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Computing

Wiring the classroom

November 5, 1998
Web posted at: 5:00 PM EST

by Stannie Holt

From...


(IDG) -- If you went to school in the 1960s or 1970s, you may remember the first clunky attempts to computerize education, such as crude flash-card programs to drill multiplication tables or the huge, noisy dot-matrix printer in the corner of the computer lab that spewed out the hard copy of your laborious 10-line Basic program.

Although computers already were important in business and research, for a long time they were rarities in the classroom -- either toys or vocational-technical training tools.

Now advances in technology, most notably the Internet but also CD-ROMs and better software, are converging with the changing concepts of education and shifting priorities in the labor market to make computers a staple for nearly every grade and subject.

Along the way, computers are changing the typical classroom from a traditional factory-like model into something more open, flexible, and self-guided, with multiple sources of information and authority.

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Computing Priorities

New technology is creating utopian hopes that all students will become eager learners and teachers, mastering challenging curriculums custom-tailored for their needs while having the world's libraries, art galleries, and concert halls literally at their fingertips. They will do dissections of virtual cadavers, go on virtual field trips to a salt marsh or Mars, and deliver their term papers via Macromedia Director. Eventually they'll become the self-starting, cooperative problem solvers and "knowledge navigators" that employers want.

Well, maybe.

Beleaguered taxpayers often consider computers a frill. David Gelernter, Yale computer science professor and commentator, has called Vice President Al Gore's drive to get every U.S. public school hooked up to the Internet "toxic quackery" because this diverts resources from the three R's and does not give students the skills and discipline they really need.

Others worry that too much emphasis on screens and modems could produce a generation of red-eyed, twitchy misfits with the attention span of squirrels.

But across the country, thousands of school districts, serving millions of students, have invested large chunks of their money and staff time in projects ranging from teaching kindergartners to read to allowing teenagers to have hands-on participation in university research. The Computer Curriculum Corp., a major courseware vendor, estimates that there are now about 7 million computers in U.S. schools.

"The three R's have been expanded to include computers. The community demands it; computers are not a frill," says Douglas Buchanan, director of educational services at the West Des Moines K-12 School District in Iowa. The affluent, suburban district of approximately 9,000 students is a leader in computer use.

"Because the world has gone this way, we would be foolish not to give our kids access to these machines," says Betty Harrison, superintendent of the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, in Ontario, Calif.

Radical Change

The first thing to realize about bringing in computers is that they'll change the whole shape of the enterprise, whether it's a school or a business, experts say.

The traditional classroom, with a "sage on the stage" lecturing to evenly spaced rows of students sitting at their desks and isolated from each other, mirrored the assembly-line economy of the early 20th century, says Stephen Gerkey, a former teacher and administrator who is now an educational consultant at IBM, in Santa Fe, N.M.

Now employers want workers who don't wait for the factory whistle before they start to work, and who independently and creatively solve problems, work well with others, and have the ability to juggle several tasks at once, Gerkey says.

Emerging classrooms reflect these expectations. Students work in groups or solo, with multiple centers of interest and links to the outside world, whether with use of a library card or a browser, Gerkey says. The teacher, no longer the sole source of authority and approval, is more of a facilitator and guide of students' efforts.

"The monitors are sort of windows into the way kids are thinking," says David Dwyer, vice president of advanced learning technology at Computer Curriculum and a former education scientist at Apple. "You don't want to sit down and lecture them, you want to give them time in this wonderful interactive environment."

Quoting management guru Peter Drucker, Gerkey says it doesn't make sense to automate if "you're going to be twice as fast ... doing the same old dumb stuff." Schools that don't first figure out what problems they want to solve may waste huge amounts of money and effort with ill-informed implementations, he warns.

Gerkey says he has seen schools where hundreds of computers sat unused and other schools where elaborate machines were used solely to replace flash cards or typewriters.

The reason for this waste? Not enough teacher training, "the most important investment of all," Gerkey says. "People, especially educators, need to make enormously complicated changes if they're going to use teaching and learning technologies effectively and help America's children do the same."

But many school districts don't budget even a small fraction of what they spend on hardware and software for teacher training, though many studies have shown that it takes three years to five years to go from novice to power-user level, Gerkey says.

Training is important because no program, no matter how well-designed, will teach itself, Gerkey says.

"The equipment does not make ineffective teachers better," Harrison agrees.

But for good, motivated teachers, technology can increase effectiveness and grant access to new resources -- such as letting students participate in NASA's radio-interference experiments at the Palomar Observatory, Harrison adds.

Individual Attention

The major forms of computer technology in the classroom include CD-ROMs, mostly encyclopedia and other reference works; packaged curriculum programs such as Reader Rabbit or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing; desktop applications for word processing, graphics, and so on; e-mail; and the World Wide Web.

One major advantage that computing technology brings with it is individualized lessons.

"As a teacher, I can have 30 students and 30 separate educational plans for them. And I can't do that without technology," says David Widener, director of information technologies at the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), in Arlington, Va.

Programs also are good for drilling facts and practicing skills, particularly in subjects that are very structured, such as arithmetic and beginning reading, educators say.

