Teaching and Technology...

[IADad]

With technology more present everywhere in our lives how should it change the classroom.

My kid's school has smart boards in every classroom. But I fear that they are simply shiny bulletin boards. We still have teachers teaching TO kids rather than facilitating their learning. We still have reports being turned in on paper while we teach computer keyboarding side-by-side.

Maybe I'm impatient, but I really want HOW we teach - How our schools work to change and I fear we are stuck with teachers who know one way, and schools who can only operate relative the way they operated last year.

I know it's dangerous to experiment as a new method may lack some critical component, we can't afford to "waste a generation" on experiments/ But surely there are shining examples where learning is happening differently.


EXAMPLE - as we settle into the new school year, my 6th grade son's teacher sent an email, pointing us to her teacher's webpage. One of the links there was for Science Extra credit - the text there talked about finding articles (either from books or credible web resources) making copies of the article and writing summaries in their own words on the article and perhaps including questions. I love the idea of opening it up to their exploration and encouraging them to question, but print and write and turn into her extra credit folder? I suggested that kids may want to create "reports" online and would it be okay. She was very receptive, but I kind of wonder why that had to come from me? The kids are pushing that way - she obviously uses technology and encourages its use to an extent. Is it just because it's always been done that way? Is she afraid of creating /exploiting a digital divide?

So, how are your kids and your kids' teachers using technology to teach and learn better, not just in a different medium?

 

[pwsowner]

Technology is definitely changing things. I still remember back in my school days we had to go to a library to read books on things. Now, who goes to libraries anymore?

 

[mom2many]

I cyber school so clearly technology is prominent in my kids schooling, but even then a large percentage of work is done in work books with pen and paper.

What needs to be remembered is that there is still a large percentage of the population that doesn't have computers and doesn't have internet access. Until about 4/5 years ago we only had dial up, or satellite (that was a HUGE ripoff). Some area's are still that way.

So all tech schools sound great, but aren't always accessible for many. So I think schools are just trying to find that middle ground.

 

[pwsowner]

That was a problem last year for a cousin of mine. She has a daughter who was 12 and the school would send home homework specifically to do on the Internet. They didn't have Internet, so a few times they came to my place, a few times they went to the library, then she decided it's time to bring up the issue with the teacher. She can't do homework on the Internet regularly, period. It turned out she wasn't the only one in class with that problem, so the teacher made some changes.

Internet is great, but not everyone has it yet. School work done by Internet or computer has to be done in school.

 

[cybele]

I'm all for technology in classrooms. Of course though, the effectiveness of it comes down to the individual schools and teachers.

All public primary schools here have the smartboards, they went in as some government initiative a few years back, my two younger kids are in primary, Lux is in grade 6 and they don't really use theirs, her teacher is much more innovative, I suppose, in the way he likes to teach, he's one of those real 'outside the box' teachers, which works for some students, but Lux is one of those kids who learns by reading off the board, which is going to be hard for her because there is such a huge push away from that style of learning under the "not all kids learn that way" argument, which is fair enough but well, sucks to be her right now because of it.
Anyway, back to the point, Sasha is in prep (which is our version of what you guys call kindergarten... and our kindergarten is your pre-school... gets confusing) and his teacher loves the smartboard and she gets the kids to use it more than she does so she uses it as an interactive tool, which seems to work really well for her class.

They still do 'old fashioned' things their school has a small library and each class has two lessons a week in there for research tasks and general borrowing. When the older classes (grade 4's-6's) need more resources they usually have a trip to the local public library and they run a research class for them there, which my kids have always hated because their father is the branch manager of said library so if they screw around they get in three times the amount of trouble, from their teacher, from the librarian and from their Dad, haha.

As for who goes to libraries anymore. Lots of people. The great thing about all this technology is that it has changed libraries from a big quiet building of books and a woman sitting there shushing people to more interactive activities. My husband always says that at least once a week a customer will say to him "These machines are going to take your job" in reference to the RFID system, but in truth, he's doing more now than back hen he started over 20 years ago because he doesn't have to do the work of the machines. They can have more schools come in for research assignments, more computer lessons for the elderly, more early childhood sessions, more author talks, more adult illiteracy classes. It's fantastic.
(Also, I can't speak for anywhere else, but statistics show that library usage in Australia is actually up from last decade.)

 

[IADad]

yes, cybele around here all of our libraries are expanding and they are expanding in space for "usefulness" not shelf space, they are trying to facilitate learning and exploration and collaboration between people, it's a segment that is actually pushing a vision forward.

