Teacher give those kids a tablet!
Filed Under (Software, Technology) by Susy on 17-01-2007
Because I’m a total tablet nut, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for tablets to be used instead of conventional laptops. Time posted an interesting article about the problems with America’s school system and a lot of their attention was devoted to outdated teaching methods and the lack of technology. My passion is improving science education and I immediately began to brainstorm ways to solve many of the problems with current American educational methods that Time was commenting on.
Let me begin with a disclaimer before anyone tries to rip my head off. What follows is a description of an ideal world where all school systems were funded equally and received adequate funding. I am a realist, however, and I understand the difficulties with deploying new technology in schools. The issues of cost both in acquiring new technology and training teachers and administrators to use new technology can make any deployment of new technology seem daunting. But I think the benefits warrant the cost.
Let’s take a field trip to what I like to call the Modern School. In this school, students are given a small slate tablet and a portable keyboard at the beginning of school. That’s it. These students don’t have to carry backpacks around all day because all of their textbooks are in ebook format and are preloaded onto their tablets. They can annotate their textbooks without getting into trouble. In fact, their teachers encourage them to take notes in their textbooks! They can highlight and make lecture notes without getting in trouble for defacing rental textbooks. Students can look up words that give them trouble using dictionary software and get the correct pronunciation for the words as well. Look at those SAT vocabulary scores going up!
Lectures are different at the Modern School. Teachers post worksheets on the class website at the beginning and students work along with the teacher in filling them in. Teachers don’t mind tablets in lectures. They can see that their students are paying attention to the lecture and they don’t have to talk over the background noise of 30 keyboards clicking. Since these students have OneNote and its recording functions, they feel comfortable participating more in class. They aren’t worried about missing a few notes because they have the lecture recorded and they know that the teacher is recording her screen notes as well and will post them after class.
The teachers at the Modern School don’t like lecturing. They know that the average attention span is about twenty minutes. They break up their lectures with different activities. Students participate in group work- made easier by the ability to send files to each other and make edits to each others’ work. They also participate in activities and chats with their sister class in Japan. One of their recent assignments was a paper written with a partner in their sister class. Because of the ability to track changes in a document, both teachers were able to see the work that their students had done and grade accordingly. The students learned how to work with international partners which will help them when they are ready for the business world.
Okay, let’s get back to the current world. Every bit of technology I described exists today. When students graduate from college, they are going into this world. Business is increasingly project-driven and teamwork-oriented and having international clients and partners is a way of life. So why are our schools stuck in the 19th century (and yes I DO mean the 1800s)? Yes, the deployment of this technology will be somewhat challenging. Any change is. However, we will be preparing students for the “real world” and I think that’s reward enough.
business, education, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc
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