How To Help Our Public Schools With Technology?

armorer writes "I'm a programmer engaged to an inner-city public school teacher. I've been thinking for a long time now about what I can do to help close the technology gap, and I finally did something (very small) about it. I convinced my company to give me a few old computers they were replacing, refurbished them, installed Edubuntu on them, and donated them to her classroom. I also took some vacation time to go in, install everything, and give a lesson on computers to the kids. It was a great experience, but now I know first-hand how little technology these schools have. I only helped one classroom. The school needs more. (Really the whole district needs more!) And while I want to help them, I don't really know how. With Thanksgiving a week away and more holidays approaching, I suspect I'm not the only one thinking about this sort of thing. I know it's a hard problem, so I'm not looking for any silver bullets. What do Slashdot readers do? What should I be doing so that I'm more effective? How do you find resources and time to give back?"

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Public School Tech (and I don't work for Intel)

[GMonkeyLouie]

Intel is a great company to look at; I went to a US News and World Report conference about three weeks ago where an Intel VP came to talk about the special deals and discounts they've worked out with select school systems. Apparently, Intel contributes not only by donating technology for classrooms and computer labs, but also by training teachers in how to use them effectively in the classroom and developing a "digital literacy" curriculum for them to use. Intel takes great pride in their school involvement, and you can find details about that at http://www.intel.com/education/ [intel.com]. Now, there was a panel at this conference talking about the role of private interests in fulfilling the technology needs of 21st century schools beyond just straight philanthropy, and the perspective that came out was that more private companies should be selling deeply discounted equipment to schools to get bulk orders steady customers, not to mention the image boost. There was also a very touching vignette about New York middle school students reading Romeo and Juliet videoconferencing with an Israeli class that was reading the same work. Finally, the Brookings Institution had a little bit about how the Federal government can facilitate involvement in "educational entrepreneurship" which is developing cheap, classroom-relevant tech specifically targeted for school use. This was part of the Blueprint for Prosperity report which can be found at http://www.blueprintprosperity.org./ [www.bluepr...perity.org]

Community Service Project

[bouaketh]

During my work at a local University we held an e-waste drive. In addition to Freecycle, craigslist, slavation army, and goodwill we were able to provide computers for 2 classrooms (30 seats). We also put Edubuntu on those computers and they are still kicking, that was 2 years ago. Since then they have garnered funding from grants through the NSF and local business. It is now a student run organization with faculty supervision. They invite faculty, staff, and employees from local businesses to donate their time, expertise, and equipment to help outfit the schools. If you have a connection to a local University you might want to consider doing the same. Get the compu-geeks and eco-trip hippies together. It is good press for the University and anybody involved. The students learn something. You do your part to save the earth. Kids get computers and slowly everyone is happy...slowly.

Haven't read them all yet but...

[armorer]

I submitted as AskSlashdot, so I'm not sure why it's under news. I'm not sold on the idea that our district should spend its money putting a computer in every classroom either (I'm not asking them too though.) I agree wholeheartedly with the folks here who say that the school's really need dedicated teachers. Unforunately, I can't provide teachers so I'm trying to help with something closer to my area of expertise. As for the machines and kids goofing off instead of doing work: I locked down a lot of things on the machines I brought in so that the kids can only use them for educational games. And I was amazed at how much fun these kids had with TuxMath.

I am in the same pport.

[SteveHencye]

I am a 9th grade student and I know exactly what you are talking about! I go to a small private school of about 800 kids in 1st-12th grade. I am the only real computer geek here, there is one other kid but he is just about gaming and a little bit of hardware. Which won't get you much. So out of the whole school aside from the computer technician I am the computer guy. People come to me before they go to anybody else, I kind of like it but it almost hurts knowing that these people know nothing about computers (aside from myspace, they all have myspace) and that they are going to have trouble getting jobs because so much requires some type of computer skill. We used to have a computer class but that only lasted for about a year because nobody wanted to sign up. Now I have all the text books and use them for my own learning. This is pathetic. But a lot of parents that I know do not want their kids knowing stuff about the computers for fear that they will become non-active and start gaming, and sad but true thinking that they will become violent. I think that an example of why it might be the way it is would be something like Columbine. After Columbine nerds were being kicked out of school for days because of gaming and such, slashdot especially was jam packed with people telling their stories about how people had grown a fear for them. Many children had their computers taken from them for fear that they would act upon the actions in those video games. The truth is that the games and such are not bringing the violence in, its people that fear these children. These kids are rejected. People in schools do not support computers, they support sports and jocks. Stuff that will get these children no where in life. Something has got to be done to help the education of computers in schools. It is pathetic and very annoying. The teachers do not even know anything. The sad thing is that you have to be careful about how you come upon it, we do not want to raise a bunch of computer hackers and people that will turn to the dark side. Great point. I hope you can work someting out. As far as teaching these kids I have no clue, I have tried but they do not want to learn. I guess you have it or you don't.

Re:Question....

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, there are some schools that are as you've described. I have a friend who works as a school councilor. When he got his current job a couple of years ago, he was dismayed to find that he couldn't update his fantasy sports teams during his lunch hour (he's a bit of a fantasy fanatic) since the filtering software had classified Yahoo's fantasy sports section as a gambling site.

It was at this point that he came to me looking for a way to get around the filtering. The solution that I came up with (basically using remote desktop to connect to his home PC, which also had the additional benefit of allowing him to retrieve work files that he worked on at home) worked for about 6-8 months and then they started blocking that traffic as well. He had an iPhone at this point, so he didn't really need a replacement solution, but it still shows that there are at least a few schools that take the time to filter properly.

