And with the advent of the Coronavirus disrupting classes everywhere, DIGITAL LEARNING will be a useful technology to ensure that kids continue their schooling.
The cheap piece of chalk was replaced by a $10,000.00electronic pen.
Horribly written.
And interminably long.
Today, both students and teachers have access to smart mobile devices, and a bunch of distance e-learning and assessment solutions...
.............and are dumber than ever.
As educational technology has been developed and distributed, K-12 educational outcomes have steadily declined, even as spending exploded.
Class, discuss.
I've seen smartboards throughout the Army for years. I've never seen one that actually works.
Billions of dollars spent to teach children that the sky is green, the grass is blue, White Man Bad and there are 500 genders.
Smart boards are over hyped and more an outcome of unlimited budgets at these K-12 suburban schools. I think it's time to move towards digital classrooms, fire half the teacher and most administrators and cut school taxes by half to start. Sell the schools to private industry and community taxpayers who own homes will get a $3,000 - $10,000 annual windfall which will help the economy explode.
The real problem in modern education is motivating students to put down their phones and engage the subject. They tend to procrastinate and never really understand the material well and integrate the new ideas with what they already know. Think of the difference between a pile of scattered Lego bricks and a castle made from Lego bricks. To solve the problems graduates will face required building castles from bricks.
When I was in grad school we were permitted to take classes for credit or audit them. The classes I took for credit - and worked the problem sets from hell - are the ones I remember decades later. The classes I audited, I remembered very little a semester later.
My wife and daughter are both high school teachers of STEM subjects. Their biggest problem is to get their students to start assignments promptly and complete them before the exams. The ones who learn this work ethic do very well. The ones who constantly procrastinate and do not know how to articulate where they began to be confused tend to not even make an honest effort at homework or labs in class. They are wasting the tax dollars of those who pay for the school.
There is a comic strip, drawn by Jorge Cham entitled Piled Higher and Deeper, that mocks graduate student life and the problem with teaching undergrads. The funniest cartoon was the one where the frustrated teaching assistant stapled Taco Bell applications to the homework of the slackers in her class.
A shift towards Virtual Classrooms and Collaborative Learning Environment .
Wonder why the student failure and drop out rate are so high?.
As an engineer with multiple degrees in chemical and mechanical engineering who wrote not one But two theses I can assert the following
Number one you can learn anything you like by yourself either online or through Books
Number two one of the most important thing is to learn is how to write the English language well
This involves being able to write hundreds of pages proofread it organize paragraphs and thoughts move things around and do you research in the library or multiple library’s to see what others have done before you to build upon your own research
What I noticed now is everything is trying to emphasize do it the easy way the short way and that is not the way
Nicholas Carr, in “The Shallows”-—a book, naturally about how books are superior-—cites study after study that shows that readers who read printed physical page retain far more, and are far less distracted than readers reading the same exact pages on a Kindle or a screen.
The distraction levels on screens are off the charts. Moreover, screens change the WAY you read-—not top to bottom or left to right, but bouncing all around. Further, “collaborative learning’ is often a joke if the students haven’t LEARNED anything to begin with. It becomes an exercise in sharing ignorance and “feelings” rather than real instruction. The Waldorf Schools, for example, allow NO screens until 9th grade, and they are where all the tech execs send their kids.
Finally, “surveys” of what people “think they learn” as as useful as “student evaluations” in today’s universities. They don’t measure nothing.
I’m a huge advocate of homeschooling. I am not an advocate of Big Educational Publishing’s offerings. Pearson is especially bad because they attempt to force consumers to adopt their digital model and charge an arm-and-a-leg for it. They are bullies every bit as bad as Amazon without the same level of customer care. They are approaching monopoly status and should be busted up, IMHO.