Quote from Seek10:
Why is this obsessive, excessive dependence on the cool new dangerous, dumb tools, that die that moment they drop on floor or for a drop of water. simple. Apple guys feed the school district or educational administrators , that becomes norm to suck the money from property taxes which reach the tens of thousands of dollars in some townships in NJ. School teacher unions have excessive manipulative power in state politics and every body feeding each other as if there is no tomorrow, sucking every thing including the future of the kids they are supposed to shape.
Many - or even most - teachers do not want this technology because it can be used to replace them. The change in curriculum, the dumbing down of students, the campaign to rate teachers based on student test scores, are all corporate driven. Corporations hate teachers unions just as they hate all unions. They want to replace public schools with private ones, (charters),and pay teachers almost nothing and work them twice as hard.
Corporations were behind No Child Left Behind to usher in charter schools once public schools were rated failing. They also came up with the protocol that would insure that the public schools failed. In many cases, these charters use public school buildings without paying any rent for them, and do not accept struggling students. Their aim to to eradicate public education - just as they want to do away with the post office - to replace both infrastructures with corporate ones.
It's a total scam, and of course everyone blames the teachers and their unions
quote from hjackson:
It's a tool, I don't see the sense in destroying it. I can see that some older people might not see the value in it, but much of what's done or can be done with computers is reading and writing. Our tools are extensions of our bodies, you wouldn't destroy your writing utensils.
If they are misused, computers are much more a distraction than a tool. There is so much going on on line that the mind has difficulty focusing. I use a pen or a pencil to write something on paper, but after I'm done, I don't linger for hours with my writing implements. I go on to something else. But it's not like that with computers.
Computers can be real challenges to parental authority because they're so seductive, the sound can be lowered, and the parent often has no idea to which sites the child is going, who he/she is talking to, what values are being inculcated etc.
Going back to computers in classrooms, I was hired a few years ago to assist a former colleague conduct, (I can't say teach because the role for the teacher was merely to assign finite short online passages according to grade level and monitor scores), a reading class that was online. Interestingly enough, it was found that the students did not want to advance because once the reading level went up, the work got more difficult. Since the reading passages were unrelated, and there was no reinforcement or reason to read any passage, it must have seemed to the students just random work that led nowhere. They had no real world motivation for wanting to improve their reading skills, so they didn't.
In terms of cost, the school had to buy the computers, set aside a special room for them, hire me, pay for the online curriculum and for the training of the teachers. The school also had to pay to fix the keys that the kids pulled off the keyboard. Apparently, it must have been more rewarding to do that than to read the passages. But the students couldn't go off into cyberspace - the program kept them glued to the reading passages that they had no interest in reading.
