The Laptop Revolution continues apace:
Three Stanley County teachers and a parent are getting a chance to see how the new high school Computer Connections program is working at local high schools.
Stanley County is looking to join the state’s high school computer program where tablets are provided to both teachers and students. The group toured both the Winner and Riggs High School programs last week and plan to tour at least one more in Kadoka later.
Teacher Laura Snow, who is chairperson of the school’s Classroom Connections program, says at both schools, the group got to talk to both staff and students about the program. She says they got a lot of comments.
Snow says the group’s mission is fact finding in nature. Snow says a survey of Stanley County high school teachers show that an "overwhelming number" support the idea.
In the program, the school would pay most of the cost of purchasing the needed 200 tablet computers for staff and teachers and there would be some state financial assistance as well. Snow says cost is an important factor.
Snow says the group will present a recommendation to the school board later this year, which will make the final decision on whether to apply to be part of the program next fall.
Indications are that the laptop hegemony is coming to the state university system:
The university system will convert to wireless, Jewett said.
“We will fix that as fast as humanly possible,” he said. Students will have to pay for the laptops, but by law the cost can be part of college loans, he said.
It's “clearly wrong,” Jewett said that the state's university students studying to be K-12 teachers are not being trained in a wireless laptop environment when that's the environment they will be placed in once they take teaching jobs.
“It's the way the world is going.”
My thoughts on laptops in education are not a secret, although, it should be noted, they are my own, not my employer's.
Let me repeat a story I have told before. In Evelyn Waugh's short novel Modern Europe, one of those Englishmen with a hyphenated last name, Mr. Scott-King, serves as a classics instructor at a finer public school. After an adventure in continental Europe, he arrives back at his school only to be informed that, once again, his school will be teaching fewer of the classics. The headmaster who delivers this news to Scott-King says, "As you know I'm an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the 'complete man' anymore. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?" To which Scott-King replies, "Oh yes. I can and do." The headmaster suggests Scott-King teach some more "relevant" subjects along side the classics, and Scott-King responds, "If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."
Recent Comments