The indicative word from the story is probably "inner-city." The schools that have enough budget or have parents of students who have the necessary know how to put the necessary infrastructure in place will do so. But in areas where the public schools are constantly running into budget problems, it's the kind of expense that's an easy cut to make.

Re:Question....

[ShieldW0lf]

I would suggest introducing them to Scratch.

http://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]

I've taught my 8 year old to program with it. You can upload your programs to the MIT website and get kudos from other kids, which gives positive feedback. You can download other peoples programs and see how they made them, then hack them and upload them again, and it will preserve the fact that you created it, and whose work it was based upon, giving some opportunity to see the rewards that come with sharing information.

Re:Equipment alone is useless

[rosasaul]

I used to work in a public school system, and that's exactly the case. The teachers often knew far less than the student's and thats not saying much; most of them just knew how to update a myspace page. The other main issue was this idea that donating a computer solves things. Often if they don't have the computers then they don't have the resources to upkeep them either.

Re:Question....

[PogoTex]

I couldn't agree more. PowerPoint should be banned from all school computers and most business computers, probably the most misused software ever written. We need to learn to communicate in complete sentences, paragraphs, and perhaps even longer forms. Bullet points communicate fragments, not complete ideas. We need to teach math and sciences starting with the basic computing tools; fingers, toes, blocks, marks on paper... Things that work during a blackout. Computers can be introduced in middle school or later. Which brings me to my other pet peeve, children with video games and mp3 players when out with family. Bring the children into the family and learn how to relate without the junk.

Re:Freecycle

[jweller]

I go to my local dump/recycling center frequently. I think official policy is that you can't take anything. The reality is that it depends on the guy standing there. I tried to take a large pile of still in the package patch cables and KVM cables, and was told that "this isn't walmart." I've also come home with lots of stuff. The worst they are going to do is tell you put it back and ask you to leave. I have brought home perfectly good, but old, machines several times.

Re:Freecycle

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you that this is not a good idea to just start picking up machines and investing your time in getting them configured. Your hearts are definitely in the right place!

In my district, for example, we have VERY strict rules about machine configuration, etc.

The first step should ALWAYS be getting in touch with your school's principal and asking about technology donation rules/regulations. Often times there will be very specific vendor, OS, and model specifications. Remember, that after you drop off your computers the district has to support them!

Introducing castaway computers adds a significant support cost to this system. In a time when schools are getting budgets slashed technology expenditures are always early cuts.

You're much better off:

1. Finding out what you can do to help.
2. Finding out what the district/school policies are regarding donated technology.
3. Respecting the district's wishes even though you're trying to do the right thing.

Re:Freecycle

[cayenne8]

Hey, how about starting a Computers for Guns program at these schools?

Don't overlook the obvious

[GodfatherofSoul]

I used to work in a very wealthy school district. They had zero clue about how to best implement their plans, but lots of cash to throw at the problem. They even had a computer lab with 24 desktops and 12 cheap printers; with a parallel cable splitter connecting two PCs to each! The teachers were also never shown how to even use the most basic functions of the PCs they each had in their rooms. So, the vast majority of hardware was relegated to collecting dust or game play when kids were done with their work.

So, what I'm saying is the first two steps are:

1. Show teachers how to leverage technology in their lesson plans
2. Show the administrators what technology can do

Getting too fixated on the hardware details first is putting the cart before the horse.

Re:Question....

[Kintanon]

What's the point of having computers in the class rooms if 80% of the time the students aren't doing anything at all with them?
Assuming you have the students turn and face you while you are lecturing, then once the assignment starts you roam from desk to desk there are still large blocks of time where 25/30 students are technically unsupervised.
When I was in lab classes in school it was trivially easy to conceal my activities from supervising teachers even when they stood behind me for long periods of time.
The teacher should be able to concentrate on TEACHING, not scurrying around making sure no student is doing anything inappropriate.

Re:Question....

[PollyAnna]

As a (Math, Programming) teacher and also (later) a Technology Director in both public and private schools, I will say that, in my 10 years of experience, many excellent educators and administrators (veteran or brand new) are not as computer literate as some of their students, and are therefore either a) easily convinced by the student that what they are doing is "for a project" or "to maintain the computer's antivirus, etc..." or b) not comfortable enough with technology to confront the student on inappropriate use and/or set firm limits on computer use in the classroom or lab. Neither do most of these excellent educators get much (if any) paid training time to learn about more about educational uses of technology, learn how to "really" use tech in their classes, and feel comfortable enough to know what the kids are doing and call them on it if it is off-task. I love this question, think it is both timely and newsworthy, applaud what armorer did to help the students in his fiancees class and his desire to know what more he (and all of us) can do to help kidsâ(TM) education during tough economic times (which is usually the case in public education anyway). While I still believe that monitoring, teaching a class with computers, and computer maintenance (from an IT perspective) is much easier using labs with all of the screens facing the same direction, I think the real issue here is how to help educators confidently monitor their students when they are using computers, set clear limits on computer use in class, use more and more technology themselves, and effectively incorporate technology throughout their curricula so that students understand that the two arenâ(TM)t separate anymore. Regarding internet access, most teachers want to use computers to help students (appropriately) access the wealth of information online. It is the IT Directorâ(TM)s role to make sure that firewalls and content managers are adequately configured for this.