Technology at school

According to a recent New York Times article, the presence of laptops in the classroom is being reconsidered.

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse…

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

I don’t feel that it’s fair to either the schools or technology to demand instant results from such a new experiment. Schools haven’t had much time to figure out the best way to incorporate technology into the educational process. The technology can be adapted to meet the needs of students and administrators both, but that takes time as well.

Computers are here to stay, and as with many new “gadgets”. the young will often be the first-adopters. We can’t expect schools to adopt a Luddite-like attitude toward computers in general and still meet the needs of the students. While I might agree that laptops in the schools create more problems than they solve, and may never be appropriate for the classroom, desktop machines that have software to control access to the internet and that can be locked down or turned off during tests, etc., need to be included in the learning process. Further, I don’t think this issue is limited to laptops or computers. The same debate is being waged over the place of cell phones on campus. New technologies require new policies, and those take time and research before being implemented.

Schools need to determine how best to use computers in the classroom. Students need to learn how best to use the internet as part of their education. Computing is not a single solution, it needs to be integrated sensibly and practically into the current system.

I also don’t believe that technology is contributing to the decline of humanity, as some pundits have suggested. It has introduced new elements into society, and some of those deviate drastically from what we’re used to. We can’t turn back the clock and pretend that computers don’t impact our lives. It achieves nothing to be overly nostalgic for times gone by and to suggest that past lifestyles would somehow be workable in our modern times.

We are no longer a rural society. There are still remnants of that lifestyle here and there, but it’s nowhere as predominant as it once was. Change may not always be perceived as good, but it is often inevitable. We are headed into a future where technology will touch on nearly every aspect of our lives. We can either learn how best to deal with that eventuality, or we can attempt to live in denial and fall further behind the curve. Everyone will have to make their own decision.

But the schools, in order to prepare students for their futures, need to accept the presence of computers in their lives and find the best way to introduce that element into the classroom.

[tags]laptops, schools, technology, New York Times[/tags]