Any teachers here?

[NobleSavage]

What are your thoughts on bringing high tech into the classroom? Are there studies that demonstrate this is the right thing to do? It seems like it would be hard to beat pencils, paper, and a chalk board. They are cheap, don't need batteries, and if you lose them easy to replace. Are kids so fucked up (maybe I should say different so as not to fall prey to a generational gap) being born after the internet that they NEED gamification?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Tech is a tool and like any other it can be used or misused. The problems in educating today's youth don't come from PowerPoint, but from curricula that teach to a test instead of the students.

 

[NobleSavage]

Tech is a tool and like any other it can be used or misused. The problems in educating today's youth don't come from PowerPoint, but from curricula that teach to a test instead of the students.

I hate to derail my own thread, but I've heard a lot about the problems of "teaching to the test". I get it. I would never want to teach K-12 because I don't think teachers have enough freedom. However, how do you balance that with the need for national standards and the "need" to rank everyone for college admissions? How do you deal with hyper competitive kids being pushed by hyper competitive parents who want the tests in 1st grade so their kid can get into the gifted program in 2nd grade?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Tech is a tool and like any other it can be used or misused. The problems in educating today's youth don't come from PowerPoint, but from curricula that teach to a test instead of the students.

I hate to derail my own thread, but I've heard a lot about the problems of "teaching to the test". I get it. I would never want to teach K-12 because I don't think teachers have enough freedom. However, how do you balance that with the need for national standards and the "need" to rank everyone for college admissions? How do you deal with hyper competitive kids being pushed by hyper competitive parents who want the tests in 1st grade so their kid can get into the gifted program in 2nd grade?

How did we deal with such things before?

Case in point,

My parents were a part of "The Greatest Generation." When they met in Washington DC in 1943, one of them was from Wilmington NC and the other from Eatonton GA. Both of them knew how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Both knew the presidents Washington through Roosevelt and could find any of the 48 states on a blank map. Both had heard of atoms and something called atomic power. Both had read and understood Moby Dick.

Neither one of them had taken a standardized test in school.

I took standardized tests in school, but they were not used to fire my teachers or shut down my school. They were used as a tool for educators to gage where we as students stood among our peers in our school, our district, and the nation. There was no high pressure and the scores were used to HELP us not punish or reward us.

Tests too are just tools and subject to the same rules of use and misuse as any other tool.

 

[bigfield]

What are your thoughts on bringing high tech into the classroom? Are there studies that demonstrate this is the right thing to do? It seems like it would be hard to beat pencils, paper, and a chalk board. They are cheap, don't need batteries, and if you lose them easy to replace. Are kids so fucked up (maybe I should say different so as not to fall prey to a generational gap) being born after the internet that they NEED gamification?

As far as alternative teaching tools are concerned, the Montessori method has been around for a while. Expensive as hell, though.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Children don't need gamification, they need our attention.

 

[Keith&Co.]

It seems like it would be hard to beat pencils, paper, and a chalk board. They are cheap, don't need batteries, and if you lose them easy to replace.

But you can't take them home.
If the assignment is distributed electronically to their platforms, they can access a wealth of information that the schools cannot keep in their library, or cannot keep up to date, and submit their work back to the teacher electronically. Their names are already attached to the work and everyone has a receipt of what was handed in and when.

This is the ideal, though. In practice, the kids have permission to have their handhelds in the classroom no matter what the teacher is doing, and they text and surf no matter what the assignment may be. Then they have the audacity to look surprised if they have failing grades because they were otherwise occupied while teaching was going on.

It might be better if in addition to 'airplane mode' the electronics might have a 'school mode' which prevented certain applications during classtime. Of course, my idea of a 'school mode' is to set of an EMP pulse from the whiteboard at the start of every session. my wife's school's administration would label me 'not a team player.'

 

[Keith&Co.]

However, how do you balance that with the need for national standards and the "need" to rank everyone for college admissions?

But there IS no balance ,here. Kids have no time to read, to write essays, to actually gain learning skills such as researching, arranging and writing papers. Because though the colleges will require this, the schools do not gain anything from it.
The school's funding comes from their students' performance on the tests. So they teach the kids to pass the test so the schools secure their funding. They don't prepare the kids for college or life, but to pass the Biology or English or Math test.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

However, how do you balance that with the need for national standards and the "need" to rank everyone for college admissions?

But there IS no balance ,here. Kids have no time to read, to write essays, to actually gain learning skills such as researching, arranging and writing papers. Because though the colleges will require this, the schools do not gain anything from it.
The school's funding comes from their students' performance on the tests. So they teach the kids to pass the test so the schools secure their funding. They don't prepare the kids for college or life, but to pass the Biology or English or Math test.

