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:
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