Chalkboards With Brains 231
theodp writes "Third graders at Columbia University's elementary school may never know the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. All across the country, dust-covered chalkboards are being ditched in favor of interactive whiteboards that allow students and teachers to share assignments, surf the web and edit video using their fingers as pens." From the article: "Bang uses the board to display a wide range of learning materials on her computer, from web pages to video clips. It is also used as a lunch-time reward for students: The children watched Black Beauty on the same screen that was used earlier for geography."
Real value (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, editing what you've written, brings a whole new aspect to writing on a board. Being able to "drag" a chunk of what you've written to make room for something you forgot or didn't have room for, is a life saver. Similarly, if you run low on room, you can scale everything you've written down a bit, and continue on without having to break up your work. Very powerful.
Similarly, being able to flip back and forth between "pages" of stuff that wouldn't fit on one board, or after you've moved on, and want to refer back, is very convenient.
Getting hard copies of everything on the board, another major value.
The previous generation with which I'm familiar, took a bit of practice to use, so some folks in our company didn't take to it; but I'm sure the technology (esp the software) has evolved, and kids pick things up more quickly than adults, anyway.
now they've blown it... (Score:2, Insightful)
nothing like an unauthorised public performance to get the MPAA on your ass... perhaps they should have checked the little license that is shown when playing the dvd... the one which defines what constitutes home use...
Re:This is pretty old (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate people touching my screen, and hate to do it myself.
I can try to enforce using a stylus at all times, but having the screen touchy would make their fingers gravitate to it.
Not new :) (Score:2, Insightful)
Cost (Score:1, Insightful)
They are underutilized; teachers don't know how to use them (one of my teachers spent half a lesson with an IT guy in the room trying to get it to work). These things have been placed in every classroom in my school, afaic they should be concentrating on paying teachers more and buying textbooks (some maths classes get photocopies every lesson - which ends up just as expensive in the end, just the money is coming from a different department!).
This "IT for schools" stuff is a load of **** imo, "going to the IT room" for many 12 year olds doesn't mean "yay, enhanced learning", it means "let's go on games sites whilst our teacher can't see what we are doing" (of course this is generally down to the teacher, but I am only speaking from my own experience). The real purpose seems to be keeping lazy IT support staff in the job (again I am only speaking for ONE SCHOOL)
The screens on a few occasions have been used by a few teachers to show websites etc, but I don't find it especially useful compared to them explaining properly how it works (perhaps this is just the way I learn).
There is no substitute for a proper teacher explaining something properly on a proper black board!
Purpose? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod me a troll or whatever - maybe I'm just bitter and cynical because schools flipped out over computers and the promise that because kids were now doing math facts on Asteroids they'd be doing university-level numerical analysis before they got their drivers license. For what? Nothing. Schools invested millions and now are trapped in contracts with Microsoft for millions so kids don't have to pick up a pen and pull out a sheet of paper.
Kids don't learn better when you put something on a screen that someone sold the school with inflated promises in order to make their monthly sales commission. They (we!) learn better when we have good teachers with adequate supplies of basic essentials like books and teaching materials and we have an open mind.
America (the rest of the world too?) has got to stop this culture of worshipping the kids and bending to their will because something is "hard" or "boring". Kids whine about something and the country spends millions to accommodate them. Math is hard? Good, tough up kid because the rest of the world is tough and isn't going to bend to your will. Stop buying thousand dollar machines to add flashy videos of cartoon characters doing the bumb and grind to the multiplication table.
I whined about math being hard and used the crutch of calculators until I did A.P. Calculus AB/BC without a calculator. The best thing that ever happened to me. Then I realized the importance of getting to the details and nitty little things of a subject like math. When you can push yourself through difficult things, you build your ability to do tough things in the future. It sounds strange, but because I labored through calculus without a calculator, I'm a better computer science major. See? Character building!
Recalling the best classes/teachers I've ever had in my 15 years of public school and college now, the one's I've walked away with the most from have been the ones where we stuck to the basics: calculus without calculators, marching band without PDAs strapped to our heads, literature without ebooks, science without lame and detached "learning" computer programs, etc etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I'm a computer science major and I still have lofty ambitions of improving the world through computer science. But a computer is a tool to learn information. It shouldn't be the information.
A $2,000 blender does not a better chef make. A $2,000 computer does not a better educated kid make.
(This was a rant that spiraled out of control quickly. I blame the caffeine...)
it' not the tool... (Score:3, Insightful)
As others also said, kids [as we are talking about elementary schools here] can be very well taught without unnecesarry tech equipment. Why I say unnecessary ? Because if not used well [you know, tech for tech's sake] they can turn out to be more a distraction than a helping tool.
Also, making kids familiar with technology at an early age _can_ be good. But not when these are the _only_ tools they meet. I hope they can find the best balance somewhere in between.
Backup power supply (Score:3, Insightful)
All across the country? (Score:2, Insightful)
"All across the country", they say. Sounds like somebody's been snorting a little too much chalk dust.
