21–29 of 29 posts
Which side of the division line do you put each quantity on? How do you use unit math to verify your problem statement? Multiplication table, and simple addition/subtraction. Probability and statistics. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
I don't know about general purpose computers, but my life would be completely different if my high school hadn't required the use of computers that masqueraded as calculators. My school required us to use either a TI-81 or TI-85 and my friends and I quickly discovered the power of TI-Basic. We started with small games to amuse ourselves, since this was an era before mobile phones. But I quickly realized that I could…
> We already saw an extreme example of misallocated resources in Peru. But even in a ``wealthy'' country one has to be concerned about this problem. Many educators in North America share the feeling of betrayal of the teacher who said, They can give us the axe, but they can spend thousands on computers. We have to fire our music coordinator, we have to fire our music teachers, we have shitty libraries. (Lynn, a Canad…
"What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads." Yes this is exactly what I see in my sons school. Some of the kids actually know more than the teachers and end up providing support to the teachers. Then the kids do silly things like duplicating…
I find this to be an egregious waste of school funds, funds that could have gone towards funding school plays, improving school facilities, or expanding the engineering course offerings. And the real kicker is that my HS is an "arts magnet" school.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We should debate specific applications, whether they help the education, or are just shiny toys. Then we should make the cheapest computer which runs exactly these applications and nothing more, and use that in schools.
If teachers don't know how to use a computer, these two things could fix that easily: set up the educational computer so that it can only run those selected educational applications; and write a book about how to use each of those applications in education.
A debate on the level of "Computers good! No, computers bad! Good! Bad! Good! Bad!" is not helping anyone.
An example of a useful application in math education could be e.g. something that shows you how a graph of a function changes when you change the equation. For example, you could have a quadratic equation, where you can use the mouse to change each coefficient. When the time is right, bring the computers and let the kids experiment with this. On other days, do not bring the computers to the math lesson.
Collect some applications like this, make a Linux DVD which can be installed or run live, write teachers' manual for each application and put it on the DVD and online as a PDF file, and that's it. (I suppose someone already did something like this, although probably without the PDFs.)
The question is not whether to use the computers or not, but how to use them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads." Yes this is exactly what I see in my sons school. Some of the kids actually know more than the teachers and end up providing support to the teachers. Then the kids do silly things like duplicating…
I attend high school in the Bay Area and I'm surrounded by this Smartboard epidemic. Nearly every classroom at our school has one, but only around 10% of teachers actually use the "smart" portion, even though most of them have gotten some basic training in their proper usage. Most are used as dumb projectors for presentations and lectures, and the pens are seldom used. And keep in mind, this is Silicon Valley , the "…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I attend high school in the Bay Area and I'm surrounded by this Smartboard epidemic. Nearly every classroom at our school has one, but only around 10% of teachers actually use the "smart" portion, even though most of them have gotten some basic training in their proper usage. Most are used as dumb projectors for presentations and lectures, and the pens are seldom used. And keep in mind, this is Silicon Valley , the "…
teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.
We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'm mad.
[0] https://de01903704.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.
The ready-made lessons are more shitty tech demos (Amazing! Drag and drop! Buttons! Computers!) to wow the administrators than actual lessons. We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'…
And I’m an officer of a robotics team, so I feel your pain. We get zero funding from the school. Most money comes from members’ pockets or fundraisers. Eventually, we want to ease the burden on members by getting corporate sponsors, since we obviously won’t get any money from the school district, who’s busy cutting library budgets and buying smart boards.