A MacBooks-to-Success Story For Students And Educators

[onehandle]

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Sixty educators from across the nation roamed the halls and ringed the rooms of East Mooresville Intermediate School, searching for the secret formula. They found it in Erin Holsinger’s fifth-grade math class.

There, a boy peering into his school-issued MacBook blitzed through fractions by himself, determined to reach sixth-grade work by winter. Three desks away, a girl was struggling with basic multiplication — only 29 percent right, her screen said — and Ms. Holsinger knelt beside her to assist. Curiosity was fed and embarrassment avoided, as teacher connected with student through emotion far more than Wi-Fi.

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/education/mooresville-school-district-a-laptop-success-story.html

[Logical]

1. One handle, is this another of your required pro-apple posts?

[girl gone mad]

2. Yet, the most exclusive private schools ban computers in the classroom..

and the school that top executives from Silicon Valley's biggest tech firms (including Apple) put their kids on long waiting lists to get into doesn't even want kids using computers at home.

Why is that? Maybe they already know something that the rest of the country is just now figuring out?

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores

excerpt:

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.

Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.

Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all

[Robb]

3. Wait! I have anecdotal evidence that educational technology is stupid!

Also, Arne Duncan ate my baby!