Teachers Ask President and Congress to Bring More Computers to the Classroom
Today, a number of education and business organization called upon Congress and the Obama administration to invest heavily in classroom technology and teacher training as part of the forthcoming economic recovery package. These organizations, including the Consortium for School Networking, the International Society for Technology in Education, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the State Educational Technology Directors Association, have asked the new administration to spend roughly $9.9 billion on installing and upgrading the technology in America's most disadvantaged schools.
As this additional technology would definitely raise the demand for bandwidth in these schools, these education organizations have also called for an upgrade of these schools' networking infrastructure. They would also like to see a good part of the funding go to educating teachers in the use of this new technology - technology in the classroom, after all, is only as good as the teachers who use it.
President-elect Obama has always made technology in the classroom a central focus when discussing education policy, and there is clearly a pressing need for bringing more technology to the classroom to train students for a job market where these skills are now mandatory. It should be noted, though, that technology is often the least pressing of all the problems faced by some of these disadvantaged schools.
CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user Extra Ketchup.
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It's really a shame that we're stuck with socialized schooling. I really look forward to the day when schooling is privatized.
Then there won't be begging for resources, from people who don't have them. Let's be honest, neither Obama nor Congress know how to make computers. And neither of them have *their own* funds to invest in them.
Private companies, noticing a competitive advantage in providing schooling with up-to-date computers, would have a tremendous incentive to invest in them. It would be a huge selling point in getting new customers (i.e. students).
Instead, we have to deal with bureacracies....(Wasn't Obama about "change"?)...Seems the only things changing is which politically favored corporations will be receiving the contracts.
The article touches on a couple very important questions: what makes classrooms more effective, and how should the government be involved in helping to maintain and build our society's lead in use of digital media to drive innnovation... point well taken in this article that computers may not fix much of what's wrong in a given school. Plenty has been written about that.
I'd suggest that the most immediate way to address the need for digital investment would be to pressure Congress to build digital infrastructure and innovation into the economic stimulus bill requested by President-elect Obama - please consider signing the five2digital petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/five2digital and requesting that Congress focus some of the stimulus spending on digital.
All the supercomputers in the world won't fix a society that calls its best and brightest as "nerds." The culture's broken, not the classroom capital budget.
Of course, there was a time, you know, when computers weren't in schools. Yet somehow, someway, children learned. They graduated. They went to college. They built America in the richest country in the world. Without computers in the classrooms.
It's not a cure-all, parents and politicians. It's a tool, nothing more.
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I agree with Bruce Japsen (in fact, I would like to know his ideas more). For a parent like me, it is so hard to find even an elementary school which does not teach computer usage to children. I want my children to spend at least their formative years without the addictive laziness of computers. Laziness should come only after learning to be self-reliant.
As a first year special education teacher in an urban high school, I just want to cry about the fact I have no computers in my classroom with students who do not read and write so well. These kids abosolutely love technology and will engage with enthusiasm lessons which would otherwise come to them on a worksheet where they complain just as enthusiastically. Last week on a local news station a teacher is featured once a month as a hero in her/his classroom. This month a teacher was featured who has made a difference in the lives of her students. The photos showed her classroom filled with students who had laptops on their desks and in the backround was a smartboard and any other kind of techlology you can imagine. Again, I just want to cry. I spent 20 years in corporate america as a technology manager and have no doubt that the 21st century is driven by technology. This generation has the opportunity to learn and implement things we could only dream of. We will know soon enough if Obama will take the technology stall in classrooms and move it to the front burner.
I posted the comment above "I agree with ...". Please, read my comment, and keep in mind that I am a software developer :) and yet, I agree with Bruce Japsen, "[A computer] is a tool, nothing more." To learn to live without it would result in a child becoming self-reliant and *independent* of (at least) computers. Learning computer usage takes hardly a few days for teenagers, so why the desperation to get children hooked on to computers? PROFIT, of course! A lot of kids on computers means a lot of profit for computer makers, right?