Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't Schools Connected? 568
rtobyr writes "We use the Internet — E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family. When I was in Iraq with the Marine Corps, we used e-mail (secured with encryption and stuff, but e-mail nonetheless) to communicate the commanding officer's order that a combat mission should be carried out. My third grade daughter produces her own YouTube videos, and can create public servers for her games with virtual private network technology. Yet here I am trusting a third grade girl to deliver memos to me about her educational requirements in an age in which I can't remember the last time I used paper. Teachers could have distribution lists of the parents. The kids' homework is printed. Therefore, it must have started as a computer file (I hope they're not still using mimeograph machines). Teachers could e-mail a summary of what's going on, and attach the homework files along with other notices about field trips or conferences that parents should be aware of. Teachers could have an easy way to post all these files to the Internet on blogs. With RSS, parents could subscribe to receive everything that teachers put online. If teachers want to add to the blog their own personal comments about how the school year is going, then all the parents would see that also, and perhaps have the opportunity to comment on the blog. It seems to me that with the right processes, the cost and additional workload would be insignificant. For example, instead of developing a syllabus in MS Word, use Wordpress. Have schools simply not paid attention to the past decade of technology, or is there a reason that these things aren't in place?"
It seems odd that primary schools in at least the U.S. don't use technology to communicate with students much. My younger sister went to a private school that made reasonable use of Blackboard, but that seems to be the exception.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:4, Insightful)
A computer capable of e-mail, web, and dialup access can be had second hand for $15. I think we ought to be able to contract with local e-waste recycling companies and give these away.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:5, Insightful)
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
Those people are, however, notoriously underrepresented on slashdot.
Two main reasons I don't (Score:5, Insightful)
A) You can't assume every child and parent has access to the internet or computers. I work in a fairly normal catchment area of the UK and I'd say there are around 10% of families that fit into this category.
B) Too many excuses. You set homework online or through dedicated software and the pupils come back with 1001 excuses - "broadband wasn't working", "I couldn't download it", "it was in the wrong format", "printer was out of paper", "I've got it on memory stick and it still needs printing" All easily check-able and solve-able individually but not if you have 30 students. Give a child a piece of paper with homework on it, and if they lose it it's their fault (they could have come and collected a new sheet before the lesson), and if its not done it's their fault. Much much simpler.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand that. I see it at my daughter's school, unfortunately. What really sucks, though, is that my daughter's education is drug down because of that. Equality is all fine and dandy, until you realize that your own child doesn't get what she needs, because she excels... and I don't have the money to move her to private. :-(
Re:Poor people exist (Score:5, Insightful)
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
That is amost certainly the nail in the coffin of the electronic notifications to parents system. Imagine the "social stigma" if a teacher sent email notices to most parents, but had to give Billy and Marcia printed notices because their families are too poor to have the Internet and can't get email? Or if Roger is a bright kid and he tells the teacher that his parent's email address is a gmail address he controls?
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
Re:Two Words: Lesson Plans (Score:4, Insightful)
That is BS in general. There are certainly some teachers that this applies to but any parent can request an observation to see exactly what is being done in the classroom. If you to examine you can. A teachers job is to teach the kids, not show the parents what is being taught. If you want to know what they are doing, go and check it out or ask the teacher outright. I am not a teacher, but have always found the district my child attends to be open and helpful.
"Reply" is the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor people exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.
Perhaps you could fill the gaps? Shocking, I know...
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes but they are the minority.
Special treatment can be made for the few who cannot access the internet off of school grounds.
I am sure there are a few armless children who go to school as well. Should we ban all school work that requires writing or typing because of this minority?
Re:Public libraries exist (Score:5, Insightful)
The nearest library to the house where I grew up is 10 miles away in another city. You assume the poor folks in the neighbourhood are going to just have to walk that each way every night because because there are no buses or other public transport in the country, and if they can't afford net access, they can't afford the extra 100 miles of gas a week either.
"Serving poor people is not an excuse for failing to upgrade your technology".
Yes it is an excuse when you fail to actually think about what you are talking about, and put a huge extra burden on the poor because of your rather stupid assumptions.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:4, Insightful)
If said poor person lived in Comcast's footprint they can get 1.5Mbps for $10/month:
http://moneyland.time.com/2011/08/10/comcasts-internet-essentials-10-a-month-service-for-low-income-families/ [time.com]
There are some restrictions, like not having an active account for the past 90 days, so shut off the cable and wait a few months.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:5, Insightful)
"signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway."
No, there are many ways to electronically sign things.
The point of a sig. is not that they can trace the ink back to your pen but that the design is not easy to copy.
How do you positively validate the identity of a parent in a household where the student is the most computer literate (and perhaps the only English speaker), thus responds to all of the parent's email? Give the parent a secureID dongle and hope they don't share the PIN with their much more computer savvy child?
Re:Poor people exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just poor people.