I don't lament the demise of "the stacks." I had a librarian in High School who was MUCH more concerned with books being properly stored and maintained and her library being orderly, than how people may actually use the materials. Glad to see that breed is dying away.

 

[pwsowner]

I haven't been to our local library for years, so I went today to check it out and they have changed. Still busy too, just on computers instead of books.

 

[akmom]

Kids need to be proficient in computers and utilize Internet resources, but at the same time, there is a big difference between googling a topic and researching credible sources. In terms of research, at least, written material has a higher standard of accuracy than web pages, so that's a good place to start when you're learning to research a topic. If kids start with the Internet, they may not be able to discern sources that are authorities on a subject from activist websites and forums. So... you get low quality research. Once they are proficient at finding lots of sources on a topic and properly citing those sources, they will start to learn what to look for on a website (in terms of citation) and have a better idea of what's acceptable to use. So I guess that's an argument for not implementing technology in the classroom too soon...

 

[akmom]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you go to a library and collect a bunch of materials on dog sledding. They're all going to be useful for a student writing a report on dog sledding. But you go on the Internet with that same topic, and you're going to get results from the American Kennel Club, Wikipedia, some guy's opinion of the Iditarod (popular sled dog race), chat rooms about dog breeds, companies that offer dogsled tours, etc. and it's going to be based on key word choice, not suitability for a report. So... I think kids need some experience with what good sources look and sound like before they make use of such a vast, diverse and unregulated "library" as the Internet.

I mean, there is Google Scholar and stuff to help sort peer-reviewed articles from random sources, but most of that is tailored to a college reading level, and useless for an elementary schooler.

 

[momandmore]

I remember my son being in 1st grade and using the smart boards when they were introduced to his school. We have moved since then and last year it was just the High Schoolers who had laptops or tablets from school.
This school year all of the kids have iPads which I think is a bit much. 7th graders and up have to bring them home on a daily basis as the teachers have them do their homework on there.
My SD's are in K and 1st grade and bring them home on the weekends to play learning games. It's mandatory in our school system and I just don't think some smaller kids are ready for that big of a responsibility to take care of it. Not to mention the cost of them is way more than what we could have bought them for on our own. 10yo DS still writes some in a journal but they want them to take notes on the iPads instead of writing it down.
I do think it is good in some ways, we do use technology for a lot of things, but sometimes it isn't the best or it's unreliable. Or like PP said, not everyone has internet

 

[IADad]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you go to a library and collect a bunch of materials on dog sledding. They're all going to be useful for a student writing a report on dog sledding. But you go on the Internet with that same topic, and you're going to get results from the American Kennel Club, Wikipedia, some guy's opinion of the Iditarod (popular sled dog race), chat rooms about dog breeds, companies that offer dogsled tours, etc. and it's going to be based on key word choice, not suitability for a report. So... I think kids need some experience with what good sources look and sound like before they make use of such a vast, diverse and unregulated "library" as the Internet.

I mean, there is Google Scholar and stuff to help sort peer-reviewed articles from random sources, but most of that is tailored to a college reading level, and useless for an elementary schooler.

That's funny, I read your response as more of an endorsement of use of the internet than a criticism. I agree that those things will be distractions, if not landmines to writing a report BUT don't they potentially lead to more learning than being limited to the report? I remember using encyclopedias for research. The "problem" I had, especially because I didn't think alphabetically too well, was that I'd get lost in the encyclopedia, I'd be browsing through the pages and spot something of interest and stop to read about it. Sure, it wasn't great for getting my paper done, but I learned. People ask me today "How do you know that" about various obtuse things I seem to have some knowledge of and I think that's in part where it came from. I passed out of 20 hours of college course via CLEP tests in areas I had had little or now high school coursework in (and I came within 1 percentile rank of passing out of literature despite having never read a novel.)

So, does the learning come from writing the paper ? or being exposed to the subject matter? being encouraged to explore? That's the kind of different learning I think can be exploited with technology. Now, you raise serious concerns about how to tell good sources.

 

[Andrew W.]

My wife is all excited about an on-line poetry class she is taking this fall through Coursera, which offers free classes from top universities that anyone can take. This class is from the University of Pennsylvania, but Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Yale are among about 75 schools involved worldwide. There are several consortia of universities offering these free MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). Udacity and edX are others. They really took off last year.

My wife's class has 30,000 people including octagenerians and high school kids and home schooling families taking the class together and a very dynamic professor whose enthusiasm I can pick up from overheard live and taped video discussions and audio updates.

It can't be long before this kind of thing has a major impact on high schools.

 

[akmom]

IADad, I wish I had you for my trivia team! There's a competition once a year and we always get skunked.