Technology is making another move, and it’s changing the face of education:
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes.
And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.
“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”
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Many superintendents are enthusiastic.
“In five years, I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks,” said William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools. “They can be better than traditional textbooks.”
Schools that do not make the switch, Mr. Habermehl said, could lose their constituency.
“We’re still in a brick-and-mortar, 30-students-to-1-teacher paradigm,” Mr. Habermehl said, “but we need to get out of that framework to having 200 or 300 kids taking courses online, at night, 24/7, whenever they want.”
“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
Why would that be a threat, though, why wouldn’t the ability of parents to get world-class education resources for their children be a good thing ?
I don’t think he is saying that it would be a bad thing for the parents or the students. He’s saying it would be a bad thing for the schools in Orange County. It’s refreshing to hear a superintendent speak that frankly about the fact that brick and mortar public schools have seen their heyday come and go.
The biggest problem facing parents and educators right now is the practical one of what to do (physically) with students who do not need to go to the school building in order to get their education. If they are left unsupervised, nobody believes that they will stop playing video games (except to do drugs and have sex). So where do parents put them?
Brick and mortar public schools will have to continue to exist in the 21st century despite being obvious anachronisms.
I don’t think digital textbooks and all that is the solution.
When I was in school, I had a friend who conned us out of lunch money by predicting the next day’s weather. He became a world renown climate scientist. Another was kicking our tails with his custom built racing bikes, later providing expertise in boosting our car’s horsepower. He makes his living building and selling super-modified race cars. My childhood hobby was amateur radio, which provided a base for a life time of employment. All of us could have cared less about learning anything except as it pertained to our interests.
I see the same thing with today’s kids. They are totally bored out of their skulls with structured education, and society loses them by the time they are 13. Want to see their natural curiosity in action? Take a bunch of teenagers on a week long tent camping trip to really remote WV, and just turn them loose. No internet, cell phones, or any other modern conveniences. They will drive you nuts in the beginning, but the trip home makes for great conversation.
Yet when it comes to school, we expect all of them to learn at the same rate and ready to be pushed out the schoolhouse door like an endless line of cars from an assembly line.
The trick for education is to find the student’s interest, then provide the resources to mold that natural interest into a life time of learning. The entire wealth of the internet is worthless if no one has the desire to use it.