Multimedia capabilities also mean that information has more ways to reach students. This can help those students who don't pay much attention to print media but might be more attracted by sound, motion, or real-world activities.

A lesson on, say, Martin Luther King Jr.'s role in the civil rights movement is much more gripping on a CD-ROM than out of a textbook, Buchanan says.

"The multimedia allows kids to see him, to hear him speak -- that, you don't get off paper," Buchanan says.

The ability to communicate beyond the classroom is also changing expectations.

"Technology today is on the verge of just exploding the communications field and turning the global village into reality," Buchanan says.

For example, in Buchanan's district, 12th-grade honors English students act as online writing tutors for ninth-graders on another campus, and middle-schoolers have pen pals in other states.

In Harrison's district, students correspond with other teenagers in Europe and Latin America.

The Brentwood Union Elementary School District, in California's Contra Costa County, is one of many school districts that offers e-mail to teachers and families so they can check homework assignments, confirm absences, and send notices about an upcoming field trip without worrying about children leaving flyers in their backpacks.

Possibly the biggest advantage to technology is a simple one: Kids think it's cool.

"Computers are intrinsically interesting," according to Gerkey.

"It certainly taps into their imaginations," Harrison says. "And they love being able to go home and tell their parents how to do things."

Vital Skills

The rise of computers is turning the old-fashioned "library skills" of research and evaluation into vital strategies that students need every day.

"The amount of information we're receiving every day is increasing logarithmically," Widener says. "Memorization of rote fact is not as important ... as inquiry and problem-solving skills."

One aspect of this is learning to search effectively so that 43,207 responses on a search engine won't swamp a third-grader looking for information on turtles.

Students also need to sharpen their judgment, to "take a particular piece of information and assess critically whether it's fact or not," as Widener puts it.

"The contemporary and future problem is going to be how to deal with this avalanche of information and make productive use of it," Gerkey says.

Harrison is cautious.

"I have no evidence anyone is doing any more substantial research because they're on the Internet than if they went into the library and looked it up in hard copy," Harrison says. "Real learning takes time and energy and a great deal of patience. Computers give students with short attention spans the ability to flip through many sources of information ... at a very shallow level. The information's out there, but that doesn't mean you know it."

Unequal Access

Because of a lack of resources, many schools are behind in the race to make their students competitive.

Few schools can afford state-of-the-art equipment, Buchanan says, and some make do with machines that date from the first time Steve Jobs ran Apple.

Even with PC prices dropping to prices less than $1,000, providing one for each of the 52 million school-age children in the United States would cost billions of dollars -- not including the costs of servers, connectivity, software, Internet access, and training.

"It's a hard sell" to taxpayers and school administrators, Buchanan says.

Proposed alternatives to PCs, such as Oracle's Network Computer and Microsoft's WebTV, haven't received much support.

Corporate partnerships with companies, including Compaq, IBM, and Apple, are helping some schools, as are grants and volunteer efforts such as Net Day.

However, social barriers keep some students away from the screen.

Roberta Furger's book Does Jane Compute? points out that girls have been less likely to use computers at school or at home, to go to computer camps and classes, or to go into technical majors and jobs, in part because of stereotypes that technology isn't feminine.

Race and family income also are issues. In 1997, 78 percent of all U.S. public schools had some kind of Internet access, compared to only 63 percent of those schools with mostly poor or minority students, and the latter group had fewer computers, according to an April study by professors at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management.

Moreover, only one-third of African-American high school and college students had computers at home, compared to 73 percent of their white counterparts, the Vanderbilt study found.

If these imbalances aren't reversed, the have-nots will only fall further behind the haves, researchers warn.

On the other hand, Widener says, "Technology is a leveling factor. It helps me play the game more equitably -- [only] knowledge matters here. I am hopeful that as we provide more resources and training, technology's going to become more prevalent and accessible in all schools."

Educational ROI?

Despite enthusiastic testimonials by educators, and the eagerness many students show for new technologies, it remains harder to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of educational technology than of IT improvements in business.

There are relatively few well-conceived studies on whether students learn more or better with computers, and too many existing studies lack credibility because educational software companies commissioned them, according to Gerkey.

"Schools and taxpayers may be getting a return on their investment, but given the difficulty of evaluating how technology affects learning, it's not clear what or how good that return is," Gerkey says. "Quantitative measures are what everyone says they want, but qualitative measures (such as student enthusiasm and the new types of information they're accessing) may be more useful."

One reason that it's so hard to assess the impact of computing on education is that the field is always changing; the Internet and the most sophisticated software packages are only a few years old.

"It's interesting that we're all going pell-mell into this at a very expensive rate," Harrison says. "I think they should be very cautious."

Tracking student performance in the real world is time-consuming. Widener is overseeing the AASA's new multiyear study to track technology use in the 20 to 30 top U.S. school districts. The group hopes to compile a database of the best practices in educational technology, so other schools can refer to it.

However, "that work will never be done," Widener warns. "That frustrates a lot of people who want closure, but technology is never `closed.'"

Stannie Holt covered kindergarten through 12th grade education in California for eight years before coming to InfoWorld. She remembers playing Pico, Fermi, Bagels on a computer with a cassette tape drive. She can be reached at stannie_holt@infoworld.com.

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