I can see that I'm going to have trouble keeping up with your posts. I do want to respond to Betts Zerby's post about the first-grade classroom activity she saw.
This sort of activity is exactly the type of thing the software sales reps use to get that sense of "gee whiz" going, and I have been susceptible to that myself. But now we get into some philosophical differences. First, drawing with a drawing program involves using a mouse. A mouse is a rather blunt instrument. Six-year-olds can draw with it, but what they produce looks like what a three-year-old could do with a crayon. Still, we print it out and make a fuss over it as if it were better than anything they could do themselves with actual art supplies. I'd rather have my kids learn that what they create with their own hands is worthwhile in its own right. I'd also rather have young children working with three-dimensional, physical art supplies that have texture. But that's just me. It looks as though the teacher in this case had some actual academic objectives, and that's good. If the teacher finds that this lesson helps the kids really "get" using periods at the ends of sentences and spaces between words, then great. In the absence of any research to show whether or not computers work better than other approaches, we need to go with the teacher' s judgment. That's what we hire them for. But during my school tours last year, I found that computer use is not left up to the teachers. Computer time is a scheduled part of the week, whether or not the teacher has an academic objective that s/he believes can be best achieved with computers. If the lesson Betts describes works well, then I hope the teacher can use it for the next 20 years if s/he wants to. But in my experience, teachers generally are pushed to learn about the "newest" software, as if its newness makes it better. Some new software is useful, but much of it isn't, and you can't really tell until you've bought it and sunk the time into learning how to use it. Teachers' time is their most valuable resource, and they should be allowed to spend it on efforts they judge to have a bigger payoff. The other thing that bothered me during school tours was that so many principals sounded like sales reps for software companies. Some were totally certain that computers were the best thing for little kids and had never heard any information to the contrary. I think the district has a responsibility to inform principals that computers are unproven. Principals should not be feeding the public a line that is untrue, in turn feeding the public's desire for computers. I looked for a public school that did not place so much emphasis on computers. There is none, not even the fine arts (!!) magnet near my home. And about teaching programming: I tried to teach programming in Basic to third graders, believing it was a neat idea. It was a complete waste of time. They don't think that way yet. I think in setting policy, we have to bear in mind that children really are children, and that they have developmental stages. Fourth and fifth graders will have trouble using the Internet for self-directed research, in my opinion, because they aren't developmentally ready to figure out what is reliable information and what isn't. That's a pretty high-level critical thinking skill, which doesn't kick in until adolescence. I had to teach seventh graders why "America Online" isn't a "source." Thanks for your thoughts in and outside the forum! Heather Martens Kingfield _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
