美國小學開始依賴平版電腦教學.可是萬一系統有問題呢?
Schools Learn Tablets' Limits
Districts Grapple With Glitches as Some Say Devices Can Supplement Lessons
Oct. 14, 2013 9:15 p.m. ET
As schools rush to embrace computer tablets as teaching tools,
glitches have officials in a few districts rethinking the usefulness
and even security of the latest technology trend.
The highest-profile snafu came in Los Angeles, where a $1 billion program—funded by voter-approved bonds—to provide
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iPads for K-12 students came under fire after some students
sidestepped the security system and accessed social media, online games
and other content that was supposed to be blocked.
The Los
Angeles Unified School District temporarily took back thousands of
tablets from students at three high schools and required the devices to
remain on-campus in all 30 schools where the effort had been rolled out.
School board officials called a special meeting for Oct. 29 to assess
the $50 million first phase of the program ahead of votes to fund the
second and third phases.
Los Angeles school board member Bennett Kayser said the
district's initiative was "hastily planned" and several "red flags" were
overlooked, such as the potential expense of lost or stolen devices and
questions about the completeness of the installed curriculum software.
Plus, he added, "There is no silver bullet or Superman here; technology
is a tool, not an end unto itself."
The fitful Los Angeles
rollout comes as K-12 schools nationwide are expected to spend $9.7
billion on technology in 2013, up from $6 billion in 2003, according to
the Center for Digital Education, a national research and advisory
institute specializing in education technology trends and policy.
Districts in Maryland, Kansas, North Dakota and elsewhere have rolled
out tablet to thousands of students this year. And experts say the pace
of technology spending is rapidly growing as schools try to become more
tech-savvy.
Advocates say new technology may allow teachers to
better target students' individual academic levels and learning styles,
and engage students who often are bored by the more traditional style of
teaching. For example, teachers can watch students writing essays in
real time and shoot one a note if she failed to write a proper
introduction and another a separate note if she used improper
punctuation. Moreover, they say, students need technological skills to
compete in today's economy.
Leslie Wilson, of the Michigan-based
One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit that helps districts implement
programs that assign a digital device to every student, said students
must learn to be "creators and producers, not regurgitators and
consumers" of information, and technology can hasten those skills. She
said laptops, tablets and other such devices can benefit students if
they are chosen with student achievement in mind, rather than on the
"glitziness" of the product.
Skeptics say schools are racing
into the digital promise with little forethought and, in some cases,
expecting computer tools to boost academic outcomes even though the
research on the issue is inconclusive. Researchers from the University
of Southern Maine, for example, found that a program that provided
laptops to middle-school students boosted writing scores, while a study
by the Texas Center for Educational Research found no difference in test
scores between middle-school students who got laptops and those who
didn't.
The Los Angeles program, the first phase of which was
approved in February, aims to provide by the end of 2014 every student
with a tablet employing digital, interactive curricula designed to meet
Common Core math and reading standards adopted by 45 states and the
District of Columbia. Under its contract with Apple, the school district
pays $678 a tablet; Apple didn't return a call for comment.
Parents
and residents questioned the high price tag and speedy rollout of the
devices. Some students and parents said they didn't understand their
personal liability if an iPad was broken or misplaced. Now, some
school-board members are calling for a clearer plan for the costs of
maintaining and updating the technology.
Still, district
officials say they are pleased with the results so far. The devices
allow for instruction to be tailored to each student's level and
teachers have gotten creative with their assignments, such as having
students work with slide shows on the tablet. Superintendent John Deasy
called the initiative "stunningly successful," and added: "It's pretty
amazing watching students who've never had access [to tablet technology]
and now have it."
Meanwhile, officials in Fort Bend Independent
School District in suburban Houston scrapped a $16 million iPad
initiative after an audit this month found, among other things, teachers
complaining the curricula on the tablets were incomplete and didn't
align with the district's instructional goals. The district had given
out about 6,000 tablets with an interactive science curriculum to
fourth- through eighth-graders as part of an effort to boost science
test scores.
Jim Rice, president of the school district board of
trustees, said schools are "seeing a sea change in how children learn
and schools need to keep up with that," but, he added, "the devil is in
the details and districts should understand all the moving parts before
they jump into technology."
Officials in Guilford County Schools
in Greensboro, N.C., suspended a $30 million effort that gave 15,000
middle-school students Amplify tablets after students or school staff
broke about 10% of the screens either by dropping them or placing them
in backpacks or purses, and some of the cables that connect the devices
to keyboards broke.
Officials with Amplify—the education
subsidiary of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal—and the
school district say they are working to fix the problems. District
officials said they were satisfied with the academic content on the
tablet and said teachers had been using them to provide quality
instruction. Superintendent Maurice Green said the suspension was
"extremely disappointing" and said the district "remains committed to
personalizing learning and to the one-to-one initiative."
