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.
Kids are waaaaay more tech savvy than parents (Score:4, Interesting)
Then again, such a child probably would do better outside of traditional schools anyway.
We are already connected...and it's not all good (Score:3, Interesting)
At least where I teach, we *are* connected. The school has a website that links to all courses, the grades are all in an online gradebook that families have access to, and on and on.
As with many systems, things aren't as well integrated as they could be. The ecosystem of ways to share is so rich that what we end up having is a cobbled together system where people use what's most comfortable to them -- some use online calendaring for assignments, others use a static web page, others a blog, others email distribution lists, others just use the online gradebook to post things, etc. It's tricky as the tech director to decide when to regulate and enforce a common solution for consistency and when to let the diversity flourish to allow for innovation. In our case, we've standardized on the online gradebook and some form of course website, but that's not to say the other forms don't flourish as well (sometimes well integrated into the required forms, others not).
There are, however, some real downsides.
The biggest downside is putting everything in electronic form gives parents a weird level of insight into our grading process. By allowing them to peek into everything we do, we no longer choose how and when to communicate with parents, and the result ends up being some weird expectations (parents who right in with anger and concern when there kids have a low average early in the semester when we've only graded 2 assignments, etc. etc.). I also find that by having moved everything online and made things much more public, we are ennabling a lot of parents to continue coddling their kids and lowering expectations for them. Certainly it seems like parents expect us to put everything online.
Note: I don't speak for all schools, but I can say that here in the Boston regional area, what I'm describing is not at all exceptional. I work at a charter, but the same kinds of expectations are there at the major public districts that surround our suburban town.
Re:Equal Access (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good part of the reason. Schools can't exclude some students, and so disseminating things electronically would make twice as much work for a teacher. But there is another thing going on, too. My girlfriend is a teacher. She used to teach middle school. She wasn't required to post homework assignments online, but there was at least a tiny bit of pressure to do so. She refused, and for what she thought were sound pedagogical reasons.
We live in an age of irresponsible children and helicopter parents. If an assignment is on the board and a middle schooler has to copy it down and keep track of his assignment book, he's learning something. He's forming a habit. That little boy or girl is learning to take responsibility for himself. Moreover, the parent will have to keep tabs on his or her kid, and ask about the homework assignments. In this way, the parent is contributing to the child's moral development. Now, I realize that this is considered a loaded term in our politically correct society, but responsibility is a matter of character, and building character is one of the things that goes on in school, and is certainly one of the things parents ought to encourage the development of. If a parent, instead, spends every evening looking up on the Web to see what the kid's homework assignment is, that parent is not being a parent but a valet.
In short, there's an argument to be made for not putting assignments and other things on the Web.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Interesting)
We could easily subsidize the purchase of, e.g. a Raspberry Pi if we eliminated some waste from the education system. For example, textbooks.
Let's take all the money that's spent on textbooks nation wide, and use that to commission a free (as in beer and speech) set of elementary school textbooks. You only have to do this once, because the three 'r's don't change. Once you've done that, you can reallocate your entire textbook budget for technology instead.
Also going to cost a lot of money to do right (Score:5, Interesting)
And nobody seems interested in spending a lot of money on schools. IT in primary schools is some of the most pathetic I've ever seen. They do a completely shit job of it and a large part is lack of funding. When there aren't enough people, isn't enough cash for good systems ans software, is it any wonder you can't attract people who are good at it and that they can't do their jobs well?
So first big money increase is that the schools have to overhaul their IT. They need a lot more of it and higher quality. If the system is going to be critical and required, it'd damn well better be implemented and supported properly. You can't say "Well just go find something online for free," when it is something critical to the success of the school.
Support for people using it, both teachers and students, would be massive too. I know every parent likes to think their kids are real clever with computers but here's a newsflash: They aren't. Regular kids know how to use them in the same way regular people know how to drive a car: They know the minimum necessary to make it work and lack any advanced problem solving skills. I can see that shit every time I play an online game and have to give people support in making Ventrilo or Teamspeak work. Here are people who like computers enough to play online games, and they still don't know enough to make a voice chat app work properly.
So this wouldn't be some magic thing that would just work. It would require a lot of infrastructure, support, and development and that costs money. Now in the end it very well could be worth it. Maybe it saves money in the long run, by replacing more expensive labour intensive things. Maybe it doesn't save money, but the increase in quality of education make it worth it. Either way the problem is you have to fund it first. Since people are not hot on providing extra funds to education, that is a non-starter.
Re:Poor people exist (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a retired teacher (2002) and the union brass has done everything they could to impede computerization. All excess money has been drained into salaries, and nothing into smartening up the teaching staff so they know a hole in the ground from a nether aperture. This sounds bad, and it is. The structure of teaching salaries does not allow for competence in IT or any hard sciences. Teachers start with a teaching certificate at low wages and over 10-15 years advance in grade and in extra courses taken to a high wage. the start is about $35,000 in Toronto and the top end is about $83,000, plus generous benefits and a short work year. The usual teacher starter is an arts graduate of some king plus a year in teachers college
Engineers and good IT people start at $60-70,000, so none enter teaching at the bottom. The union will not allow anything else.
Union greed conquers all.
Re:Equal Access (Score:5, Interesting)
This is precisely the kind of reverse logic that inspired me to start the Open Slate Project. Many teachers confuse the process of doing school with learning. Both my sons regularly received low grades in courses they should have done well in, because they failed to turn something in on time. Think about that. What does "Math - C" really mean? That the student is average at math, or disorganized?
