Here is a typical district/principal purchase that undermines the case for spending money on technology in schools. This is an anecdote from an actual school that I am not affiliated with but will not name.
Elementary principal knows she wants to integrate technology in her school (and also needs for teachers to be able to take online attendance).
Principal decides to buy each teacher a laptop and buys the best…Mac Book Pros for everyone! (MacBook Pros are about twice as much as MacBooks and are more powerful than most teachers would need).
First instructions from principal are, “Do not let students use these laptops.”
Laptop comes in box but school does not purchase laptop bags for teachers. Laptops are either unprotected when transported or left in their box because it’s too much trouble to take it out and put it back in.
Laptop comes locked as per district policy. Teachers cannot install software, change settings (even things like brightness and contrast), update software, or customize the computer in any way without an administrator password. The administrator password is only held by administrators. This particularly bothers me because it makes the experience of using a MacBook Pro (which is extremely easy and intuitive) and makes it frustrating and unintuitive.
Schools don’t need to spend more than they need to. They need to make it convenient for teachers to use their laptops. At some point we need to hand the technology over to students. Unless we do these things, how are we improving education by introducing fancy technology into our schools?
What are the worst technology purchases you’ve seen in schools?
PTO buys a souped up rolling mobile computer lab for high-performing public elementary school. State-of-the-art laptops are on every student desk. Teacher’s laptop projected for the lesson. Picture perfect 21st Century Classroom. Parent volunteers are willing and able to come in and assist on the days the computer is fully integrated into the curriculum.
And in that hour of time the class is using the mobile lab they struggle to make programs work and connect to the internet because the school district is not servicing the machines with upgrades, updates and general maintenance. And the network was put in 10 years ago and cannot handle the data so everything is painfully slow. This pain is compounded by a wireless network that was handed down from a Title I school that does not cover the whole building and is crippled with outages.
The sad thing is that the kids are so excited about learning this way and that excitement fades with the frustrations of a inadequate system. You cannot halfway commit to technology. By doing so you waste money and instruction time. And you loose your most important audience- the kids.
My school has a computer lab full of iMacs that were put in sometime last year. I’ve never even seen them and probably won’t before the end of the year. This is apparently “not a priority.” Oh and I have no student computers in my classroom either.
District buys oodles of DOS labs when Windoze is already out..
Ours is not necessarily wasteful, but funny.
Stimulus money is buying projectors for everybody, elmos, new computers for everybody. (we don’t understand the new computers, the ones we have are perfectly fine.)
And new new powerpull may have blown a transformer. We just know we had no power in half the school.
Six years ago I won a computer grant and received five desk top computers for free. I was able to use them in my classroom for three years without issue. The fourth year the district switched ant-virus protection and the techie informed me that it could be used only on computers bought by the district. I used the computers that year, but by the end of it without protection they were useless and I was forced to have them sent to recycling. The district never converted to Vista and still uses XP, which these computers operated on. Yes over the years they were much slower than the new models put in the labs, but for web surfing and taking practice tests from the textbook company and word processing, power point presentations and desk top publishing they would still be usefull for a number of more years.
It was a shame and the district should be ashamed of itself for not extending something as simple as anti-virus proctection to keep them running.
Back in 1990, I was teaching 7th grade social studies, I was so excited when the school bought laser disk players. The library bought the complete National Geographic series on laser disks. The series came with a manual that contained descriptive text and a bar code for each image. The manual could not be checked out.
When I asked how could I show the images without the manual, I was told to photocopy the bar codes and glue them down to paper to be scanned by a bar code reader. I checked out the school’s only bar code reader and tried to scan the codes in class as we studied African history. The photocopy images were not crisp enough to be read by a bar code reader.
When I asked if there was a piece of software that I could buy with personal funds that would automate this process, I was told that the only available software was written for Mac. I was one of the few teachers with a desktop computer because I brought my personal PC into my classroom, which of course couldn’t run Mac software.
It was heartbreaking to see those two expensive laser disk players sit in the library, hardly used, until they became obsolete surplus equipment.
Yes, it’s so hard to get technology into our schools that sometimes schools are so overprotective of equipment/materials that it’s too hard or inconvenient to use them or teachers don’t even know they are available. Unfortunately, technology does not get better with age.