The student is said to be in charge, to have ownership of her education.About a month into the retooling, a video appeared that gave vent to the frustration many were feeling in this netherworld of cyber teaching.A sweet young woman introduces herself as the music teacher, and says shes composed an ode to online teaching.After a few disarming chords on her ukulele, she lets out a primal scream.
That scream made the rounds of social media, even making national news. The human signals that tell a teacher how a class is reactingthe sighs, groans, snorts, giggles, eye rolls, glances, body languageare stripped away online. Warmth is difficult to express; rapport, trust, bonding almost impossible to build. Kids can be hard to motivate under the best of circumstances, says teacher blogger Steven Singer, but try doing it through a screen. Ed Dba Notes Free Access ToWhen the pandemic hit, right away we got a list of all these technology companies that make education software that were offering free access to their products for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, said Gordon Lafer, political economist at the University of Oregon and a member of his local school board. They pitch these offerings as stepping up to help out the country in a moment of crisis. Marketing has become so aggressive that a school superintendent near Seattle tweeted a heartfelt appeal to vendors: Please stop. Just stop my superintendent colleagues and I need to focus on our communities. Let us do our jobs. Her plea hit a nerve, prompting a survey by the National Superintendents Roundtable that revealed a deep vein of irritation and discontent at the barrage of texts, emails, and phone calls, a distraction and nuisance when theyre trying to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. ![]() Many superintendents have allowed these incursions, directing funding to technology that might have been better spent on human resources, teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians (up to 5.6 billion of school technology purchased sits unused, according to a 2019 analysis in EdWeek Market Brief ). Now the pandemic has provided ed tech a golden opportunity, a tailwind (these are the terms we hear): Michael Moe, head of the venture capitalist group Global Silicon Valley, says: We see the education industry today as the health care industry of 30 years ago. Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute, urges that the United States 700 billion public-education budget should be spent on a bunch of online materialsalong with a device for every child and better connectivity. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has close ties with the Koch network, also sees the classroom as obsolete: If our ability to educate is limited to what takes place in any given physical building, we are never going to meet the unique needs of every student. Andrew Cuomo announced his intention to work with the Gates Foundation to develop a blueprint to reimagine education in the new normal. The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms, Cuomo said. Personalized programs are different from the online teaching most teachers did this spring, in that they eliminate the need for the teacher. Their interactive software has the student interacting with the computer, not a human being. Theyre called personalized because an algorithm based on a students past performance generates learning plans tailored to her level and interests. The student sits, encased in headphones, responding to prompts, clicking her way through preset steps to predetermined answers; she demonstrates competencies by passing a test, then moves on to the next task and the next test, until she receives a digital badge.
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December 2020
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