Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation’s public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.
Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn’t necessarily making things better, just different.
I nodded so vigorously at this article in the Washington Post. It relates to my personal, education-related technology purchases and my Board of Education’s technology purchases. Like I said before, the prefectural government seemed amazingly bad at spending money on the schools’ behalf. Even with my own interesting purchases, it takes a lot of work – no less than it did before, that’s for sure – to transform the physical materials into real educational matter.
My hunch is that I can make the decision to buy something for myself, and use it in my classroom. If it goes poorly, I have only myself to blame. When a BOE makes a stupid purchase, everyone in the prefecture can blame them. I wouldn’t say I’m better at spending my own money than they are at spending the prefecture’s money: perhaps it’s a matter of the teachers’ ineptitude with technology, although I think that’s less likely. I would rather think about this in a less-generalized and more specific way.
More on that later.
Via the sometimes caustic but always thought-provoking blog Cafe Hayek