Not everyone can use e-mail. My mother, who would get custody of my children if I had any and something happened to me can't manage e-mail. She can cook and clean and drive, and she doesn't have Alzheimers, and has a decent pension income, but computers and e-mail are simply too complicated for her. Programming her VCR is too complicated for her. When I lived in the same city as she did, she could sort of manage, if I came by every day or two to help her out, but now that I'm 4 hours away it's simply not realistic.
If anything in that situation it would be the kid running the computing in the house (as happened even when I was in high school). Neither my mother nor father got to the point of using e-mail at home, although my father used e-mail at work and picked it up in his retirement, my mother, not so much (divorced).
Computers are any or all of expensive, complicated and insecure. Poverty is certainly a major issue, on both ends, running reliable IT systems isn't cheap, and if your e-mail system is down for the day does that mean you're not 'effectively communicating with parents' or some other regulation? A lot of guardians for children lack the capabilities to effectively manage any sort of electronic communication, and by extension that may make the system insecure. Paper isn't secure either, but e-mails to parents is the sort of thing begging to be hacked by some industrious students.
Electronic gadgetry used wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Insightful)
>>> Equality is all fine and dandy, until you realize that your own child doesn't get what she needs, because she excels... and I don't have the money to move her to private. :-(
>>>
That's one of the reasons I support making school tax == 0% for those parents with children who "opt out" of government school (for that year). The money that you are allowed to keep could then be used to afford that private school.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Insightful)
How many of those "poor" people, who allegedly can't afford a box of cereal for their kids, have a fridge full of beer, a couple packs of smokes on the table, Cable TV and buy lotto tickets every week?
Re:Poor people exist (Score:4, Insightful)
Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.
Are you sure? There were no Albert Einsteins back then.
We could manufacture goods too, thousands of years before factories or machinery. That fact doesn't imply we did a good job at it or did it efficiently
It's not a question of what can be done. Schools could educate with zero technology, but it would be inefficient, and the outcome would be poor. Schools should be doing the best possible job at educating students as efficiently as possible, so that students can better themselves, and so, as a result, our country can better itself.
Technology and the ability to use technology is very important in our society and is becoming more important. A lot of innovative things can be done with technology that would be of great benefit to the public and of great benefit to students and all involved.
You cannot "learn technology" or "understand technology" solely by reading about its history, who invented it, how it works, or reading about how its used.
There comes a point where practical exercise is absolutely necessary to obtain even a basic level of of familiarity and skill. "Book smart" only goes so far. You can read all the books about writing and literatuire that you want, if you never write anything, not even an essay, you will not be a good writer.
Certain technologies are so important to the world that students should be immersed in it, be required to use it daily and extensively, so that they master the technology.
Pen and paper and Books used to be in that category. Nowadays I would say Laptop and Keyboard and World wide web fall in that category.
Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Blaming the teachers' unions proves you are a fucking retard who listens to too much Rush Limbaugh.
Where you should blame are the fucking Retardicans who demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a fucking dime of taxes to support it.
You want to know why school IT is "bottom of the barrel"? It's because the schools themselves are physically falling apart. Class sizes are 35 kids or larger now, up from 25 a decade ago, despite decades of studies showing that education quality declines with larger class sizes. Most schools have computers that are 6-7 years old and barely holding together, school infrastructure for email and web outreach is likewise a joke, and as likely as not it's all administered by the one tech-savvy teacher on staff who gets a measly 8-10 grand bonus per *YEAR* to spend an extra 20 hours a week trying to hold it all together with duct tape and baling wire.
They can barely convince teachers to keep teaching in the system as it is. Why? Because it's shit wages forever, you have to spend at least 5 grand a year on "continuing education" and take outside classes on your own just to fucking remain certified, you have to spend your own money on any classroom materials other than the books chosen by the curriculum administrators and the chalkboard or whiteboard in the front of the room, and then when the next budget crunch comes around, all the teachers in the state have to take a pay cut and then get blamed for being "the problem", like the fucking Retardicans and that college failout retard Scott Walker in Wisconsin pulled recently.
You want to have schools that teach well and give all kids an opportunity for a good education? LEARN TO BE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. The US educational system, thanks to the Retardicans, is like trying to pay Yugo prices for a car but expecting you'll get a Lamborghini. NOT. FUCKING. GOING. TO. HAPPEN.
Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem has absolutely nothing to do with money.
It's a culture of stupidity. That's the problem. Teachers in Afghanistan somehow manage to get by on 1/100th the resources. Don't be stupid enough to believe that just spending a million bucks to fill a school full of brand new technology is suddenly going to change everything around, and now we'll be minting Rhodes scholars year after year. It doesn't work like that.
Re:Equal Access (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, let me say that in general I happen to agree with you - and I was one of those C students.
However, there are two things being measured here - timeliness, and mathematics. Those are being combined into a single letter grade. Its entirely possible tha the student in question has a solid understanding of maths and a poor understanding of time management. The official remediation will be to ... study more maths, but generally in a summer school environment where time management is not a consideration.
Whoops.
Still, it may be the most valid solution for the level of expediency it provides.