I too am disorganized, and forgetful ... and a lousy speller. That is why I purchased an Apple Newton, back before there was Palm Pilot. Once I saw how that tool transformed my life, I knew every high school student ought to have one. From there it was a small step to imagining class activities automatically downloaded onto the students' slates. Homework uploaded at the click of a button, located on the worksheet. Continuous status visible to the parents. And more ...
The argument that poor families cannot afford it does not hold water. In the Open Slate Project, students build and maintain their own slate computers, a modern day version of shop class.
Why has the project not been successful? Resistance to change. What IT has made it into schools is mostly as a course, like "keyboarding," or, like my sons, a student initiative. My younger son took notes on a Palm Pilot connected to a folding keyboard, then uploaded them to his iMac at home for editing. There were selective teachers who understood problem with a jammed backpack and lost worksheets, and were happy to have him submit homework by mail. They were the exception.
I thought home schoolers would be more receptive. They, as a group, are even more conservative, and are likely to condemn any and all use of IT in education.
I still think it is a good idea. I would like to hear from any of you who agree.
Solution looking for a problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Schools aren't connected with buzzword compliant social networking crap because there's no reason to think that it would help kids learn! I've worked in an education department's IT division before, and every time somebody tried to push through some sort of "social" or "connected learning" crap it was a total failure. It was underused and pointless. Nobody could ever demonstrate the slightest benefit, but the costs were massive.
Meanwhile, the real problems that could be solved with technology are being ignored. For example, I have this great statistic that shows that the further away a school is from the city centre the fewer books it has per student. That's insane! What does the physical location of a student have to their with the propensity to read? Why should schools in the country have fewer books? If books could be delivered electronically, students everywhere would have equal and fair access to literature, but noooo... the politicians are totally spineless, and don't have the nerve to tell the publishers to provide digital copies of their works. Copyright this, renegotiate that, it's so much effort... so fuck the kids, let the country bumpkins stay illiterate, what matters is that the honourable senator's kids go to a private school with a library that has three floors and subscribes to fifty journals.
Re:Public libraries exist (Score:3, Interesting)
My local public library has lots of internet computers, however, there is a waiting list to get to them particularly in the evenings. If the parent has to spend several hours in order to sign little Bobby's field trip form, then little Bobby isn't going on that field trip.
Re:"Reply" is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes a lot more time for a parent to pick up a phone or write a letter to contact the teacher... and I think that's how a lot of teachers like it.
I agree completely. The very act of picking up the phone and finding the correct number to dial filters out 90% of the parent calls, of which 99% are of no value to the student. Even when parents email me, I give them my phone number and ask them to call.
Also, I would never "comment" online. Anything written has to be extremely factual and to the point. Anything I write to a parent, I write under the assumption that this piece of communication could end up in court somewhere, and I word it appropriately. On a phone call, the parents will hear the unvarnished truth, I almost never sugarcoat. An email message however will contain much as much jargon, waffling, and ass-covering as I can fit in the 4 or so sentences I'm willing to write.
For example, I'm willing to write a parent to say that Johnny got a 43% on his last test, but I will never write that Johnny got that 43% by texting his girlfriend in class and not completing his homework. If they want to find that out, the parents have to call. Why is that? Johnny's parents will point out that homework is not part of the curriculum, the texting is irrelevent, and that clearly I am punishing Johnny for not completing his homework and because I have some weird problem with cellphones, being a luddite like all teachers. Then they will appeal the mark to the superintendent, claiming that I have a clear bias against their son as evidenced by the email I sent them, and threaten legal action.
The previous paragraph is a true story, happened to a coworker. Parents turned a failure into a pass.
So yeah, I very rarely write to parents due to logistical (can't answer all parents, serves as a good filter keeping away those that don't really care) and legal (written stuff is dangerous) reasons.
The real world (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Electronic gadgetry used wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Teachers should be able to use technology to teach 50-60 students at a time, all with individualized instruction.
My sister's an elementary school teacher. She can use tech. She's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is the school board and the teachers' union. She's been begging the school board all year to get software she wants to use. It finally showed up last week, in March.
Report Cards *could* be damnably simple; radio buttons on a couple of web pages, with a few text boxes thrown in for detail. Instead, it's all done by hand just as it was done 150 years ago, because everybody else thinks it's alright as it is and it doesn't need to be changed. My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
Add in all the PC !@#$ that teachers have to look out for these days (they don't even want to mention "Christmas" now that there's rampant multi-cult sensitivities to consider). God help her if she gets a "slow" kid whose parents refuse to believe is slow. "MY PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE IS NOT SLOW, DAMNIT!"
School IT is close to the bottom of the barrel, right next to lawyers' and doctors' IT. School, though, has the added encumbrance of school board bureacracy and a teachers union in the mix.
Hell at the temperature of the Sun's corona.
Fact check (Score:5, Interesting)
Next time, before spewing all that venom on how the US is not spending any money on education, please check your facts:
http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd [mercatus.org]
"As we can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the United States spends more than any other country on education, an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen."
How much of this money goes to actually educating the kids after the unions take their cuts, I don't know. But saying that Republicans "demand to have a first-rate educational system while not wanting to pay a [...] dime of taxes to support it", is simply not true.
Throwing more money at the problem won't fix it.
Fix the families. Restore family values. Education and all other aspects of life will follow.
Re:Fact check (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now American culture idealizes the uneducated self starter, the charismatic salesman who becomes and executive or the untrained (or better yet, rejected) garage inventor who outsmarts all the eggheads....
Improving one's life through education is seen as the 'looser' way of getting a good life, the path that lesser people take.