Not the biology test.

that might involve EVIL-ution.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I did teach. Escaped in '07, when the Assessment Mania was reaching full tide. Happy beatnik now. The assessment side of the game is completely out of rational proportion. No child left untested, indeed. I had some excellent teachers in the 60s/70s who managed to impress on me a love of literature and writing without yakking nonstop about the required benchmarks needed to pass the Blah, Blah, Blah. In Ohio, we actually had a state educ. dept. head who told a group of educators that if you present a piece of literature to a group of children and fail to follow up with assessment, you have missed an opportunity and you are not carrying out your profession. Jesus! Do you think today's students will ever want to read a book for themselves, when they're out of school? Every book is a "text" (hate that word!) that demands an assessment. Why would anyone ever want to read for themselves, with that background? I still remember my 7th grade English teacher, a tough old bird named Mrs. Briola, who one day read aloud O'Henry's "The Last Leaf". I remember how she got to the final paragraph and I could feel my hair seem to stand on end. And she didn't then throw an assessment task on us. That was in 1967. How many literature memories do you think teachers are creating today, with everything pressurized toward the Big Exams?

 

[ronburgundy]

I have taught at University and conducted research on pedagogy and classroom learning in grades 6-12.

Reliable development of effective teaching approaches depends upon application of research-tested principles of the factors that impact learning in both the short and long term. That is true regardless of whether those principles are implemented via tech or non-tech methods. Tech isn't magical, it helps when it is based on tested principles and overcomes pragmatic obstacles in non-tech environments that impede full implementation of those principles. But it could hurt when those conditions are not met.

In principle there are computerized learning environments that could present info in interactive, multi-modal ways that textbooks cannot. Computerized tutoring systems can even be designed to use student's answer's to questions it asks to tailor instruction specifically for someone with their current level of understanding of the topic. There is some research showing sizable learning benefits from some intelligent tutoring systems. However, its important to note that the best one's are really just acting like we'd hope a quality teacher would/could. Part of it is because the tech requires each individual student to be actively engaged and responding, which is implausible to expect a single teacher with 30 students to do. But another part of it is that tech removes some of the control over the pedagogy from the teachers, because so many teachers don't know what they are doing, have very wrong-headed ideas about the state of learning-related sciences, and/or do not actually understand their subject well enough to explain it to others. This isn't because teachers are stupid. Its mostly because we do not train for or require real subject matter understanding from teachers. High school science teachers don't even need a bachelors degree in any science field, only a B.A. in education with an "focus" on science, which typically means a few courses taught within the Education department by non-scientist on how to teach kids science, not really on learning the science itself. OF course, conservatives will blame Unions for these low standards of prep, but the fact is that we don't pay science teachers nearly enough to attract people both capable and wiling to understand science in general, a discipline in particular, plus understand how to foster that understanding in kids depending on their age, plus be willing to put up with all the drama an headaches that come with being the only authority in the several classrooms of dozens of teenagers half the days of your working life. There is already a science teacher shortage, raising requirements would produce a crises where most classes had no teacher.

All that said, the theoretical benefits of tech are achieved by the way most tech is currently used in the classroom. Research suggests little learning gains from most existing tech in the classrooms and/or how that tech is being used by teachers. Most teachers employ their same pre-tech approaches and merely use tech to add shiny bells and whistles to it. That will do little. The beneficial tech is when it largely supplants or fosters a major change to pedagogy. A physical computer or ipad and does nothing in itself to foster learning more than a lump of clay would. It is all in the software and how it is used. Only a fraction of the software is designed in a principled way that would give it a potential for effective use, and only a portion of that software is properly used to manifest that potential.
The same goes for the internet use itself in the classroom. There is far more invalid info on the internet than valid. For all of their limits, textbooks at least have some degree of vetting in terms of the validity of their content and method of presentation. Research shows that even most college students are rather poor at using the internet in a selective and critical way to gather valid information on a topic. That is why the more effective tech uses do not involve use of the internet, but rather pre-designed closed interactive multi-media environment where all the content is peer reviewed and vetted.

One thing we need to be very cautious of is that tech in the classroom brings corrupting for-profit corporate interests more into the classroom. Private companies are springing up left and right looking to cash in on education "reform" because tech cost $ and they want to be the one's to sell it to tax-payers. It is quite hard to properly test tech effectiveness once the tech is already in classrooms, and they can make billions before anyone figures out their tech isn't effective (or even harmful). Thus, their only motive is to develop something that they can get into classrooms by any means neccessary. That includes distorting the science (as profit motive often does), and developing superficial features that may appeal to teachers, parents, and politicians, but not necessarily be actually effective for learning. Also, they will grease the palms of any decision makers that determine widespread adoption of particular tech.
I recall a couple of years ago there was a private "Summit" of various filthy rich people who had nothing to do with education, but were meeting specifically to brainstorm on ways to get more filthy rich off of education tech and "reform". Granted, one way they can make profit is developing an actually and demonstrably effective tech that informed decision makers choose. That just isn't the only or most likely cheapest and and easiest way, so not the way most of them will take.

 

[credoconsolans]

However, how do you balance that with the need for national standards and the "need" to rank everyone for college admissions?

But there IS no balance ,here. Kids have no time to read, to write essays, to actually gain learning skills such as researching, arranging and writing papers. Because though the colleges will require this, the schools do not gain anything from it.
The school's funding comes from their students' performance on the tests. So they teach the kids to pass the test so the schools secure their funding. They don't prepare the kids for college or life, but to pass the Biology or English or Math test.