Many
districts around the country are rolling out tablets without a hitch.
About 850 students at Neil Armstrong Middle School in suburban Portland,
Ore., got digital tablets this year after a smaller pilot program at
the school last year showed students were more engaged and less likely
to misbehave during class.
Nichole Carter, an eighth-grade
English teacher who was part of the tablet pilot program last year, said
the devices dramatically cut down on paper costs, allow her to track
student work in real time and let children work together through a
protected social media-like platform.
"A tablet is a tool that
can enhance a lesson and engage kids," she said. "But you really have to
know your content and understand how to teach for it to be effective in
helping children learn."
*****
Some of the News Fit to Print
Some of the News Fit to Print
STUDY: 15 PERCENT OF YOUTH OUT OF SCHOOL, WORK
WASHINGTON (AP) — Almost 6 million young people are neither in school nor working, according to a study released
Monday.
That’s almost 15 percent of those aged 16 to 24 who have neither desk
nor job, according to The Opportunity Nation coalition, which wrote the
report. Other studies have shown that idle young adults are missing out
on a window to build skills they will need later in life or use the
knowledge they acquired in college. Without those experiences, they are
less likely to command higher salaries and more likely to be an economic
drain on their communities. The article is in the
Boston Globe.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
AN INDUSTRY OF MEDIOCRITY
Bill Keller writes in
The New York Times: Of all the competing
claims on America’s education dollar — more technology, smaller
classes, universal prekindergarten, school choice — the one option that
would seem to be a no-brainer is investing in good teachers. But
universities have proved largely immutable. Educators, including some
inside these institutions, say universities have treated education
programs as “cash cows.” The schools see no incentive to change because
they have plenty of applicants willing to pay full tuition, the programs
are relatively cheap to run, and they are accountable to no one except
accrediting agencies run by, you guessed it, education schools. It’s a
contented cartel.
A PATH TO ALIGNMENT
Indianapolis—Lumina Foundation has issued a report by two widely
respected educators that examines how Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
and the Degree Qualification Profile (DQP) can better forge alignment
between the nation’s K-12 and postsecondary education systems.
Discussions around the need for alignment between K-12 and postsecondary
competencies are not new. This
report, however,
highlights ways that CCSS and DQP can be used together to promote
development of a common language throughout the entire pathway to a
college degree.
WIRED FOR TEACHING
A growing number of faculty members are using social media in the
classroom and are finding technology to be both a help and a hindrance,
according to a new survey. About 40 percent of faculty members used
social media as a teaching tool in 2013, an increase from 33.8 percent
in 2012, according to a report by the Babson Survey Research Group and
Pearson Learning Solutions. Likewise, more faculty members used social
media for professional communications and work in 2013 (55 percent) than
in 2012 (44.7 percent). In both years, faculty members most often used
social media for personal purposes. The article is in
Inside Higher Ed.
IDAHO SEES EARLIER TEST AS A TOOL TO BOOST COLLEGE READINESS
Idaho high school sophomores are taking the Preliminary Scholastic
Aptitude Test (PSAT) as part of a statewide effort to help districts
graduate more college- and career-ready students. Its increased use --
an estimated 20,000 10th-graders could take the exam this year -- will
provide detailed information on students' strengths and weaknesses that
has not typically been available to schools. The article is in the
Idaho Statesman.
ABOUT K-12
TEACH FOR AMERICA RISES AS POLITICAL POWERHOUSE
With a $100 million endowment and annual revenues approaching $300
million, TFA is flush with cash and ambition. Its clout on Capitol Hill
was demonstrated last week when a bipartisan group of lawmakers made
time during the frenzied budget negotiations to secure the nonprofit its
top legislative priority — the renewal of a controversial provision
defining teachers still in training, including TFA recruits, as
“highly
qualified” to take charge of classrooms. It was a huge victory that
flattened a coalition of big-name opponents, including the NAACP, the
National PTA and the National Education Association. But it barely hints
at TFA’s growing leverage. The article is in
Politico.
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM FOR IMPROVING OUR SCHOOLS
Marc Tucker blogs for
Education Week: I submit that the most
serious impediment to running a first class education system is our
seeming inability to focus on the design of the system itself. The gold
standard education research methods are singularly unsuited to the
task. It is not possible to randomly assign state populations to state
education systems. Education systems, it turns out, cannot be studied
in the same way that most health treatments can.
posted Oct 21, 2013 08:44 am
FASTER MATH PATH
A faculty-led group called the California Acceleration Project has
helped 42 of the state’s community colleges offer redesigned, faster
versions of remedial math and English tracks. But the group’s
co-founders said they would be able to make much more progress if the
University of California changed its transfer credit requirements.
