White House Calls On Kids To Film High-Tech Education

theodp writes "Over at WhiteHouse.gov, Bill Nye has issued a call for entries for the first-ever White House Student Film Festival, a video contest for K-12 students, whose finalists will have their short films shown at the White House. From the website: "The President has an assignment for you: Our schools are more high-tech than ever. There are laptops in nearly every classroom. You can take an online course on Japanese — and then video chat with a kid from Japan. You can learn about geometry through an app on your iPad. So, what does it all mean? We're looking for videos that highlight the power of technology in schools. Your film should address at least one of the following themes: 1. How you currently use technology in your classroom or school. 2. The role technology will play in education in the future."

Spend more, because kids aren't learning more

[Nyder]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ [cbsnews.com]

While the USA spends more on education, we still aren't learning better then anyone else.

Funny how Lincoln educated himself with a piece of coal and a shovel to write on (according to stories I was told in school), yet today kids have to have an tablet to learn?

Maybe the kids could do a high tech film about how throwing money at technology doesn't actually improve education.

Re:You're addressing the wrong problem.

[0123456]

The people that think technology is the problem with our schools aren't addressing the real problem: The fact that our culture is anti-learning, anti-education, pro-sky-fairies and anti-critical thinking.

Well, yes. But that's compulsory schooling for you. Kids are forced to sit in boring classrooms for the best part of twenty years being indoctrinated by left-wing, unionised government employees so they'll vote for left-wing governments who'll demand higher taxes to pay teachers more.

You need to get kids to enjoy learning, get them reading and writing, then get them to learn to think rationally and analyze things critically.

Kids naturally enjoy learning and want to learn as much as possible. Takes years of teaching to beat that out of them.

What these people really don't want to hear is that 'high tech' is making schools themselves irrelevant when a kid who can read can find just about any information they want either online or in a good library.

WRONG SOLUTION

[litehacksaur111]

Technology is not going to fix the problem of parents not being involved in their children's education. People learned how to spell and add numbers before there were computers, tablets, Ipads, etc. Somehow everyone thinks that spending more on technology or blaming teachers in going to fix education. The problem begins and ends at home with the parents getting involved in their kids education to motivate them to learn. One of my favorite quotes regarding this is "The man who learns only when and what he is taught in school has truly learning nothing at all." The main problem with education is motivating students and that cannot be solved with teachers, small class sizes, or technology. END RANT

Re:Spend more, because kids aren't learning more

[femtobyte]

The US has to spend more on education because it spends so much less on providing a decent quality of life for overwhelming numbers of children outside school. Lack of living wage and labor protections, along with a generally terrible social safety net and public commons, means that millions of kids arrive at the school door in no condition to learn. When you can't afford nutritious meals at home, regular healthcare, or a clean and calm environment to sleep in, or access to extra-curricular educational and cultural enrichment, it's no wonder the schools have trouble producing decent results. Countries with uniformly better educational outcomes aren't severely cutting corners on the rest of the fabric of society, making students suffer environments of severe inequality, exploitation, and poverty. The entire degraded societal fabric of poverty and inequality makes changes in any one area seem so futile and expensive in the US --- which is used as an argument against improving any one area. But, really, you need a mass overhaul of the whole, to build the foundations of a functioning society (rather than an exploitative oligarchy).