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The thing about schools and computers is that it really is a losing battle on the part of the school. They wish to provide the students with easy to access to t
by Everlag 13y ago
The thing about schools and computers is that it really is a losing battle on the part of the school. They wish to provide the students with easy to access to tech to allow them to become intimately familiar with it to advance in the world.
Then they have students use computers for the most simplistic things. Typing up essays and getting to piece together a video in windows movie maker is the absolute extent of what the above average Canadian high school can do. They don't understand, they being the old guard of teaching, the things a modern computer can do because they think in analogue methodologies, not digital.
Only within the last few years have we replaced overheads and transparencies with 'smart boards' and projectors and even then, few teachers have been found to use them in any manner other than an even more LIMITED version of the traditional overhead. Very recently the younger teachers have built small wordpress sites or shared google drives for notes because of ease and personal comfort which is a giant step forward but moot for all it does to solve the issue of the unsavvy teachers.
If a school were to wise up and switch to open source, the amount of headache from staff is simply impossible to imagine. The students can understand the rapid pace of technology and the very new or extremely impassioned teachers can cope with it where the older teachers throw their hands into the air and bring out the transparencies. A billion dollars to the person to come up with a way of easily transitioning them to modern method.
Sorry for the rant, but education hits close to home for me.
- waster 13y agoHave to agree that teachers are already overwhelmed, by and large; and that IT staff tends to be minimal, most certainly underpaid, and possibly under-qualified (in the case of teachers moonlighting as IT staff in their spare time). Many people who don't use tech a lot (many teachers!) aren't really familiar with open source. They learn the big suites, because that's what they learned in school. It's a cycle. On the optimistic side: MOOCs and the like may change things. Crafty, budget-conscious teachers who have a tech bent may change things (raspberry pi, anyone?). Clever startups may change things. I'm with Everlag: A billion dollars to the person to come up with something that helps them transition.
- pyre 13y ago| Only within the last few years have we replaced | overheads and transparencies with 'smart boards' | and projectors and even then, few teachers have | been found to use them in any manner other than | an even more LIMITED version of the traditional | overhead. Back in 2001, my university microeconomics course was delivered via overhead transparencies (rather than Powerpoint like most other classes). But even the usage of transparencies was too much for this professor. All of his 'slides' were just transparencies which he had used a wet-erase marker to write dense paragraphs of text, which was mostly what he was reading back to us. Not only was this worse than most usage of PowerPoint that people complain about, he didn't even take the time to maybe type up these 'slides' and print them on transparencies (or go to a local office supply store / print shop to get it done). Point being some people will use the tools presented to them (even very basic tools) in the most bone-headed way possible. It's just a fact of life.