Here in Portland, OR, they're trying to figure out how to replace the 3-year, 1.5% income tax that expires next year. When you're firing teachers and cutting classroom hours, you probably don't spend much time evalutating interactive keyboards.
Re:Potential for abuse (Score:1, Insightful)
"...got me frogmarched down to the principal's office..."
Principal's office in college? Don't you mean the Dean of Students?
Re:Purpose? (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in a town with 4 elementary schools. The fourth was just built about 3-4 years ago. The other three are from the 50's-early 70s. Parents who don't deal with teachers on a regular basis are flocking into the new district. The "new" school already has trailer out back because its overcrowded. The classes are big, the teachers are mediocre (my wife knows several from when she went to high school with them), but the faciliy is "new and shiny". The standardized scores are the lowest of the four schools.
When we moved into town (I have a child which will attend elem school in just over a year), we elimiated any house in the new district. We ended up in our "second choice" school, but we know the class size is always on the small side, and we know one of the K teachers personally and she's great with younger kids and very smart. I don't think they have computers in the classrooms - just a learning lab. Doesn't bother me a bit.
I'd rather have small class sizes, caring teachers, and an active parent base than gee-whiz gadgets in the classroom anyday.
Been using one for most of the last year... (Score:2, Insightful)
Does the tech make me a better teacher? No, but it does allow me to keep the attention of my 180 hormonal 7th and 8th graders on a bright and sunny June day where you can smell the ocean on the breeze. Do all of the teachers who have Smart Boards at my school make use of them? No. Some simply do not want to while others do not know how to use them or integrate them into their lessons. Here is where the system starts to show flaws. The level of training we receive on technology is almost non-existant. My school and school district could stand to do much more there.
Smart Boards and computers are excellent tools to use in education, but are not a panecea for all of education's ills. Smaller class sizes would be an excellent first step. I have between 35 and 38 students per class, which is far too many to give any kind of individualized attention to in class. 25 to 30 per class would be really nice, and being able to achieve that mythical 20:1 student to teacher ratio would be heaven. Another thing that would be of big help to the level of education we can provide would be to have elemetary teachers who are not afraid of math. So many of my 7th graders barely know their multiplication tables, much less any trace of pre-algebra skills like how to work with formulas. Heaven forbid that I throw a fraction into a problem. We're trying to fix the problem of under-performing schools by making the Jr. High and High Schools so much more advanced, but we aren't getting the foundations laid securely enough to allow that to work. Better pay would be nice, but I'd much rather see math specialists at the elementary levels and more teachers in general first. Education is the foundation of every other career. If we do not support it properly, we're going to see more and more of the other professions suffer in the near future.
* - When using my LCD projector or overhead projector, I do not have to keep my room "oppressively dark." I have mini-blinds on my south-facing bank of windows and paper covering 80% of my north-facing windows, which is sufficient to be able to see either image source. In fact, my students almost uniformly prefer the dimmed room and natural lighting opposed to the harsh flourescents flooding the room. There is a chorus of groans whenever I turn the lights back on. Supposedly, we were going to get blackout curtains last year, and to be fair, we did get the runners installed, but here it is, 9 school days left, and no curtains yet. The paper stays on the windows.
** - I only use PowerPoint because it has Equation Editor and MathType [dessci.com]. If Apple (or a third party) has something similar for use with KeyNote, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Maybe I should submit an "Ask Slashdot" for that one...
Re:Purpose? (Score:3, Insightful)
You should be suspicious of this rationale, since it is ridiculous if carried to the extreme. Books and chalkboards, after all, are only "technological crutches" for learning, as are heated and air-conditioned classrooms with artificial light.
The bottom line is that something like 80% of the expenses at a typical American high school or college are salaries. If you can spend $2000 on anything that makes a classroom teacher being paid $30000/year even slightly more productive, you've probably won. After all, it only takes a 2% productivity gain over 3 years to break even.
Does this same logic make it stupid not to maintain and improve buildings? You bet: arguably even more so. But it's not an intuitive tradeoff to most people for some reason, even though the math is quite easy to understand. I think a lot of it is simple, if misguided, inherency. "If charcoal on the back of a wooden shovel was good enough for Abe Lincoln, it's good enough for my kid."
Good for tech companies, not so good for kids. (Score:2, Insightful)
Read The Flickering Mind [amazon.com] by Todd Oppenheimer for a detailed analysis of the problem of technology in the classroom, especially in K-8 classrooms.
From the article:"If a kid wants to research boats they can do a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document or they can do a movie or slide show to show to the whole class."
Kids don't need to be spending their time learning fucking powerpoint or word. They need to be learning the fundamentals.
There's a reason Japanese schools have stuck with chalkboards and abacus's (abacii?)... they work.
This will make a bunch of tech companies and consultants a lot of money once they convince school boards that this technology is "vital" for kids' education, but in the end the kids won't benefit one damn bit.
Anyone remember the NEC e-Rate scam last year? Same shit, different year.