Hawaii Teacher: Lack of Computers in the Classroom a Real Problem
I have a Promethean board in my classroom. It鈥檚 an impressive beast of an installation, with a motorized lift to adjust the height, a giant, thick-bodied screen with connectors and wires protruding from the back, and a futuristic looking projector shooting into a convex mirror that reflects the image back onto the screen.
You can hook a laptop up to this behemoth and write on it using a special pen – about the same way you can use a projector to project onto a white board and write on that. But the Promethean also allows teachers to design fancy interactive slide shows, or games that students can play by coming up to the board and moving or revealing answers with a touch.
I found a Promethean online for a little under $8,000. I鈥檓 not sure how much our school paid for them, but there is one in every single classroom, making Campbell High one of the most 鈥渢echnologically advanced鈥 public schools in Hawaii.
Unfortunately, the majority of these devices have become little more than expensive projectors.
Designing fancy, interactive slide shows and games is kind of like designing a website on iWeb, requiring comparable amounts of time and technical literacy. To most teachers in our school, that kind of investment in one single lesson or game isn鈥檛 worth the sacrifice of other responsibilities.
We spent money outfitting every classroom with these new boards, but the vast majority of our classrooms are without air conditioning. Students and teachers sweat in temperatures that can get up to the high 80s during the summer months.
At the same time students in nearly every single expository writing class have to hand-write their papers because those classes aren鈥檛 held in computer labs.
In the 21st century, when computer skills are an absolute essential to succeeding in nearly every single professional skill, we are not even providing computers for our high school students to write research papers.
I was lucky this past year. I was also the media teacher so I was the only English teacher able to hold my expository writing class in a room where every student had access to a computer. I had no problems having them take notes because they loved to put their computers to use. They literally loved typing their notes! They learned advanced formatting, column breaking, highlighting, commenting, and adding graphics to their notes and documents in addition to how to use prepositions and parallel sentence structure.
I could cruise through lessons, having students copy examples and then write their own in a few seconds with almost no problems. Students were unbelievably engaged because they were able to work at the speed at which they are accustomed to communicating, rather than hand-writing notes into a notebook that I would later have to decipher.
At the end of every class, students emailed me their notes, making grading a breeze. With a click of a button in my Gmail, I could check the individual in-class work that was embedded into the notes and exemplars that we worked through as a class.
Teachers know the difference between technology that supports classrooms and gimmicks purchased so that policy makers and administrations can claim to be integrating technology into classrooms. Technology is useless if it does not support teacher-student interactions, and teachers, not administrators or policy makers, can explain what those technologies would look like in their classrooms.
Oddly, no one is asking teachers what technologies we need in our classrooms to be successful. Instead, we are presented with technologies that are sometimes clunky, ineffective, or not targeted to our subject matters, and then we are asked to find a ways to integrate them into our instruction as if the introduction of technology alone were going to magically change our student outcomes.
Successful businesses do not create products and then make people interested in that product. They identify a need and then create a product to address that need. I do not need a giant interactive board that requires hours of my time just to allow students to individually go up to the board to interact with it.
I need to get a jump on my students the second they walk in the door and to not lose momentum by wasting the first 10 minutes of my instructional time taking attendance. And I need to stop doing double work inputting attendance, then hand-writing referrals for every student that doesn鈥檛 come to class, then walking that referral over to a physical mailbox. We could free up hundreds of thousands of teacher work hours and make attendance systems much more accurate using the same technology that the Honolulu marathon uses to check in its runners at checkpoints.
I need my students to be able to type, edit, and submit papers digitally, just like they will in the real world. I need to be able to more quickly and thoroughly administer and grade projects and assignments. And I need a room that isn鈥檛 as hot as a sauna in which to teach.
There are technologies that support my classroom needs. The question is just whether education leaders are going to start listening to what teachers say about how to best support their classroom, or if they are going to continue to tell teachers about what teachers need.
Unfortunately, for this next year of students, I鈥檒l be teaching expository writing in a classroom with no computers.
Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.
