Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Good article in the Wall Street Journal today entitled, What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?.

The article discusses some reasons the Finish students scored so highly:

Strong reading ethic (apparently, the government sends new babies a free book!)
Very low funding disparity between schools
Free universities
No gifted education
In-class freedom for teachers - check out this quote:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. “In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs,”

Lack of technology - here’s another quote:

In November, a U.S. delegation visited, hoping to learn how Scandinavian educators used technology. Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. “You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?” says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip.

This comes back to my series of blog posts asking “Is technology worth it?” (part 1, part 2 and part 3). I think technology is worth it, of course, as long as we think about it. But what I like about this article is the simple message: it’s the teaching the counts.

Today, February 26th, 2008 I:

1) Scheduled an LCD projector for a big school day called “Hunter Day”
2) Talked to our guidance department about posting an important announcement on our school website
3) Advised the after school program to use google calendar to manage their events and classes
4) Spoke with our elementary school instructional technology specialist about using windows software update service for the elementary school lab
5) Read about 250 rss feeds
6) Started backing up 4th and 5th grade laptops in preparation for re-imaging (using asr)
6.5) Realized each of the laptops (we have 23 of them) had about 80gigs of data, and we only have about 500gigs of storage space left on our external hard drive.
6.6) Panicked
7) Cleaned up a monstrous amount of wiki spam. Banned several users for life. Deleted several articles. Pretty normal wiki stuff, actually
8) Assisted 4 wonderful girls from the elementary school use iWeb. Reminded them that embedded content wouldn’t work locally unless there was internet access
9) Added a class to blackboard for a English teacher
10) Helped admissions department change email from outlook to a web-based email system
11) Helped a science teacher resolve an issue on her laptop. It wasn’t playing any sound with DVD’s, but was playing other music. Fixed it by not using Windows media player
12) Walked a Verizon guy around the school, looking for 2 T1 boxes. Found them, everyone is happy.
13) Told an teacher who lost the combination lock password on her laptop lock should would have to be cut
14) Helped student who accidentally saved a new document over an old one. We tried to rescue the data from her usb disk, but no luck.

15) lunch

16) Continued to re-image 4th and 5th grade laptops
17) Got information from student for new ID cards
18) Told our building Union representative I was still interested in being on the union executive committee
19) Got a group of icons for new school website
20) Discussed purchasing a public address system for our school, and how we should go about it
21) worked on a new template for a website
22) showed the Verizon guy around our school (again)
23) made some suggestions for using NYSSL

Part 1 here and part 2 here.

Technology in education is very expensive - especially when we account personnel, licensing, and legacy equipment costs. If we focus on student learning and take advantage of many exceptional free services technology can become less expensive and arguably, more effective. If you want to get all business-speak about it, technology in education should be really, really agile.

It’s not a simple formula.

The effective application of technology in education is a nuanced thing. Effective system administration, centralized user data, robust and reliable networks, well managed and sensible security, correct technical support, pedagogical in-class support, clear and strong administrative direction, wise financial management, and clear thinking all play a critical role in a successful educational technology program.

So considering this, is it worth it? My answer is: it depends. If your school is willing to put in the mental muscle, time, and funding, technology can play a genuinely important role in student learning.