having run a high school computer lab and taught multimedia there its
really true that they are oversold and underused. it takes a lot of
creativity and flexibility to find when and where you get a hight bang
for the buck to use computers in the classroom, otherwise you are just
spending a lot of time and money that yields negative learning
returns... i do fear taking the other extreme can be just as
problematic.
its the content, stupid was my old motto. folks get wrapped up in to
the tech use/process and forget that its sposta be about the learning
unless you are in a specialized tech class. for some things you can do
some wonderfully engaging things with computers and tech in the
classroom, but its really limited in its scope and requires resources,
planning, and experience to do it for a positive educational gain. was
actually a hard concept to get across to some teachers and made some
battles, but the shining examples eventually won them over to doing
more planning and limits on how/when the computers were used. others
hated all technology and it took a time and work to show them some
places where it could really help.
its like most things the simple rules of, everything in moderation;
right tool, right task; there is no magic bullet /there is no free
lunch; tend to be such good guides.
so much of this stuff gets jammed into education by powers above. in
the late 90s i gave a presentation to the heads of all the bay bells
about interactive multimedia education. they were all hot with the
roll out of interactive services via their new systems they thought
that they could make millions by delivering/selling educational
materials via tv/computer. i showed them really cool things we had
done that were very successful, and they were really drooling, but i
left the last third of the talk to interactively discuss with them the
other shoe(s) to drop. first these were in very specific, cherry
picked places where technology really worked great and that was not
true of the vast majority of things to be taught/exhibited, then the
cost to develop content to this cool interactive level (jaws dropped).
then finally i had them estimate how much they spent on educational
materials themselves (id say most of these guys were in the 7-8 figure
range of income) and it was pretty pathetically small. i then
contrasted ok you make over a million dollars a year what do you think
someone making $40k will spend. big silence. i told them these were
not a deal breakers, but just moderators and that they needed to
choose wisely where and when technology should be inserted into
education to be successful. it was interesting chatting with them over
the rest of the weekend event as many admitted they were ready to just
try and jam this down the tubes w/o ever thinking about these things.
was an eye opener for me at how things were done at that level too...
cheers
jeff
On Oct 25, 2011, at 1:00 PM, use-livecode-requ...@lists.runrev.com
wrote:
This book is about 10 years old but is still a sobering read:
Larry Cuban
Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.hull.ac.uk/php/edskas/Cuban%2520article%2520-%2520oversold.pdf&pli=1
I think I also recently read that some Maine school district that
decided to buy an iPad for every one of its KINDERGARTENERS is the
same
that previously bought iBooks for an older grade despite no evidence
showing that the iBooks improved student performance.
Judy
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