Hate to tell you, but that's what college does as well.

I remember sitting in my packed (required) Philosophy class, enjoying the back-and-forthing with the Philosophy teacher, discussing various schools of thought, only for an exasperated Mr. Redneck in the back of the room interrupting.

Was any of the discussion going to be on the test? If it wasn't, he considered it a waste of his time.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Exactly -- "is it going to be on the test??" THE TEST. The end-all, be-all. Assessment, the orgasmic fulfillment of the technocratic pedagogue. My education in the public schools -- the best of it, the part that guided me -- was Act One. Acts Two, Three, Four, and on, were what I decided to learn and explore on my own. So just consider how today's young scholars are going to feel about 'reading a text.' Ugh, ugh, ugh!!! Who wants to read a text? Reading is now a punishment-based activity. The punishment is rampant assessment and chisel-pointed instruction where everything is the state-imposed test. I count myself as lucky to have graduated from public schools in the pre-Reform days.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

A friend of mine, a former air traffic controller, recounted to me the other day an incident with one of the last trainees she was assigned before she retired.

She gave the girl a scenario. Two planes are flying at seven thousand feet in clear midday skies. They are flying at a steady speed and their trajectory will have them crash into each other in approximately 30 minutes. There are no other aircraft in their air space and none expected to join them. What do you do? The young woman she was training said nothing. My friend then said, you now have 25 minutes, what do you do? The young woman said nothing. 20 minutes. 15 minutes. 10 minutes.

My friend looked at this young woman and asked her what was she waiting for and the young woman replied, she didn't know what was the best answer.

In really life, there is more often than not no best answer, but there can be thousands of satisfactory answers. Have one plane fly higher. Have one plane fly lower. Have one plane speed up, have one plane slow down. Change the angle of either plane or both. And so on. This need for a BEST answer, I think, comes from an over emphasis of objective, multiple choice testing. We are educating a generation of people who know only how to look at a choice of stated answers and then and only then can they decipher which among the choices given is the BEST answer.

Life is not a fill in the bubble test and you need to be able to think about situations without reading A,B,C,D, and E because life doesn't provide lettered choices.

 

[Sajara]

Technology isn't going away. It needs to be taught somehow in the classroom. To me, the most important lesson is ow to use it responsibly. I go out to eat now and people have phones out the entire meal. They have their phones out while they drive, while they work, while they have sex (okay, not sure on that last one, but I'm sure it happens somewhere).

I use my phone at work to take notes, but I make sure people know that is what I'm doing. I use certain apps for work related functions and to make 'work-type' tasks at home easier too. Still, I didn't have any technology growing up (despite being 27). I had issues learning limits because of that too I think, so teaching this sort of thing in school would have been useful.

The tests are definitely a problem in schools. And while I think Montessori are expensive and perhaps a little too far the other way compared to public schools...they certainly have ideas that public schools could learn from. We should be spending more on education and less on wars if we want to stay competitive in the world (in all the ways that could be taken).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A friend of mine, a former air traffic controller, recounted to me the other day an incident with one of the last trainees she was assigned before she retired.

She gave the girl a scenario. Two planes are flying at seven thousand feet in clear midday skies. They are flying at a steady speed and their trajectory will have them crash into each other in approximately 30 minutes. There are no other aircraft in their air space and none expected to join them. What do you do? The young woman she was training said nothing. My friend then said, you now have 25 minutes, what do you do? The young woman said nothing. 20 minutes. 15 minutes. 10 minutes.

My friend looked at this young woman and asked her what was she waiting for and the young woman replied, she didn't know what was the best answer.

In really life, there is more often than not no best answer, but there can be thousands of satisfactory answers. Have one plane fly higher. Have one plane fly lower. Have one plane speed up, have one plane slow down. Change the angle of either plane or both. And so on. This need for a BEST answer, I think, comes from an over emphasis of objective, multiple choice testing. We are educating a generation of people who know only how to look at a choice of stated answers and then and only then can they decipher which among the choices given is the BEST answer.

Life is not a fill in the bubble test and you need to be able to think about situations without reading A,B,C,D, and E because life doesn't provide lettered choices.

Your friend should have let the time run down to zero to illustrate the problem better.

 

[credoconsolans]

Exactly -- "is it going to be on the test??" THE TEST. The end-all, be-all. Assessment, the orgasmic fulfillment of the technocratic pedagogue. My education in the public schools -- the best of it, the part that guided me -- was Act One. Acts Two, Three, Four, and on, were what I decided to learn and explore on my own. So just consider how today's young scholars are going to feel about 'reading a text.' Ugh, ugh, ugh!!! Who wants to read a text? Reading is now a punishment-based activity. The punishment is rampant assessment and chisel-pointed instruction where everything is the state-imposed test. I count myself as lucky to have graduated from public schools in the pre-Reform days.

Yup. If that is the only thing that will give credit to the student and teacher, why would anyone want to teach or learn anything else?

Your transcript shows only how well you did on tests, not how educated or how well-rounded you are now.