How Apple wants to remake the classroom

Tech Republic ^ | January 23, 2015, 2:44 AM PST | By Nick Heath

[Swordmaker]

What Apple plans for education — PING!

Apple for a Teacher Ping!

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[Jonty30]

Computers don’t belong in the classroom, imo.

[pepsionice]

I think up through age twelve....it’s a waste. I would agree, that math classes would be better after the sixth grade if computers were utilized in the class and allowed the more advanced kids to progress quickly through modules. I can remember around the ninth grade where the teacher was incompetent and we wasted around twelve weeks on one single chapter because he couldn’t get more than a quarter of the class to grasp the topic.

I’d also agree that computers do very little in terms of literature or English grammar.

This idea that every kid in a school needs a laptop....it just means more cost waste on the school district for the laptops and the stupid software packages. Few grasp where cost enters into the game.

[martin_fierro]

"It's an example of a true learning environment, it's challenging, it's relevant, it's collaborative and engaging," he said saying it was everything education should be in a digital age.

"Well, we can't have that." -- Teachers' Union

[Leto]

The original pretext for the university is that the teacher would read the books to the class they would copy the book. Great strategy pre printing press. The the university became know for their Library of printed books and the access to smart people to teach others.

Now we can record the people who can communicate the subject matter to others, have access to a library more expansive than any university and do it whenever and wherever we wish.

It shouldn’t cost 60k/yr to get an education.

BTW making children do math w/o calculators in class is a very good thing.

[BCW]

This is all great - but as the article points out - the student only went so far and stopped. He did not see the significance of his achievement.

I’ve talked to IT teachers who tell me that students in the elementary grades - especially 4th and 5th graders - when doing research - will only view the first 3 Google searches and stop or move on without the desire to sink in the results and refine them...even though this is taught in computer tech classes...

[MarDav]

I have my students do research papers and do not allow them to use Google searches. Our school has an account with an online database search that accesses scholarly articles. That’s where they must obtain their info. Google is crap when it comes to doing research.

[MarDav]

“Computers don’t belong in the classroom”

This is more to the point. I agree. More times than not it is a toy for the students, and not the tool it is meant to be.

[trebb]

I taught and developed courses for 28 years - I hate the reliance on technology. It usually ends up being automated slide shows, etc., and allows the "teachers" to become lazy and ignorant. The AF tried to convert to "smart" classrooms many years ago, to leverage upcoming technologies. The program keeps getting traipsed out and some "turd polishing" takes place, but it has not improved efficacy. Most of the failed "upgrades" become permanent for the simple fact that they can save a few bucks a year.

IMO there's nothing like a topic-smart and motivated instructor/teacher to ensure actual learning takes place.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

How to plug in parents’ credit card numbers into the app store is what they mean by computer education these days.

[goodwithagun]

We just had an in-service about technology and the child's brain. While using tech can certainly be an amazing educational boost, even college students aren't mature enough to handle it. My students have netbooks because our ELA text is online. Are they annotating Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address or are they goofing off? The thing is, they are so good at being deviant that I don't catch them until they fail to hand in work or fail an assessment. It's too late then. Each year we catch the AP and scholar students with pictures of exams and copied papers from previous students.

I think technology in the classroom is a wonderful concept; however, children aren't capable of correctly harnessing its power. Also, at the in-service the speaker told us that children no longer read linearly, but in an F pattern instead. Pull up a Wiki entry and you'll see exactly what that is. We are now training our brains to read until we see a key phrase or hyperlink, then skip down lines and read until we see another. Frightening.

[chrisser]

"It's not so important that we know that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, what's important is what was happening around the time, what impact it had and how did that change society."

I think I used to at least partially share this philosophy. Then one day, I realized that, if you don't know that Columbus discovered America in 1492, then you have to rely on someone else to tell you what's important and what was happening round the time, what impact it had, etc.

If you know the dates of significant events, then you can read about other significant events, and by the dates and locations you get to discover, infer, or decide what was happening around the time, what impact it had, etc. etc.

Then you don't get bamboozled with revisionist historians who make stuff up in order to bolster their agenda.

[Jonty30]

It’s not even about computers being used as toys. It’s been noted that computer learning doesn’t involve nearly as much thought processes because it takes steps out between the material and the student. Computers, in many ways, basically just gives the answers to the student.

[Flintlock]

Ya wanna improve education???

Re-institute recess.
NOBODY gets paid more than the teacher. NOBODY!!!!
Real (1950’s) textbooks.
Small (walk-there-from-home) classrooms.
No ‘wired’ ANYTHING.
Teachers get rid of ANY student for misbehavior (as in GONE)!
Bring your lunch from home—REAL FOOD!

It would work, too.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

It is very unfortunate the professional society sites, scholarly sites, and good aggregation sites are all so expensive. It is very frustrating to find interesting abstracts online, but rarely have access to the paper.

[logi_cal869]

Great. Now we’ve got 2 of the richest organizations on the planet, Gates & Apple, fighting over classrooms.

[Moltke]

Apple's VP of education

How Orwellian. Scary and very telling of what Apple has in store (no pun intended) for society.

[Swordmaker]

Computers don’t belong in the classroom, imo.

Perhaps you are right. . . at certain levels. . . on the other hand, I think the Classroom belongs in computers. That's what Apple is facilitating. Did you even read the article before commenting?

"Apple has more than one million apps, more than two million books, almost one million media files available through its services, according to Couch, as well as more than 10,000 public courses through its online learning repository iTunes U - with Apple breaking down some of that content into categories and educational level to make it easier to browse."

[Swordmaker]

I have my students do research papers and do not allow them to use Google searches. Our school has an account with an online database search that accesses scholarly articles. That’s where they must obtain their info. Google is crap when it comes to doing research.

I have found that even for normal searches, Google is becoming useless. Too much cruft in the way and too many non-responsive hits popping in. The first page is usually paid positions, so it is hard to know whether it is properly responsive or not. It has also been affected by political considerations. . . and Google disappears things that some employees don't like.

I discovered this back in 2008 when I did a search for Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate . . . and found that Google had replaced every single instance of the images with innocuous campaign stop images. If you went to the links, the BC pictures were still on the sites, but the Google thumbnails had been replaced with non-representative photos that DID NOT SHOW THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE! I posted this fact here on FreeRepublic, and posted screen shots of the searches and results, and others confirmed the situation, and it continued for about a week, when suddenly the correct thumbnails of the birth certificate re-appeared without explanation.

I now use DuckDuckGo for searches.