On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 12:04:03PM -0500, nate at refried.org wrote: > On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 11:28:08AM -0500, Dan Rue wrote: > > You can start going to open source a little at a time, without hiring a > > new IT staff. For instance, you can save that 50-75K by running open > > office on existing windows systems. Open source software is nice enough > > now to start running certain applications, without diving in head first. > > <devil's advocate> > While that may all be true, isn't the point of school to teach kids > things that they'll _use_ once they get out of school? That's why my > high school (back in the day) used primarily Windows, MS Office, > WordPerfect, Pagemaker, Quark Xpress, etc. Why teach them an > application they an application that they'll probably never use? > </devil's advocate> Nate, This is a very important question. What *should* we be teaching in high schools? There are, of course, broader considerations than just technology. The curriculum pendulum these days has swung very widely toward what's called "social efficiency." That's the idea that the curriculum should be focused on what the students will need for their working lives. In technology, you can see this reflected in all the speeches that technology leaders like to give about schooling and how it should be changed. Lou Gerstner from IBM is typical of this. He wrote a book called "Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in Today's Schools" and speaks a lot about how schools aren't preparing students for the workplace of the future. One of the problems I face as an educator is preparing students for a future that is unknowable. Instead of playing futurist, my goal is to prepare students with the skills to adapt to a changing world. Sibley, like many high schools, teaches entire courses on using office productivity software. We have a course in MS Word/Powerpoing and Excel/Access. These are usually taught be business teachers on the pretense that students will be going out into the workforce and the software skills they learn will be useful to them. A better approach in my view, and one that I'm sure a lot of teachers take, is teaching students to use a word processor, not necessarily MS Word. In my perfect world students would learn to use these tools as part of the regular curriculum. For example, how about learning to use a spreadsheet in a social studies class that is studying the results of the 2000 census? They could be making charts, projecting future growth, etc. How about learning databases in a biology class where the students are collecting data on water quality from area streams and ponds? The students could also learn to use presentation software when it's time to present their results. (I'm just making these up off the top of my head, but I know some schools are doing things like this.) One of the challenges is training the regular teaching staff to be proficient technology users themselves. One reason that the business teachers do this work is that they are knowledgeable about it. There are lots of tech-savvy teachers in every school, but they're spread out in various departments. Taking on a project using technology in a 9th grade English course, for example, would require the training of 4-6 teachers at a school of 1,500 students. It would be a good thing, no doubt about it, but the staff development programs in most schools that I know about aren't equipped to handle training like that. But that's a whole separate discussion. Don't get me started! :-) Another factor is the parents. A number of years ago, our school made the decision to move away from Macs to PCs. One of the most consistent arguments we heard was that the PCs were what businesses used and what the students would need to know down the road. I suspect that if our school dumped MS Office for StarOffice, for example, we'd hear about it from concerned parents. That said, we'll probably consider doing it anyway when our $50k bill for Office XP licenses arrives in the mail. Well this reply is longer than I intended it to be. Later. -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson at visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com