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Every Kiddie Needs a School Laptop
Topic Started: Mar 3 2012, 10:02 PM (357 Views)
Mason
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http://bangordailynews.com/2012/03/03/news/state/mother-daughter-claim-noble-high-school-students-using-school-laptops-to-go-on-facebook-make-videos-and-watch-porn/

One kid I know of was stealing Ipods and loading songs on them using the School Intranet system - and he was selling the stolen Ipods on Ebay - making a nice chunk of change (an amount that eventually shocked many).

Kids and their parents informed the school he was stealing their IPODS - and the school's canned response was - you're not supposed to have IPOD's on campus. The thief and bully had immunity in school, it seemed.


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Edited by Mason, Mar 3 2012, 10:02 PM.
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cks
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The equipping of students with laptops was not thoroughly thought out. (we have a laptop program where I teach...it has been incrementally introduced so this coming school year will be the first where I will have students with laptops). The teacher is charged with monitoring how students are using the laptops (this from the teacher's small laptop screen) all while teaching. Does the word "impossible" jump immediately to mind? Students also have the capability to film anything that goes on in the classroom and then post it - this the teacher cannot control - well, yes, the teacher can say do not do this - but how can one know whether filming is taking place and if and where it is being posted. Yes, the word "impossible" jumps once again to mind.

The computer is just one more tool - not the be all and end all - in the educational process. We are supposed to be paper free - everything done on the computer. Yet, I can tell you, grading papers on the computer takes inordinantly more time (I have been experimenting with it this year - having one class send things to me from their home computers). My colleagues who are teaching with computers complain about the cheating that occurs on tests taken on the computer as students, before sending the test, copy and send it to kids in other classes.
The use of computer based instruction is an attempt to put more students in a class and allow for more "individualized" instruction with no idea how the teacher is to do this in a twenty-four hour day. I find that students, during their study hall (there is one in my classroom during my planning period so I see quite a bit) use their laptop not for school work but for shopping, playing video games, emailing friends at other schools (the sending of blast messages has been a problem that almost shut down the school's server several times this year) and of course there is the problem of cyber bullying.
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cks
Mar 4 2012, 08:09 AM
The equipping of students with laptops was not thoroughly thought out. (we have a laptop program where I teach...it has been incrementally introduced so this coming school year will be the first where I will have students with laptops). The teacher is charged with monitoring how students are using the laptops (this from the teacher's small laptop screen) all while teaching. Does the word "impossible" jump immediately to mind? Students also have the capability to film anything that goes on in the classroom and then post it - this the teacher cannot control - well, yes, the teacher can say do not do this - but how can one know whether filming is taking place and if and where it is being posted. Yes, the word "impossible" jumps once again to mind.

The computer is just one more tool - not the be all and end all - in the educational process. We are supposed to be paper free - everything done on the computer. Yet, I can tell you, grading papers on the computer takes inordinantly more time (I have been experimenting with it this year - having one class send things to me from their home computers). My colleagues who are teaching with computers complain about the cheating that occurs on tests taken on the computer as students, before sending the test, copy and send it to kids in other classes.
The use of computer based instruction is an attempt to put more students in a class and allow for more "individualized" instruction with no idea how the teacher is to do this in a twenty-four hour day. I find that students, during their study hall (there is one in my classroom during my planning period so I see quite a bit) use their laptop not for school work but for shopping, playing video games, emailing friends at other schools (the sending of blast messages has been a problem that almost shut down the school's server several times this year) and of course there is the problem of cyber bullying.
Here's the high tech program at the local high school where I live. I covered the story in my newsblog several times and for the most part am impressed with the results. The students I interviewed seemed highly motivated and the powers-that-be swear to me those in the class were not "geeks" nor hand-picked gifted types.

Have you had any experience with this program or heard about anyone else's results with it?

http://www.newtechruston.com/

http://www.newtechnetwork.org/
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Duke parent 2004
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The colleges of education, having temporarily stalled in concocting theoretical gimmickry to justify themselves, now advance modern technology to camouflage the failure of our ludicrously expensive schools to give their students a grounding in the tools of thinking.. That grounding, of course, requires hard and persistent work on the part of both teachers and students.. Increasingly burdened by tasks once the responsibility of parents, teachers crawl home after a long day of "activities" and "interactions" that often contribute little or nothing to improving the literacy of students.. And students whose spans of attention have already been compromised by video games, texting, television, and the Internet surmise that books and their contents deserve no more respect than school authorities seem willing to give them.

