קטגוריה: שימוש בבתי ספר

… it’s more like Groundhog Day where we are constantly stuck in act 1 of our determined effort to integrate the use of computers and networks into the practice of classroom teachers. Year after year fighting the same battles of not enough access for kids and too many administrators and teachers saying it’s important while still treating technology use as an optional nice-to-have extra.

this fall we will be seriously implementing a program to allow students to bring their own computing devices (BYOD) to school and use them in class. A few schools have been experimenting with this idea for a few years but now the concept has the blessing of the school board and the announced support of the top administrators, potentially making it harder for principals and teachers, especially in high schools, to avoid using technology for more than just standardized testing.

From the point of view of some of us, there is another strategy, one that is a little more disruptive one that goes beyond simply shifting from analog materials to digital ones.

Teachers still need to manage much of the process of learning in school. Manage but not control, a distinction that may be a difficult transition. Also tough, will be the realization that large parts of the curriculum are irrelevant when you have a room full of devices that can easily retrieve basic facts as well as communicate with anyone to develop the meaning of those facts.

Laptops make learning and schoolwork more interesting, students and teachers said. “When kids are engaged, you can teach them anything,” said Jeff Mao, who oversees instructional technology for the Maine Department of Education.

In class, teachers set boundaries, he said. “Some say, 'It's OK to check your Facebook if you're done with your work, but you have to let me know you're doing it.'”

Besides, he said, the laptops go home, where kids have access to all sites. And students are going to grow up, go out into the world where there is all kinds of social networking.

King recalled Mt. Ararat High School students who interviewed him last spring about energy. The students came over, opened their laptops, pushed a tape recorder button and began asking questions.

“As I'm answering, one student's Googling things I said, asking follow-up questions. This went on for 45 minutes,” he said.

King said he watched and smiled, pleased to see how at ease the students were using their laptops.

Learning happens best when you make mistakes

much of what we actually do has nothing with either “instructional technology” or instruction.

Simple. It’s anything that students use to develop and enhance their learning. Or, in the words of our school board, students should “use technology to access, communicate, and apply knowledge and to foster creativity”.

students have fewer and fewer tools for all that creating, communicating, and collaborating we say we want the kids to be doing.

I informed my students today of my possible trip by having them spend 15 minutes researching the Space Shuttle Endeavour (which I managed to mis-spell “Endeavor” … which they happily informed me as their search began). Once they had learned a bit I explained what might be happening. They were pumped!

Message in this for our students. Space is hard. … but keep on problem solving until it happens.

Things can happen that disappoint us. Sometimes that disappointment can make us angry, frustrated and even fearful. But in my experience that disappointment often changes later. Things happen and we get to do what we missed later. Or because we couldn't get that or do that we get to do something else instead. Think about a time that you were disappointed about something you couldn't get or do, but later things worked out or you got over it. Write about a time that you were disappointed. Tell what you were disappointed about and what happened afterwards.

A waste of time? Hardly. My trip made people where I’m from more aware of what school could become. Our local paper did a short article, and although I was supposed to Skype in an interview (the usual “convention effect” bogged the internet to a crawl) I did do a phone interview with a TV station as well. Even before I left on my trip I was asked by teachers and parents to explain what I was doing and what educational impact it could possibly make … so I had those conversations too.

The image of kindergartners touching iPad screens for letters of the alphabet makes concrete the promise of five year-olds reading soon. Another technological miracle.

Mauri Dufour, a K-6 interventionist, showed a video of kindergarten students learning their letters on an iPad. Four letters popped up on the screen. Students had to quickly identify which one was a B or a P or an M. The 5-year-olds correctly identified the letters, laughing as they worked.

Dufour said last fall she was working with one kindergartner who was struggling to learn his letters. She handed him her iPad, which has programs for children to learn letters and sounds. Within two weeks, he knew 12 to 14 letters. And within six to eight weeks, the boy knew all of his letters. He was back in class doing grade-level work.

Early childhood education has experienced value-driven ideological cycles in preschools, kindergarten, and primary grades since the late-19th century alternating between programs that are child-centered (i.e., play, exploration, discovery) and academic learning (i.e., basic reading and math skills). Even though in 2011 there are many child-centered (and hybrid) kindergartens and preschools that include age-appropriate academic knowledge and skills, in the past three decades, kindergartens and preschools including Head Start (established in the mid-1960s) have shifted toward academic boot camps for the primary grades.

Since NCLB, The sole focus on academically preparing high school students for college and the labor market has filtered down into middle schools (got to take Algebra!) and elementary grades with increased homework and testing. And, finally, slammed into kindergarten and preschool. Now kindergartners have homework. Five year-olds are tested for recognition of letters, colors, and counting numbers. Just as high school is now supposed to prepare graduates for college, preschools and kindergartens are supposed to prepare children for the rigors of reading, math, science, and testing in elementary school.

The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom.

Both these talks are about “improving education with technology” – but they couldn’t be further apart in world view.

stop teaching calculating, start teaching math

Just because paper was invented before computers doesn’t mean that we have to calculate on paper before we can calculate with computers.

teachers use technology to humanize the classroom

Khan Academy is the system’s pushback against real curriculum reform. In “Reversal #2″ that Papert talks about, we see he has explicitly predicted Khan Academy. The system likes the status quo and things that support the status quo have a predictably comfortable feel to them. Then we get to call it a revolution without changing a thing….

… although I said that the discussion about Khan Academy is not about educational technology, it should be, because it’s the perfect example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing “technology revolution” that really supports the status quo.

The laptop screens which I watched, from the back, corresponded in near- perfect correlation. When the topics appeared relevant to students, the note-taking pages appeared; when the topics veered to the arcane and irrelevant, the screens veered to facebook, gaming sites, and other distractions. Not all of them, of course, not at all. But a number of them did, in close correspondence to the relevance of the topics.

When our very fine teacher moved towards more discussion, though, asking questions to facilitate conversation, something else fascinating happened. Nearly half of the screens veered away from both note-taking pages and distractions; appearing instead were google, wikipedia, and other information source sites. I carefully approached several screens, and took note of their search topics: all of them were dead-on the discussion subject.

We are also saying, when deciding to ban “distractions,” that every minute a student is at school they are under our dictates for how they spend their time, and that we have determined there is no value for them, even in their break times, to socially network or game; this is a hard proposition for this principal to endorse.

Some educators say the social-media bans in schools are overkill and privacy fears have overshadowed the positive educational opportunities social media can offer students. They argue the best way for students and teachers not to fall victim to technology is to use it and understand so they can control it. ….

The ban also fails, they say, to take into account the role social networking has had in real-world events – most recently the civil uprising in Egypt – and dismisses some of the rich and meaningful ways students use it, including to display grief and to rally for causes.

Part of preparing students for life is training them about how to use social networking, a policy which inhibits or restricts social-networking sites may work in the short term but will not help with equipping a student with the skills for life.

Youths involved in online groups based on common interests, even if those interests were not political, were more likely to increase their level of volunteering, charitable giving, and expressing themselves about community issues, compared with similar peers who were not involved in online groups.

המחשבים מאפשרים להורים ולמורים לעקוב מקרוב אחר התקדמות התלמידים ומשפרים את המיומנויות בכלי החשוב ביותר בחיי היומיום המודרניים.