[dahart]

> We already saw an extreme example of misallocated resources in Peru. But even in a ``wealthy'' country one has to be concerned about this problem. Many educators in North America share the feeling of betrayal of the teacher who said, They can give us the axe, but they can spend thousands on computers. We have to fire our music coordinator, we have to fire our music teachers, we have shitty libraries. (Lynn, a Canadian schoolteacher, quoted in [14, p. 41])

I’ve seen this happen in the relatively wealthy schools my kids are in. They spend many thousands on smartboards and iPads, and they’ve gotten rid of the “non-essential” arts and music teachers. Parents are personally funding some arts educators on a part time basis a couple of days a week. I think it’s an egregious misuse of funds, wasteful and ultimately damaging to the kids.

What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads. Kids play games on them that they have access to at home, but they’re not being taught about the technology or being taught to use it to do things they can’t do on paper.

I don’t mind computers in the classroom, as long as the arts are funded and the teachers are paid enough. What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art. Give the mathy students some aesthetics training, and make sure the art students are capable with computation.

[20years]

"What’s worse, the tech is not being used effectively. The teachers don’t have enough training to incorporate the smartboards and iPads, and they don’t have the budget for tech training because they spent it on the iPads."

Yes this is exactly what I see in my sons school. Some of the kids actually know more than the teachers and end up providing support to the teachers. Then the kids do silly things like duplicating icons on the home screen 100+ times and change folder names to things like "poop". The teachers freak out thinking they hacked into the computers because they have no idea on how those simple things were done, or how to disable them from doing those things.

"What I’d really love to see more of is using computers to integrate math and arts together... digital arts with an emphasis on both rigorous math and rigorous art"

Yes!!!

[applecrazy]

I attend high school in the Bay Area and I'm surrounded by this Smartboard epidemic. Nearly every classroom at our school has one, but only around 10% of teachers actually use the "smart" portion, even though most of them have gotten some basic training in their proper usage. Most are used as dumb projectors for presentations and lectures, and the pens are seldom used. And keep in mind, this is Silicon Valley, the "cradle of tech innovation."

I find this to be an egregious waste of school funds, funds that could have gone towards funding school plays, improving school facilities, or expanding the engineering course offerings. And the real kicker is that my HS is an "arts magnet" school.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[alphydan]

teacher here. Most smartboards are rubbish. The calibration fails constantly, it's really hard to draw on it ... and most "ready made" lessons for smartboards are usually boring. So I'm afraid it's a projector for me.

[eat_veggies]

The ready-made lessons are more shitty tech demos (Amazing! Drag and drop! Buttons! Computers!) to wow the administrators than actual lessons.

We have smart boards and chromebook carts in every room of my high school, and yet they canceled our fucking robotics team due to "lack of funding" and fired our oldest computer science teacher because his experience + degrees meant he cost them too much to employ [0]. Yes, I'm mad.

[0] https://de01903704.schoolwires.net/site/handlers/filedownloa...

[applecrazy]

You’re absolutely right, it’s absolutely admins seeing the “ooh shiny” aspect of these things. I have a feeling the company pushing these boards has really good salespeople.

And I’m an officer of a robotics team, so I feel your pain. We get zero funding from the school. Most money comes from members’ pockets or fundraisers. Eventually, we want to ease the burden on members by getting corporate sponsors, since we obviously won’t get any money from the school district, who’s busy cutting library budgets and buying smart boards.

[UtilityDave]

Honestly the computers kids should have are the most barebones python and assembly beige boxes that can be found, and told they can play games when they can make them.

That's why I learned to code.

And beige boxes are WAY cheaper than Apple products (and make you do more with less)

[dzdt]

You're missing the point that the current tech push is largely to get computers that can run the standardised testing bloatware being pushed down from the top of the system. Education possibilities are only a side benefit; testing is the goal.

[userbinator]

digital arts

Doing some demoscene-ish things might fit... and be more likely to inspire curiosity and self-learning. As the sibling comment here notes, "you can play games once you make them" can be a powerful motivator.