The Faithful Skeptic

Blogging has been sparce.  No good reason, particularly, other than I’ve been distracted.  By what, you ask?  Kids, work, the stomach flu, and pleasantly, sunshine.  More to come soon.  Hopefully.

According to a story (subscription req’d) in this morning New York Times a lot of school districts that had started programs to give students laptops are abandoning them.  There were a lot of reasons, but it seemed like the primary ones were that the schools were not able to quantitatively demonstrate any improvement academic achievement, laptops were a distraction in the classroom and at school generally, students did things they should not have been doing with them (porn, hacking, etc.), and the programs were expensive to maintain.

I guess my response is “Duh!”  Of course you couldn’t just throw a bunch of technology into schools and expect performance to miraculously improve.  Several of the schools interviewed fessed up to not training their teachers on how to actually use the laptops effectively.  To be effective, you’d need to use the laptops in a way where they add value to the process.  One of the complaints was that students used them to cheat on tests.  So how about stop using tests (that mainly measure the ability to regurgitate information) and have the students use the laptops to create an original work product that shows their mastery of the information?

I’m a project manager on a major software implementation for my organization.  One of the first things you learn in managing technology projects is that their are three parts to the project - people, process and technology.  The technology is the easy part.  Figuring out how to integrate the technology into your processes and getting your people to accept and adapt to those processes is the hard part.  It looks like the schools in the article focused only on the technology.  Big surprise it didn’t work.

The real problem is that now educators are going to come away from these experiences with the misinformed belief that technology can’t help them improve student performance.  The lesson should be that you actually have to think about how you’re going to use technology and be prepared to do things differently.

The Bishop just announced who is being appointed to our church.  I don’t know him, but I’m excited.  I’ll be sad to see our interim pastor leave, but she’s been a great stabilizing presence.  It should be interesting…