The schools have been deteriorating a long time, and not just in America.. That deterioration has not yet pushed us into a new barbarism.. But who knows how much longer our civilization can tolerate such slovenliness, such cavalier presumption that somehow we'll muddle through?. Perhaps the Internet will save us, although I wonder how folks not accustomed to careful reading will discriminate among its multifarious offerings.

I note here that in the late 1880s, less than half a century before Germany succumbed to the virulent idiocies of Nazism, Nietzsche leveled some choice criticisms at what had been deemed by many "experts" the best educational system in the world:

Learning to think:. in our schools one no longer has any idea of this.. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out.. One need only read German books:. there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery--that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing.. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle?. The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping--that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such.. The German has no fingers for nuances. (from Twilight of the Idols, Kaufmann translation)

How utterly quaint Nietzsche would sound to our modern educators, equipped as they are with all the pedogogical research of the past hundred years and all the whiz-bang gadgets of the past twenty.. And if you doubt this conjecture, I propose you champion a reform movement whose battle cry will be:. "Back to the Nuances!"
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comelately

Duke parent 2004
Mar 4 2012, 12:19 PM
The colleges of education, having temporarily stalled in concocting theoretical gimmickry to justify themselves, now advance modern technology to camouflage the failure of our ludicrously expensive schools to give their students a grounding in the tools of thinking.. That grounding, of course, requires hard and persistent work on the part of both teachers and students.. Increasingly burdened by tasks once the responsibility of parents, teachers crawl home after a long day of "activities" and "interactions" that often contribute little or nothing to improving the literacy of students.. And students whose spans of attention have already been compromised by video games, texting, television, and the Internet surmise that books and their contents deserve no more respect than school authorities seem willing to give them.

The schools have been deteriorating a long time, and not just in America.. That deterioration has not yet pushed us into a new barbarism.. But who knows how much longer our civilization can tolerate such slovenliness, such cavalier presumption that somehow we'll muddle through?. Perhaps the Internet will save us, although I wonder how folks not accustomed to careful reading will discriminate among its multifarious offerings.

I note here that in the late 1880s, less than half a century before Germany succumbed to the virulent idiocies of Nazism, Nietzsche leveled some choice criticisms at what had been deemed by many "experts" the best educational system in the world:

Learning to think:. in our schools one no longer has any idea of this.. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out.. One need only read German books:. there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery--that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing.. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle?. The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping--that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such.. The German has no fingers for nuances. (from Twilight of the Idols, Kaufmann translation)

How utterly quaint Nietzsche would sound to our modern educators, equipped as they are with all the pedogogical research of the past hundred years and all the whiz-bang gadgets of the past twenty.. And if you doubt this conjecture, I propose you champion a reform movement whose battle cry will be:. "Back to the Nuances!"
I am sorry to (sort of) contradict you... but. This passage (at least to my mind) says more about Nietzsche (and perhaps other philosophers) than about Germany, or Germans, or anything else. Max Von Laue, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Einstein - all were born about 1880. Werner Heisenberg was born a bit later, and Fritz Haber a little earlier... Politically, it was the late Bismarck period - and Bismarck (whatever his other faults) was the very definition of subtlety. German was rapidly becoming THE language of science!

This is not to defend our dysfunctional school system - or the Nazis, for that matter. But at the very top, we are doing OK - better than OK. To give myself as an example, the VERY best of the students I encounter (I am a professor) have always been Americans - most of them from public schools. It is hard to keep a good student down, and our system seems to be sufficiently flexible to tolerate the brightest kids.

What we need are well-paid, competent teachers; schools with real curricula (as opposed to liberal gobbledegook); order in the classroom (practically speaking, this means ability to get rid of disruptive students, and tracking of the unacceptably dumb ones); more emphasis on supporting bright students - as opposed to nearly total concentration on helping the weak ones (educating smart kids is a better investment). All low-tech, common sense, fairly obvious things... forget the pedagogical "research"! :dsk:
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Mason
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Liberals believe in throwing other people's money at things.

Barack Owebama said that new brick and mortar construction ALONE helps students achieve better grades.

