[ale] Planned obsolescence / Computers for Schools

Sun Jul 25 15:59:10 EDT 2010

I'll rise to the flamebait - I was a "fly on the wall" during the
episode Jeff alludes to. 

Computer labs exist for the same reason we used to have books only in
libraries and the homes of the affluent - they cost too much for the
average folk. 

The use of computers in a primary (K-5) school exceeded our expectations
but not in areas typically assumed. The buzzwords of the late 90s and
earlier this decade were "computers, multimedia, blah, blah."

Where the computers were most used and most effective, to, at least, my
surprise, was the basic three Rs - readin', 'riting, 'rithmetic. Kids
read a ton on the web, doing fun stuff and research. We had kids as
young as first grade do the basics of researching and writing an essay.
Older kids would do complete research projects and present them in OO
Impress. They taught themselves and their peers how to produce
presentations with surprisingly little adult intervention. Even in
French class (Brandon is one of the few primary schools to have foreign
language in K-5), kids would do research on a Francophone nation, bounce
out of their seats down to the floor and continue working on a poster
project.

Math in the earlier years is a large part rote practice. As much as we
delight in paper and pencil, a significant part of those years is
memorization, especially of multiplication tables. Using TuxMath and a
few really good web sites, kids were able to put in the time to practice
their math facts under the guise of having fun.

Writing also benefited from the same efficiencies we find when we use
word processors. Instead of laboriously producing handwritten copies
that were cumbersome to edit and refine, they could instead devote their
time to the actual practice of writing. Teachers estimated that the time
saved in, say, 4th or 5th grade would be to halve the time it took to
produce and refine an essay. Even spell check proved to be a positive.
Instead of getting an assignment back a week later that with the
mistakes in red, kids would get immediate feedback on spelling errors
and the correction. 

Class room discipline increases as kids who finish assignments early can
then use computers to do research, play constructive games (e.g.
Tuxmath, Tuxpaint, etc. ) or work on a saved assignment. We used the
K12LTSP package which provided a large number of educational software
including math, science, astronomy, languages, typing instruction and
graphic arts.

Keyboarding skills don't have to be extensively taught as kids spend so
much time on the computers as they acquire the skill almost second
nature. 

Computers are difficult to introduce into the curriculum until there is
about a 3:1 student to computer ratio. At that point, teachers can break
out computer use as a part of a rotation. When you have 2-3 computers in
a room, they just sit in the corner. There just aren't enough numbers to
use effectively.

When you place a computer on every desk, then teachers can distribute
assignments with the click of a button (see FL_Teachertool
http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/) launch applications
or even specific web sites (and monitor and log out misbehaving
students).

Finally, computer labs waste a significant amount of time. Getting up
out the desks, lining up, walking down the hall (someone always getting
in trouble for talking), going into the computer lab, sitting down,
opening the assignment that was started last week and beginning from
there. I'm sure you know what it's like to open an incomplete document
you haven't seen in a week and trying to remember what needed to be done
next. You then work for 20-30 minutes, close the document and
application, line up, walk out and down the hall back to your classroom
and sit back down.

vs. clicking on the mouse in front of you.

I'm leaving a bunch of stuff out in the sake of brevity. But, test
scores rose, teachers were finally excited about technology and kids
loved using the tools.

Last note: we used a bunch of obsolete (PI and PII) desktops for our
thin clients when we started. We actually disbursed the computers in the
lab (P4 1.6ghz) to the classrooms as servers powering the former
classroom desktops. However, what you eventually find in schools and
other institutions is that when you use Linux, computers are no longer
the expensive part of the equation. The hardware becomes almost a
negligible cost. What becomes very expensive is real estate and
electricity. Our school (and electrical system) dated from the late 40s.
A few of big old CRT monitors and old computers, a teacher fridge and
much beyond that you began blowing fuses. Real estate is very expensive.
You can't just add a few square feet to a classroom to account for more
computers (we were shoving them in there like Tokyo commuters at rush
hour). It would have cost about $4k per class to update the electrical
circuits - or we could just by thin clients and lcd monitors. $4k three
or four years ago could outfit the classroom with a decent AMD desktop
as the LTSP server and maybe 10-15 thin clients and LCD monitors which
could use the existing electrical layout.  By using new hardware, we
saved on electricity and avoided the costs of updating electrical
equipment or having to expand floor/desk space to use older and larger
hardware.

Much to my dismay, my childrens' next school did not embrace computers
to the same extent. It was very painful and frustrating for them and me.
Instead, they emphasized "Smartboards", the most expensive whiteboard
known to education. Smartboards do have their place but I'd contend 90%
of them are fancy whiteboards or tv projectors. 

Hope that helps. Your question really wasn't flamebait - there's a lot
of talk about technology in the classroom with little visible results. I
hope that it helps seeing what really happens when you give young minds
some great tools. The results you seen in US education rarely is based
on effective and wide spread distribution of computers to students. Too
often, it is in fragile and expensive laptops, Smartboards or other
flashy products and expensive central infrastructure to support Windows.
If FL_Teachertool had been a commercial, Windows app, I'm sure that many
school districts would pay 5 and 6 figure sums for it. We staged our
little "experiment" for not much more than the PTA found it would cost
to update the computer lab with newer XP desktops and ended up with a
school that had 5-8 Linux desktops in K-4 and a 1:1 ration in 5th.

regards,
William

On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 10:44 -0400, Chris Fowler wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 10:12 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > 
> > When we tried to bid to finish the job throughout the school
> > district, 
> > we were preparing to develop the industrial capacity to assemble and 
> > deploy on the order of 15,000-25,000 thin clients - diskless, fanless 
> > units screwed to the back of LCD monitors, with an app server for
> > every 
> > 200-250 thin clients and one file server per school.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I'm going to throw out some flamebait here but I don't understand the
> purpose of putting computers in school in large numbers.  Maybe there is
> motivation but is the US seeing results?
> 
> When I was in HS we had one computer lab.  I took CS for 3 years and use
> that lab.  The only people that used that lab were the CS students and
> the French students came along after I wrote a program to quiz them on
> French -> English.  
> 
> I don't see why kids can't write essays with pencils.  I think there
> should be a lab for CS students and science studies where they could use
> tools like Matlab.  I'm not sure I understand the reason to progress
> outside of the lab.
> 
> Even TC's seem to be a huge drain on resources and I'm not sure the US
> is seeing results.  It also seems the eduction in the US is going
> backwards in results.  Seems the computers that are there are not
> helping.
> 
> I will admit that in my job I would be lost without Google.  Wikipedia
> is great for looking up anything I want to look up.  Kids need to learn
> how to use the Internet to lean anything they want to learn.  Even in CS
> we had slackers that would play Leisure Suite Larry instead of writing
> their programs.  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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