a monkey-in-space experiment. If the s
    • Oh... and they don't get them free. They have to spend $2999 on them.

      I'm going to bring my wireless laptop and see if I can take advantage of the network.
    • ...core courses (religion...

      Religion as a core course... no wonder Catholic school screws kids up so horribly.
      • Frosh year is essentially sex ed.
        Soph year is bible history.
        Junior year is Social Justice, which is basically a preparation for Christian Service senior year, where you get to go out and do community service (hospitals, etc) instead of sitting in class. It's rather cool actually.

        And senior year there's also a look at world religions and a spirituality in the arts class that discusses movies.
    • They're lucky. The Catholic schools I went to are still using Apple II's.

  • in this past year, i had 5 very different experiences for my teachers.

    in statistics the teacher was very technology savvy, we use graphing calculators and he has written some very good demonstration programs for them, however, for some of the things that the graphing calculator cannot handle, there is a LCD screen in the room hooked up to a box on the net. This is one of the most useful tools in all of technology savvy teaching. he found some java applets on the net and used them for many class lectures.

  • In my school, there is a race to outfit every room with ceiling mounted LCD projectors... I've yet to see more than about 3 of them used, and over here at least they cost £1,300+++

    Many of the teachers have laptops, but all you hear is minesweeper's beep coming from them every few minutes.

    Some science teachers get us to do ppt presentations, but that's a 'treat'.

    So, no our schools just waste money. The student pcs are about 155 mhz too...

  • A few stories... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nifboy ( 659817 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @07:33PM (#6448071)
    First of all, the moral of the stories: teach the teachers. If they don't know, the students most certainly will, resulting in chaos.

    One of our more "Gifted" students used the netsend part of the command line as an impromptu messaging system and taught others to do the same. Then we found you could use a wildcard to send messages to every computer in the building. Then some genius started swearing over it. It was quickly shut down, but it made several of the staff very angry as their computers started swearing at them.

    Teachers in comp labs should make sure all moniters are off before speaking. In my high school, the comp lab was set up so that the teacher's computer at the front could remotely control any of the other computers or moniters. My C++ teacher used it to turn off all the moniters, and had the immediate attention of everyone in the room when he did. My "computerized accounting" teacher didn't, and had to repeat directions over and over because people were fooling around while she was talking.

    My world history teacher demands printed resources attached to all research papers. He then checks the resources against the paper to check for obvious signs of plagiarism. Yet he still catches people every time a paper is due. Many people figure the obvious solution is to copy a resource and not turn it in, but the teacher also checks against the resources of students doing the same topic. It still amazes me that people still get caught copying.

    Don't use so-called "Distance Learning" unless you know exactly what you're getting into. While learning about the electromagnetic spectrum, we did a so-called "distance learning" whatsis with a couple of people who essentially turned out to be artists. They talked about things like the "color wheel," which had no bearing on what we were doing in class. Additionally, the other time we did "Distance Learning" we were constantly having technical difficulties, giving us sound but no image.
    • Some recent solutions to monitors always being on (at least in a lab of Macs) would be:

      1) Apple Remote Desktop - In one click a teacher can lock every screen in a lab and put an end to kids fooling around with AIM while he/she's talking to the class

      2) The new iMacs. Recently a university I read about installed 100 new iMacs in a lab. When the professor wants to talk to the class he just tells everybody to "turn their monitors" and all the students rotate the displays 90 degrees. It's a clever and simple w
  • While working at a public community college in Florida one thing I noticed was that in some departments the managers and directors had better equipment to type up their letters, email and hot-sync their Palm organizers than the labs did. Nothing quite like making the most use of equipment...
    • This was the case at the university I attended - the 'senior team' had new, good kit while the lab equipment was old and breaking down. The directors were on a 18-mo (if that) replacement cycle. The labs were on a 42-mo replacement cycle. Nothing like trying to work on a P166 while the bosses use PIII-650s to play solitaire.

  • One of the most annoying attempts at using computer technology in the classroom that I have seen was in my "Usability Engineering" class last semester. The professor had written a textbook for the course, which we all had a copy of and were supposed to read. She then put together PowerPoint presentations on every chapter, which basically listed all the section headings from the book most of us had read. Then she printed out all the slides and gave them to us. And then she spent most of every class sessio

  • Remember that teaching is the goal, not technology (Score:4, Insightful)

    by k12linux ( 627320 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:04PM (#6453785)
    I have a fairly extensive technology background, but basically zero teaching background. This means I can do a great job of proving servers and infrastructure, but not in evaluating how tech should fit into the classroom. As a result I can't really train our teachers on that aspect either.

    That is something that needs to be done by someone who knows how to teach. This also means that simply installing new tech and showing the teachers how it works is not enough. Money has to be budgeted to provide real curriculum integration. Money to is needed to provide training, and to get the teachers to attend the training.

    Unfortunately from what I've seen during this era of budget cuts, these integration inservices seem to be getting slashed early on. Worse yet, when they are offered, they are after hours and teachers aren't willing to attend... even for a stipend.

    We have a very good tech infrastructure in our schools and a lot of tools that our teachers could use. Unfortunately only a handful know what's available, know how to use it, and know how to fit it into their curriculum correctly. The worst ones try to make the computer be a teacher instead of using it as just another tool.

    I'd be interested in hearing what other schools have done about these training issues.

    I'm in shape... "pear" is a shape, right?

    • Somebody please mod that up. Please. Amen to that.

      Only in the last 5 years, say, do we have teachers that can show others how to integrate the technology. And they are only effective if they can be allowed the time to teach without being hamstrung by hardware problem solving.
      Near me is Gwinnett county schools. Each elementary has at least one integrator and one techie. Now, the integrators do help with troubleshooting, but for the most part, the two each do their appropriate mission.
      Gwinnett is the excepti
  • One of the weird things for me is to visit schools in California and the principal, time and time again, walks up and says: "Let me show you my wonderful computer lab." There are rows and rows of Apple Macintoshes, and PCs. My first question is not: How fast are they, or how many are there? My first question is: What did this computer lab used to be? The answer is telling: "Oh, this room? It used to be the music studio, but we don't teach music here anymore." "This computer lab? Oh, this was the art room. W
  • ...[I am a] recovering journalist working on an article

    Sound to me like your 12-step plan is flawed...

  • Worst and Best (Score:3, Informative)

    by octalgirl ( 580949 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @07:53PM (#6457404) Journal
    The worst was a health teacher who just sent the kids willy-nilly into a lab to do research on SEX! Unbelievable! Unsupervised! 10th graders were searching sex, protection, diseases, etc. Nothing but porn was popping up! (this was before filters) We were all just dumbfounded in the tech dept.

    Best was a home-ec teacher who asked first the best approach to bring her class in for the first time. We explained about proper research, and that the Internet was just another tool for research, not a replacement for the library and other means. And also, that a teacher should do a few searches that they expect the students to do, so they can see for themselves what type of hits they'll be getting. So she came in with magazines and newspapers, and a paper typed up with good search words to use for the research, 3 links that she deemed worth looking into, and a requirement that one of their sources had to come from the library or one of the magazines she brought in. It was very well put together, and the students responded in good academic fashion, unlike the porn kids where it was utter chaos and embarassment.

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