The reality is - when the students don't improve after some lavish Gov't Giveaway - they simply change the testing methodology.


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Duke parent 2004
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comelately
Mar 4 2012, 02:12 PM
I am sorry to (sort of) contradict you... but. This passage (at least to my mind) says more about Nietzsche (and perhaps other philosophers) than about Germany, or Germans, or anything else. Max Von Laue, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Einstein - all were born about 1880. Werner Heisenberg was born a bit later, and Fritz Haber a little earlier... Politically, it was the late Bismarck period - and Bismarck (whatever his other faults) was the very definition of subtlety. German was rapidly becoming THE language of science!

This is not to defend our dysfunctional school system - or the Nazis, for that matter. But at the very top, we are doing OK - better than OK. To give myself as an example, the VERY best of the students I encounter (I am a professor) have always been Americans - most of them from public schools. It is hard to keep a good student down, and our system seems to be sufficiently flexible to tolerate the brightest kids.
Nietzsche, too, was a product of the German educational system he found wanting.. I'm not as comfortable as you seem to be judging a system by the VERY BEST who emerge from it, as they often excel in spite of their schooling, which, in fact, appears to have been the case with Einstein.. Nevertheless, I agree with you that German academic science in the late 19th Century was less prone to sloppy thinking and obfuscation than were philosophy and the other humanities.. Even Nietzsche concedes this in several passages of his diatribe against Christianity and German philosophy, The Antichrist, which appeared in 1895.

I cannot gainsay your high opinion of American students beyond saying that it seems to be far from universal.. My Dukie son, who earned his Ph. D. in computer vision, tells me he was especially valuable at the robotics firm in southern California for which he worked just short of three years, because he didn't need to "return home" periodically to revalidate his visa.. And at Microsoft, a much larger firm where he has been employed these past eight months, he is one of the few Americans in his highly specialized and growing research group.. Just two weeks ago he told me of the group's newest hire, a fellow currently at the University of Toulouse.. If his work experience is typical, I can readily understand why some very consequential components of American business haven't lined up behind immigration reform.
Edited by Duke parent 2004, Mar 6 2012, 07:58 AM.
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cks
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Duke parent 2004
Mar 4 2012, 03:42 PM
comelately
Mar 4 2012, 02:12 PM
I am sorry to (sort of) contradict you... but. This passage (at least to my mind) says more about Nietzsche (and perhaps other philosophers) than about Germany, or Germans, or anything else. Max Von Laue, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Einstein - all were born about 1880. Werner Heisenberg was born a bit later, and Fritz Haber a little earlier... Politically, it was the late Bismarck period - and Bismarck (whatever his other faults) was the very definition of subtlety. German was rapidly becoming THE language of science!

This is not to defend our dysfunctional school system - or the Nazis, for that matter. But at the very top, we are doing OK - better than OK. To give myself as an example, the VERY best of the students I encounter (I am a professor) have always been Americans - most of them from public schools. It is hard to keep a good student down, and our system seems to be sufficiently flexible to tolerate the brightest kids.
Nietzsche, too, was a product of the German educational system he found wanting.. I'm not as comfortable as you seem to be judging a system by the VERY BEST who emerge from it, as they often excel in spite of their schooling, which, in fact, appears to have been the case with Einstein.. Nevertheless, I agree with you that German academic science in the late 19th Century was less prone to sloppy thinking and obfuscation than were philosophy and the other humanities.. Even Nietzsche concedes this in several passages of his diatribe against Christianity and German philosophy, The Antichrist, which appeared in 1895.

I cannot gainsay your high opinion of American students beyond saying that it seems to be far from universal.. My Dukie son, who earned his Ph. D. in computer vision, tells me he was especially valuable at the robotics firm in southern California for which he worked just short of three years because he didn't need to "return home" periodically to revalidate his visa.. And at Microsoft, a much larger firm where he has been employed these past eight months, he is one of the few Americans in his highly specialized and growing research group.. Just two weeks ago he told me of the group's newest hire, a fellow currently at the University of Toulouse.. If his work experience is typical, I can readily understand why some very consequential components of American business haven't lined up behind immigration reform.
Many intelligent young men and women succeed in spite of the primary and secondary education that they receive. Even those teachers of long employment who have tried to maintain high standards find those efforts negated by the prvailing educational philosophy under which they are forced to labor.

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