As the first part of an initiative to equip every student in the system with laptop computers, Baltimore County Public Schools will give second graders laptops in August of this year. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board questions the wisdom of this project.
I went on the record more than 10 years ago about technology in our schools, saying any use of technology in the classroom had to be balanced. I wrote:
Introducing technology will not solve any problems—simply because the absence (or shortage) of technology was never the problem in the first place. If schools are broken—and that’s a mighty big “if”—we need to address the real cause of the problem and stop throwing taxpayer money away on computers, telling our communities that we’re fixing the curriculum and instruction.
I said it was a given that kids will look to the Internet to find information, assuming they have access. Teachers would be wise to embrace the Internet as a source of information, as Albert Einstein would approve: “Never memorize something you can look up,” I believe he said.
But the Internet is also full of garbage and misinformation.
We need teachers to inspire kids to want to learn. They will seek information from the Internet, but first and foremost, they need the desire to seek information. Second, they need to know what information to trust and commit to their path of life … to tell the difference between good information and bad, between fact and opinion, between implied meaning and tone of voice.
The jury is still out, the Sun’s editors write, on the question of value, on whether the $150 million the school district plans to spend to purchase the computers “might not be better spent on other projects, such as an extended school day, after-school mentoring and tutoring programs or enhanced art and music instruction.”
It is important to note that this technology initiative is one of up to a gazillion changes being implemented at the present time. I empathize with the teachers, who might have trouble keeping the issues straight as they try desperately to be a good teacher to their students.
My opinion about this particular initiative has been tempered somewhat of late, as a result of so many educators saying that “poverty is the biggest problem facing our schools.”
I now see one-to-one technology programs as nondiscriminatory ways to give every kid in our public schools the same access to educational information available on the Internet. Rich kids get computers, poor kids get computers, black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids. Everybody gets a computer, and if the school’s bandwidth can handle it, they all get exactly the same opportunity to receive educational information over the Internet.
In the days of textbooks, the complaint was always something like, “This high school in a poor neighborhood has textbooks that are 40 years old, while the textbooks at the high school in this affluent neighborhood are brand new.” A one-to-one program directly addresses this concern when it comes to technology and equality of access to educational materials, which today are more likely to be on the Internet than in a textbook.
Teachers are still needed to do the actual teaching, simply because there’s so much garbage on the Internet and we shouldn’t waste kids’ time sifting through it. In the words of one Baltimore Sun letter writer, this technology only has the slightest value if it “can provide a better means for a kid to write a clear paragraph, explain an idea, or understand and apply logical and critical thinking.”
All those things are out there, on the Internet, but it takes a teacher to point a kid toward them. Computers in every kid’s hand, if used correctly, can be like having an assistant not just in every classroom but for every kid.