Twice a month, with PDAs in hand, Ruth MacLean's sixth- and seventh-grade Life Sciences classes at the King Middle School hit the streets of Portland, Maine, to conduct valuable pollution research for the community. Using their Palm handhelds, donated through the Palm Education Pioneer Program (PEP), equipped with GPS locators, cameras, and temperature gauges, the children gather real-time water-temperature data from precise locations around the city, where runoff water from the streets is directed into streams.
They also take photos and input their observations into their Palms. Back in the classroom, the data is synced to a computer. There, the students can analyze their collective findings, which go into making water-use decisions.
"We're the first to get the city data from these stream sites, and the kids are thrilled that our data will be part of a real decision-making process," says MacLean. It's a mutually beneficial project. The students learn how to apply technology to solve real problems, and the city gets a break on the labor costs of collecting this data.
From kindergarten to college, technology has affected the education of American students in every way, from how they learn to the way teachers teach. Because kids grow up in an intensely technology-driven society, their needs are different than in generations past, and they require a new approach to education. This has sparked equally intense nationwide debates among parents and educators alike about the role of technology in schools.
The fact remains: In order to compete in the workforce, all children need to be technologically proficient (85 percent of all jobs will require at least some technical skills). They will also be called on to create next-generation technologies that help them grapple with a future of unknown scientific, environmental, and sociological challenges.
Companies like Intel, Microsoft, Palm, and many others are actively working to provide technology solutions to schools at the K12 level. The motive isn't pure altruism, nor is it merely a scheme to get kids to develop brand preferences early in life. "It's all about workforce development," says Jessica Daughertee, program manager for Intel's Teach to the Future program, which teaches teachers how to build technology and higher thinking skills into their curriculum. "The skills that will be needed in the future are currently held only by about 10 percent of the workplace," she says.
Likewise, Mitchel Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten program at MIT's Media Lab, is on a mission to invent technologies that help children learn in new ways. One of the group's successes has been commercialized as LEGO MindStorms, a programmable robotics building kit that fosters inventive thinking. Technology on its own, he insists, will not teach children anything new. It has to be placed in context, with a curriculum, teachers, and a community to support real learning. "The best learning happens when people are engaged in long-term projects they care deeply about. That rarely happens in school."
At the college level, campuses are among the most wired places in the country, with wireless networks, a laptop in every backpack, and high-speed computing labs. Students at Columbia University, for example, use videoconferencing to study with virtuoso musicians and model advanced engineering problems over a high-speed Internet connections.
Although technology has transformed many classes, some think it has not ultimately done as much as it could. Ninety-eight percent of public schools had access to the Internet in 2000 (up from 35 percent in 1994), according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but the kids don't get to use it often enough.
There still aren't enough computers to go around, andeven worseteachers don't know how to use them. What's more, teachers must cope with the demands of a day sliced into one-hour segments and the need to prepare students for the high-stakes standardized tests.
Despite the $5 billion invested in the last decade to get computers into schools, only 17 percent has gone to educating teachers on how to use them. Many overburdened teachers use the computer as a reward or punishment. And it takes much more than a few minutes of computer time each week to instill in kids the knowledge needed to lead advances in technology and science. Kids need to go beyond memorizing facts for a test to mastering inquiry itselfgenerating the question before finding the answer.
Elliot Solloway, codirector of the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education at the University of Michigan, is in the vanguard to get a computer into the hands of every school child in America. His background is in artificial intelligence, but he changed when it dawned on him that making children smart was more interesting than making machines smart.
He's worried, though. The results of his survey of teachers in 4,000 schools across the country are astounding. Forty-five percent of the teachers say their kids use computers less than 15 minutes a week. A main problem, he says, is access. The computers are in the lab or in the back of the classroom. They're not an integral part of the curriculum. Solloway believes that computers will be a tool that children master and use only when each child has his own. To that end, he's focusing on handhelds, designing software and curriculum for teachers that he distributes free at www.handheld.hice-dev.org.
Despite its potential, computing represents the rift between proponents of technology in education and the school system. Ironically, handhelds have been banned in Solloway's daughter's school, where one clever student used a software program that turned his Palm into a remote control for the TV, turning it on and off from the back of the room. In other schools, teachers perceive computing gear as tools for "cheating" rather than as tools for conducting research, as one would do in the real world.
The technology in education debate will continue to play out in the coming years. But one clear trend emerged over the past decade: Fewer students are graduating with degrees in science and engineering. Colleges are taking counteractive measures, such as making computer programming a required course, but it seems doubtful that forcing programming on students will inspire and engage them the way a simple project like the one in Ruth MacLean's class has.
That project doesn't require loads of bandwidth or Sun Sparc stations. It simply requires that the teacher, the school, and the community all work together to create projects that students can be passionate about. And it teaches them science, communications, math, politics, and social studies. Most of all, it teaches them that learning is a blast.Christina Wood is a North Carolina-based writer and a PC Magazine columnist.