New and Improved! Technology initiatives in education.

Time for a big-ass rant.

The Tempered Radical knows why teachers give up on Interactive White Boards. With some major snipping, and hoping I don't eliminate context:

What bothers me ... is an attitude towards teachers that I see often in conversations about school change. "Teachers all resistant to change and lazy!" the argument goes. "If they'd just be persistent and determined, our schools would be saved." ... The general belief is that teachers lack determination and commitment in almost every circumstance.
... that's a flawed assumption. ... the amount of effort that most changes take doesn't align with the corresponding benefits that change is designed to produce. ... The software wasn't designed to naturally facilitate the kinds of teaching that I believe in and limited access to the hardware required that I restructure learning time in my classroom almost every day.

I'm all over this. I think that the programmers who do this stuff should spend some time teaching to find out how the "real-world" will use it and what those teachers actually need. This is, for me, the crux of the problem. Those who write don't know what problem they are trying to solve and often do not have a clue as to how I will use it. (Sort of an educational consultant, no?)

Then, the pressures of making a sale get in the way of making my life easier. All too often, the person making the purchase isn't the one who gets to use it. Even if they asked the teachers, they're still asking someone who hasn't used it and can't really tell.

There are four major problems with technology and tech initiatives: Variety, the learning curve, Usability and Availability.

The rant is below this break.

More SmartBored Fun

Okay, now it's on to circles and sectors. I certainly hope that our fearless graphic artists have got their Ps dotted and their Qs crossed, and their Is and Ts minded.

Or whatever.

Drumroll ...

Here it is -- the circle of sevenths. Those seven pieces are supplied separately. I guess no one ever thought anyone would ever think of reconstructing the circle.


I know you can't read those numbers on the compass, so I'll do that.

In order from 0^o North: 52^o, 102^o, 150^o, 210^o, 258^o, 308^o, 360^o
Low 48^o, High 60^o

So my questions:

1. At what point does being accurate matter in this 21st century?
2. Is right vs wrong being supplanted by "Don't I get partial credit for making seven pieces that are sorta the right size?" I know that my copy of Fireworks can make a line, copy it and then rotate each one 51.4⁰ - why can't these designers do the same?
3. What happened in this country? We used to be ultra-precise about things. Is all software doomed to be forever "buggy" and "barely out of beta?"
4. Why is the lack of true understanding on my students' part no longer a surprise to me? And why have I started to be resigned to it?

Welcome to the Next Rounds of Trivia - with a Twist.

It's a special day on the Curmudgeon's Compound in the woods. We've got Trivia as supplied by SmartBoard. Yes, that's Smart©Board. They've copyrighted it so you'll think they deserve the name.

It's a visual thing:

Use all the information available in the image: the location and size of the islands, the shape, anything that will help you scope out which country is pictured below. Identify this "drawing", direct from the Lesson Activity Toolkit #2.

Non-eponymous SmartBoard

We're busily learning the amazement that is SmartBoard. I'm getting exasperated by the childlike wonder from the elementary teachers - "Ooooh, the picture of a word and it has a sound pronouncing it! WOW." Maybe they've just been hanging around 8-yr-olds too long. I keep reminding myself, "Don't make fun."

Then we load up a bad animation of the human respiratory system. Pretty limited and possibly wrong -- it seems okay -- I'm no Biology teacher so I can't say for sure. I'm not impressed. Show me a lifelike one with zoom and realism and you'll have me, but this? Five pieces you drag and drop onto a "guy" and then press resuscitate? Oh, brother.

Robert Frost is another of the multimedia offerings. Stopping by Woods is a classic. It has someone reading it aloud. This apparently is special because none of these folks would ever dream of reading it out loud themselves. You can click and read the words, too. You can click and read something about the author. You can do nothing more here.

This is it? This is the "Interactively, Forward-Thinking, Digital Native enticing, Nowadays, Kids think Differently and You must Teach Differently" hoo-ah technology that'll transform my teaching?

Hell, I can recite that poem from memory and read it a lot better than the stupid animation can. I also know a lot more Frost than just that one poem.

Okay, I'm officially annoyed at this point. I've got a wanna-be PowerPoint masquerading as a teaching tool and falling way short of a couple webpages or even -- horror -- an actual BOOK.

Then we are told of this neat little math tool that will definitely help engage those reluctant digital natives - Pythagoras' Theorem (sic). I'm game so I toss it on a notebook page and I'm playing with it. Nothing here to improve learning - it's just a "Black Box". You drag around the top button to set the values and it tells you the answers. You do nothing but mouse around. I fiddle but I'm uninterested because I find this kind of thing unnecessary brain-candy and frankly, mentally distracting to the actual learning involved. Then, the teacher next to me gives me a nudge and shows me a 45-45-90 triangle, just like this one:

Yes, that's a 45-45-90 triangle and the sides are 252-325-403. If you take the three sides in the following equations, that calculations are done correctly -- a²+b²=c² and area values are okay. It's just that equal angles mean an isosceles triangle and those sides are not consistent with those angles. DUH. Apparently, not anymore.

It's been around since freaking 2004! It comes with the SmartBoard software, prepacked in the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 (it's also in 1.0) and it's wrong!!!!!

I swear that I have not photoshopped or altered the image in any way except cropping the edges. Go ahead. Load up your software, search the gallery for pythagoras and make a right isosceles triangle. Then re-do it, making a 45-45-90 triangle. Two different triangles.

How is this possible? Are they that stupid? In FIVE YEARS, has no one noticed this? My guess is, "NO." The folks who use these prepacked toys are mainly elementary school teachers and most of them come from the bottom quintile of their college ranks. They blithely move on, screwing up education: fractions, multiplication (that matrix crap), decimals, pretending to algebra, using tools with incorrect information that gets in the way of learning, using calculators because they can't teach math, basically screwing everything up for six straight years of the kids' education.

I point it out to the others, "Hey watch out. If this is wrong, then you need to check all of these before you trust them." Blank looks.

There's another gizmo that has adjustors that seem backwards:

I ask if that bothers anyone, being the reverse of the number line and the usual web standards. "Maybe it's because it's a Canadian company," was the only explanation.

No wonder we've got an education problem in this country.