Out of Their Seats
The extent to which students are
engaged, challenged, and, dare I presume, learn is correlated with many
things, only one of which is “seat
time.” If the education profession so
grossly misunderstands the crowning
glory of many 21st-century technologies—their ability to affect a student
outside the 45 minutes in which his/
her posterior is planted in row 4/seat
5—then yes, it might be a waste of
valuable “seat time” to train teachers
who do not have the schema to make
use of professional development in
any meaningful way.
Hilary Short
Baltimore County Public Schools
Essex, Maryland
PD = R&D
The state of the U.S. auto industry
should be a cautionary tale for educators. Pouring money into marketing,
advertising, and cosmetic product
changes rather than into research and
development, American carmakers allowed product quality to decline relative to foreign competition, and now
several of them are truly imperiled.
International competitors’ devotion to
R&D yielded better cars, higher profits, and greater financial stability. For
schools and teachers, professional development is the equivalent of R&D.
Peter Gow
Beaver Country Day School
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Corrections
The May 2009 edition of ISTE in Action, titled
“Evaluating the Fruit of Your Labor,” incorrectly
identified Clark County, Nevada, as implementing
eMINTS. The column should have read, “Churchill
County is implementing the eMINTS professional
development model ….” L&L regrets any confusion
this may have caused.
An ISTE News item in the June/July issue about
the ISTE Board of Directors election results
inadvertently left out the name of corporate
representative Dan Meyer from Atomic Learning.
We apologize for the error.
Participate in our reader poll at www.iste.org.
LETTERS
Blogging is No Threat
I read Ms. Nielsen’s reasons for not
blogging (Point/Counterpoint, May
2009) and found it to be a sad critique
of my colleagues in the field of education. Her reasons were not derived
from pedagogical research and analysis, but from the pressure of digitally
illiterate and/or technologically naive
educators who do not have an appreciation for how important technology
is to developing well-rounded learners. Her statement, “Engaging in an
activity that constantly places you
under examination makes an already
difficult job even more difficult and
potentially jeopardizes job security,”
is a clear indicator that there is a disconnect between some educators and
real-world expectations in regard to
technology. What does it say about
administrators and teachers who are
still afraid of technology in 2009?
What effect will this have on learners who are maturing/learning in this
technological age? We live in a society
that is more global than it was five
years ago and that thrives on being
connected. Blogging can be a useful
tool for teaching, learning, and communicating knowledge and should
not be viewed as a threat.
Raquel M. Bennett
City University of New York
Brooklyn, New York
Consider the ROI
As leaders in the arena of educational
technology, I encourage ISTE to provide more leadership to school decision makers regarding the total cost of
ownership/value of investment when
purchasing technology resources. The
May 2009 “ISTE in Action” column
promotes interactive whiteboards
without any regard for the ROI of
such a costly purchase. I appreciated
that the author noted “recitation at
the board” was a common classroom
activity. Rather than being the answer
to increased student engagement, this
technology requires students to come
to the front of the classroom to “write”
on a board exactly as they have done
for over 100 years in schools! How
does a technology coordinator explain
spending $1,500 per classroom on top
of a projector purchase for that result?
The author then adds that many districts are now looking to the next step,
wireless slates that allow students to
stay at their seats and interact. This
clearly says that the original large investment now needs to be increased
to allow more appropriate interaction
with the technology.
Our informal studies have shown
that a classroom video projector allowing for group viewing connected
to a network-accessible computer
combined with a $100 wireless key-board/mouse and $49 annotation
software provides more flexibility and
greater engagement than whiteboards,
at a maximum of 10% of the cost!
Our goal has been to provide technology access without having to move
students out of their most productive
work areas. This under-$150-per-
classroom investment has allowed us
to meet that goal in over 4,000 classrooms at a cost I can easily justify to
our board and community, and has
shown positive results in both student
achievement and engagement. Allowing our teachers to work with students
in any configuration and still interact
with the technology has made our
classroom environments more intuitive and instantly usable.
Please provide the professional
courtesy of considering all facets of
purchasing resources when writing articles such as this that affect purchase
decisions. Using that lens is critical to
ensuring wise spending of our ever
shrinking school funds.
Jim Hirsch
Plano Independent School District
Plano, Texas
Editor’s Note: See page 18 for an in-depth
article about how to build a “brightboard”
using a configuration similar to what Hirsch
describes.
