New research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches provides an answer: For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity. The two researchers surveyed households that applied to Euro 200, a voucher distribution program in Romania designed to help poor households defray the cost of buying a computer for their children. It turns out that kids in households lucky enough to get computer vouchers spent a lot less time watching TV—but that's where the good news ends. "Vouchered" kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades, and reported lower educational aspirations than the "unvouchered" kids.
Why giving poor kids computers doesn't improve scholastic achievement
Every school district in Westchester County now pays an administrator to purchase and "integrate" technology into our kids' schools.
Then, once your district has loaded up on technology, you have to pay someone to "coordinate" the technology. So that's two administrative positions. One person to buy and integrate, one person to coordinate.
Next year the computer science teacher at the high school will no longer teach. He will coordinate.
I wonder how much we're spending on repair and maintenance. Last year I read a Financial Times estimate saying that the price of purchase is 10% of the total cost of IT.
When Ed and I made our whirlwind tour of elite private schools last winter, we found very little technology, although we did see 3 schools where all the kids had laptops and all assignments and course materials were posted online.
The Dalton School, one of the most elite private schools in the country, doesn't have SMART Boards. Their money has gone into photography studios, darkrooms, carpentry shops, dance studios -- amazing.
See also: The Computer Delusion and High-Tech Heretic.
I wonder how long it took for moveable type to displace story telling as a primary means of passing on knowledge? Seriously.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that is wrong with technology in education is that it is used as technology in education. It should be used as a multimedia knowledge delivery tool, like books on steroids.
Unfortunately nobody is writing stuff that leverages the capabilities in the technology except for gamers. Guess what, kids will play video games for hours. If there was appropriate content to run on that track you might get a race!
the "killer ap" for me was and is
ReplyDeletethe world wide web ... "books on steriods"
as paul would have it: a new
way of *reading* (and writing).
there *are* digital natives
out there ... as paul hints,
though, they don't just play
the games. they hack the code!
teaching math via with computers,
if we were actually to want to try,
would *begin* with writing programs.
kirby urner understands this
and was (probably still is)
among the most interesting posters
in the math-ed lists i used to read.
trying to be video games
is about as good an idea
as trying to be sports.
speaking about digital 'natives' I wondered what everyone thinks about the Zoombinis games.
ReplyDeleteYes, they were created by TERC.
ari-free
Don't think you want to be a game but here's a thought experiment (or tease perhaps)....
ReplyDeleteThink about a really great commercial like the Geico Ghekko. I don't know about anybody else but I always watch them all the way through, every time, including repeats. Why is that?
Now think about your average local hot shot car dealer ad that features goofy audio and video. Do you watch it more than once?
My argument is that when it comes to lesson delivery, most teachers are like the latter. Why? Well they aren't professional presenters with million dollar budgets for one thing. And for another, even if there is a teacher somewhere doing the equivalent of the Geico gheko in a unit on, say, fractions, there is no structure in education that is capable of leveraging that across the thousands of schools that might avail themselves of it.
Current technology is perfectly capable of delivering something like this but there is no 'ad agency' out there creating the kind of eye candy that can hook kids to a lesson.
With the right structure you could employ kid's idols to create engaging content under the tutelage of math and multimedia production experts. That's what I envision as the potential but today we are structurally inhibited from thinking on this scale.
As long as schools are organized as a bazillion independent classrooms we'll never get beyond employing tech as anything more than curiosities.
I would pay the big bucks for an online instructional math program taught by Jaime Escalante.
ReplyDeleteIt would be great if Bill Gates would spend some of his foundation's millions on such a project.
anon - Zoombinis is worth the money IMHO. Haven't seen a better mathematical thinking puzzle game for the price. Don't follow the age recommendation, this game can be done much younger than age 8. If the child is finding easy success with Pajama Sam he is ready for Zoombinis.
ReplyDeleteThe initial frustration factor was that some Zoombinis in the party could be lost forever if the player didn't solve a puzzle in a certain number of attempts, but later versions changed this to say that the left behind zoombinis would be well taken care of.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete" speaking about digital 'natives' I wondered what everyone thinks about the Zoombinis games.
Yes, they were created by TERC."
Zoombinis is somewhat popular among homeschoolers. Having said that, I've never met a homeschooler that was an advocate of TERC or EM.
As my husband would say, "every once in a while a blind squirrel finds a nut." I would say Zoombinis is TERCs nut.
I have purchased many educational software titles, only to have them sit on the shelf (i.e Math Blaster). No matter how you deliver it, kids know the difference between fun and games and school. Any attempt to combine them will only hold their attention for a brief period of time.
I have observed that the most popular computer games have a strong social networking componet (i.e, Runescape, WoW) - and you won't find that in edu-games.
The best use for technology in the classroom is ONE computer with access to the internet and the ability to have the content shown on a large screen. There are many great short videos (Discovery) and science experiments (Robert Krampt's Science Videos) that I would share with my students.
>>I would pay the big bucks for an online instructional math program taught by Jaime Escalante
ReplyDeleteAgree. What is needed are master teachers...people with the mathematical content knowledge, ability to carefully select problem sets, tightly mapped curriculum, and the ability to push the students to develop their thinking ability from day one of pre-K.
The entertainer teacher is sooo distracting that many students do not get past the entertainment portion to the content. Perhaps some do push the students to develop the thinking skills and the ability to clarify the muddier parts of the show, but the ones my kid had last year (gr. 6) did not. His math test scores plunged like a rock, although his attention was riveted on the show. To my kid, having an entertainer teacher for math was like watching a magician doing tricks - watch enough and the audience can repeat the motions, but few in the audience will be figuring how to do the tricks as the brain is busy processing all the visuals and the soundtrack. And of course, no one gets the props to play with, a backstage tour, or a script to refer to....so once the show is over, you are back, in the dark.
