I saw this come up today, Jobs and Dell shared a stage in Texas and told their audience that unions and poor principles are the roadblock (Wired) to better schools in terms of technolgy advances. I haven’t seen the full article yet (I’m writing this while I’m waiting for some pictues to dump), but one thing that I can say is that for all that Jobs, Dell and their sort can do fo us in creating the technology that we use in the classroom and in the office, there is one thing that they really don’t quite seem to understand from what I have read so far – education is a significantly different world from corporate. “Bad” teachers in terms of tech integration might be amazing teachers at getting kids to do other things. Some people are just not motivated to be technosavy, and I don’t think we can fault them from that. As for principles – those are special sort of people willing to put up with far more stuff than your typical manager.
For both teachers and admin, there are so few people willing to do the job, that I think we should really value those that are there right now. The real issues are the social problems around the schools and idiotic governments.
So Jobs and Dell, before you hack at teachers again, walk a term in their shoes and you’ll see that being under valued, over worked and generally the kicking kids of every other group out there isn’t the easiest place to be. When you are worried about kids going home to iffy homes, coming to school without food and then wondering if your own kids have enough to do what you would wish them to do on a salary that doesn’t really ever seem fair for the effort and the responisbility, technology advances are not the top of the list. Just because these teachers are not using tablets and iPods all the time, that doesn’t mean they are not trying. They may be doing things with Office apps or the like, and that in many instances is enough or all that we can ask for. Realistically we should be willing to help each according to their need, so those that have the ability to do more, we help them more, but those that are struggling to get the base technolgy of pencils into their classrooms… maybe we should help them as well. For those in the US, you should be taking a look at this UNICEF report as well (via Wired).
I wonder if this canned my ADE app… it shouldn’t have in a fair world.
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