Remedial courses are widely seen as one of the biggest stumbling blocks
to improving college graduation rates, as few students who place into
remediation ever earn a degree. The problem is particularly severe for
black and Hispanic students, who account for almost half of the
California community college system’s total enrollment of 2.4 million.
Approaches to accelerated remediation are taking off in California.
The Carnegie Foundation’s alternate sequences, dubbed Statway and
Quantway, are being tried in California as well as 10 other states.
Pamela Burdman described these pathways and others in a
report that
LearningWorks, a California-based nonprofit group, released last week.
And in Texas, all two-year institutions are working on a remedial math
redesign, called the New Mathways Project, which draws heavily from
Carnegie’s work. Cal State has bestowed Statway with
transfer-prerequisite status, according to officials in the state. UC
does not, however. The article is in
Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MOVING BEYOND A FALSE DEBATE
Sarah Carr writes in
The Hechinger Report: At schools that
have embraced the college-for-all aspiration, career and technical
education is seen as being as outdated as chalkboards and cursive
handwriting. Instead, the (mostly poor and mostly minority) students are
endlessly drilled and prepped in the core humanities and
sciences—lessons their (mostly middle- or upper-income and mostly white)
teachers hope will enable the teenagers to rack up high scores on the
ACT, SAT, and Advanced Placement exams and go on to attend the four-year
college of their dreams (although it’s not always clear whose dreams
we’re talking about). On the surface, the tension between
college-for-all and career and technical education pits egalitarianism
against pragmatism. What could be more egalitarian, after all, than
sending the nation’s most disadvantaged secondary students off to the
vaunted halls of institutions once reserved for the most privileged?
Only eight percent of low-income children in America earn a bachelor’s
degree by their mid-twenties, compared to more than 80 percent of
students from the top income quartile. Yet what could be more pragmatic
than acknowledging that in cities where more than half of students fail
tests of basic academic skills, imposing purely academic aspirations
might be a fool’s errand?
GENDER, JOBS, AND G.P.A.
As early as eighth grade, girls are more likely to say they want to go
to college and to earn better grades in school because of it, a new
study says. The National Bureau of Economic Research
working paper set
out to account for a relatively recently widened gender gap in
secondary school grade point averages. Looking at 8th- and 10th-graders
and high school seniors, the researchers searched for correlations
between G.P.A. and plans for the future, non-cognitive skills (social
skills, motivation, etc.), the family environment, and working while in
school. The article is in
Inside Higher Ed.
RESULTS OF PERFORMANCE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS ‘MODEST, BUT POSITIVE’
Low-income students who receive performance-based scholarships show
modest gains in academic achievement, but their retention rates from
semester to semester appear unchanged, according to a study released on
Tuesday by MDRC, a nonprofit research group. The
study—“Performance-Based
Scholarships: What Have We Learned?”—compiles results from the
Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration, a project the group began
in 2008 that has extended to 12,000 students in Arizona, California,
Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, and Ohio. The project,
designed to increase financial support for low-income students and give
them monetary incentives to progress, is supported primarily by the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation. The article is in
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ABOUT K-12
NCLB WAIVERS IN JEOPARDY OVER TEACHER EVALUATIONS
When Congress became too mired in partisan squabbles to pass a
comprehensive education reform bill to replace the No Child Left Behind
Act, the Department of Education began allowing states to opt out of
some of the law’s more draconian provisions by granting them waivers in
exchange for a plan to improve student achievement . So far more than 40
states and the District of Columbia have applied and received the
waivers. But three of them – Kansas, Oregon and Washington – are now
being warned that they’re in danger of not getting waivers renewed for
the 2014-15 academic year. In a letter to the education authorities in
the three states, Deb Delisle, Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of
Education, warns that the granted waivers have been placed on “high-risk
status.” The waivers granted to Washington, Kansas and Oregon were
conditional, meaning that the states needed to take additional steps to
qualify for them. The article is from EducationNews.org.
INSIDERS SAY NCLB WAIVER FOR CORE DISTRICTS BAD POLICY
Three-quarters of Washington "insiders" say U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan's decision to grant a special waiver to eight California
districts is bad policy. That's according to the latest Whiteboard
Advisers's survey of mostly inside-the-Beltway folks, who have some
harsh things to say about the No Child Left Behind Act waiver granted by
the Education Department on Aug. 6. The post is from
Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
CALIFORNIA UPENDS SCHOOL FUNDING TO GIVE POOR KIDS A BOOST
California has revamped its school funding formula in ways that will
send billions more dollars to districts that educate large numbers of
children who are poor, disabled in some way or still learning to speak
English. It's an approach that numerous other states, from New York to
Hawaii, have looked into lately. But none has matched the scale of the
change now underway in the nation's largest state. "The trend is toward
more and more states providing additional assistance to students with
special needs," says Deborah Verstegen, a expert at the University of
Nevada, Reno. "California is moving into the forefront with this
approach. The piece is from NPR.