I'm looking forward to more computer aided instruction, such as the Art of Problem Solving courses.
>>I would pay the big bucks for an online instructional math program taught by Jaime Escalante
ReplyDeleteSometimes I wish that the Learning Company folks would branch out more from their current college-level liberal arts curriculum courses. They have some amazing teachers. (Let me recommend the John McWhorter language lecture seres again. It is phenomenal!) I seem to recall that they do carry some high school level courses, but I haven't heard any reviews.
There are many video based math programs (some online, some DVD, some both). Teaching Textbooks, Chalkdust Math, VideoText, and Thinkwell w/ Professor Edward Burger (Teaching Co. lecturer). Homeschoolers have been using these for years. Like having a teacher in your living room.
ReplyDeleteThey receive very good reviews. Chalkdust has a SAT prep DVD set that is very well liked.
I worked for a time in the field of Physical Oceanography. It's an arcane discipline with not very many participants. It deals with water movement on size scales that are planetary and temporal scales of billions of years. I realized, a few years into this endeavor, that people don't deal very well with scale.
ReplyDeleteWe tend to be uncomfortable with things outside our range of personal experience. A lifetime is comfortable and rational to think about. Four and a half billion years, the life of our planet, is not so comfortable to contemplate.
It's so easy to forget that a lifetime is like a single flash from an invisible firefly. Moveable type originated in China, 400 years before Gutenberg's enhancements. The type was set with clay (ceramic) and persisted in China for 800 years, well after Gutenberg.
The lesson in this for me is that even though inovation can break onto the scene in what seems a single flash, It really takes many lifetimes to mature. On the way, I'm sure, there are more naysayers than proponents. Then a funny thing happens (because we don't do scale). The technology (in some incarnation) becomes ubiquitous and everybody forgets how we got to that point.
I imagine new technology like a super nova. It bursts on the scene and sends out a shockwave across the universe. Behind it are its mature offspring that we embrace and subsume into our lives. On the crest of the wave there are naysayers. Ahead of it there are things we can't know.
The naysayers are riding the wave, unable to see that the technology we are using today isn't done with us yet, and unwilling to guess where it might lead.
Post Script:
ReplyDeleteThe U.S.A. is a super nova whose shockwave has extended to 0.000005% of the life of our planet.
Happy 4th of July.
Paul - ! That's funny -- that was Ed's first version of the Statue of Liberty piece. There are people all over the world who've built replicas of the Statue, and they do so to stake a moral claim to freedom.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is a major part of the reason why education politics are so important to a lot of us. What set America apart from the rest of the world - and no longer does - was the fact that we educated everyone.
Other countries have learned this lesson from us and are doing it better.
A couple of weeks ago I had an unpleasant conversation with a h.s. teacher from a high-performing school with a large population of minority students (different state). He was very hostile to NCLB and told me unapologetically that, "Black students don't have the cultural background to learn."
When I said the schools have a responsibility to teach all students regardless of their cultural backgrounds, he said, "If they expect us to teach black students, we need more resources."
That exchange was chilling.
Am I to conclude that until the passage of NCLB he assumed that his school had no professional or ethical duty to educate black students?
Has that been the operating principle in his school?
You'd probably be safe in assuming that his low expectations might just be presenting him with a self fulfilling prophecy.
ReplyDeleteIn this teacher's particular case things are complicated, and I can't sess (sp?) out what's going on, exactly.
ReplyDeleteHe's highly educated & teaches only very advanced, accelerated kids. (That's my sense.)
He also has a child in the lower schools, who is being drilled to death so the lower schools can meet their AYP.
He's angry about "creativity" being taken out of the schools, and told me that high school students can't learn if they don't have creativity.
This is a very educated guy.
The grade schools are on the high school's case because the grade schools are meeting AYP and then the black students are falling apart when they get to the high school.
So: this teacher has finger-pointing from the same elementary schools that are probably sacrificing his daughter to AYP.
I don't know how to put all of that together. I don't think he's teaching any black students (which is a worry in and of itself), but I don't think he'd have the attitudes he has if the high school were committed to teaching the black students as well as the white...
The whole thing was upsetting. This teacher is pretty close to being embittered by NCLB, and he's not teaching black or Hispanic students.
I just checked their numbers -- this is an unusual school, I think. Very high number of economically disadvantaged kids along with very advantaged, high-SES kids.
ReplyDeletejeez
ReplyDeletejust looked at some more of their things....they seem to be doing "professional learning communities" without the focus on results (haven't posted about that yet, but will get to it)
and they've created their own reform math h.s. program
etc
Terri-
ReplyDeleteLearning Company has a chemistry course for high school kids that looks terrific (iirc).
Anonymous- thanks for the titles!
Paul - You brought up the issue of when people shifted to print as dominant over oral culture.
ReplyDeleteI asked Ed, who said that "The short answer is that it took several centuries."
The spread of literacy was pretty slow.
There was also a long period in which people who could read read out loud to people who couldn't.
There's a new book out about the slaves during Civil War & their intense desire to read.
Often, whites would spell words in front of the slaves to keep them from knowing what they were talking about. There was a story about a slave who could memorize all the spelling, go home, and spell it out to her uncle who was literate.
He'd tell them what it meant.
This was all during the Civil War, when the slaves wanted to know what was happening on the front & their masters didn't want them to know.