| Asking whether "computers" belong to education is like asking whether "books" belong to education. I can imagine a book that does. I can also imagine a book that does not. Same for computer programs. We should debate specific applications, whether they help the education, or are just shiny toys. Then we should make the cheapest computer which runs exactly these applications and nothing more, and use that in schools. If teachers don't know how to use a computer, these two things could fix that easily: set up the educational computer so that it can only run those selected educational applications; and write a book about how to use each of those applications in education. A debate on the level of "Computers good! No, computers bad! Good! Bad! Good! Bad!" is not helping anyone. An example of a useful application in math education could be e.g. something that shows you how a graph of a function changes when you change the equation. For example, you could have a quadratic equation, where you can use the mouse to change each coefficient. When the time is right, bring the computers and let the kids experiment with this. On other days, do not bring the computers to the math lesson. Collect some applications like this, make a Linux DVD which can be installed or run live, write teachers' manual for each application and put it on the DVD and online as a PDF file, and that's it. (I suppose someone already did something like this, although probably without the PDFs.) The question is not whether to use the computers or not, but how to use them. |