The Relationship Between the Increase of Home Schooling in the United States and Access to Technology

The increase in the number of home schooled children in the United States between the years of 1994 and 1999 represents an average annual growth of approximately 17 percent. According to more recent estimates from a different source, more than 1.1 million U.S. children are home schooled today. While I have not conducted a formal analysis of the relationship between this growth and the technological capability of households, it should be noted that approximately 75 percent of U.S. households had internet access by 2004, a two-thirds increase from the prior year. Moreover, 78 percent of U.S. children between the ages of two and seventeen have internet access at home. It can be argued that a contributing reason for the movement towards home schooling is that the technological capability of households in recent years has enabled home schooled students to rely less on their parent teacher for instruction and educational resources. Indeed, the rising trend of home schooling students as a private alternative to public education "seems to be driven by parents’ concern about safety and values, and is enabled by new electronic technologies that are greatly expanding the educational opportunities available at home, while reducing parents’ teaching responsibilities" (Kolderie, 1998). For example, many states and districts provide lesson plans online. In addition, there are several private agencies that provide instruction online that fit within the curriculum requirements of highly regulated (with respect to home schooling) states. Two popular online home schooling resources include the humanities tutor edsitement.neh.gov and the "agenda-free" lifeofflorida.org.

Dear SOE: Back to Basics, Please

Our math methods class last night was irritating. They had this ambitious goal of showing us seven different math instructional technologies with an entire twelve minutes to receive instruction on and try out the technology. If you didn't catch the hint of sarcasm in that last statement, it should have been there. Okay, new technologies are cool and neat and exciting, but twelve minutes to try out statistical packages and math games and symbolic calculators is clearly not enough exposure to be useful at all. While I appreciate that our traditional education classes are trying to "keep up with the changing times," I also believe that our 504 instruction on technology is sufficient and goes more into depth with a few key technologies, thus making the exposure worthwhile. I guess the conclusion to this rant is that I wish the "traditional" education classes would just stay with the basics...we've barely had exposure to things like lesson planning and classroom management--very essential skills that we should learn as pre-service teachers.

Go EDUC 504!

I just wanted to share that because of the skills we learned in this class, my group in another class was able to pull off an awesome presentation. Specifically, we designed a computer game which we were very proud of. Please check it out on the EDUC 649 CTools site if you missed the presentation. Thanks Jeff and Liz!

The Open Source Debate for U.S. High Schools

Open source software (OSS) is software that is free of distribution restrictions. Some confuse OSS with free software, but not all OSS is free. However, there are more versions of free OSS than free proprietary software. (One popular example of OSS is the Firefox web browser by Mozilla.) For this reason, there exists a large contingency of those who believe that educational institutions, especially K-12 public schools, should begin acquiring OSS instead of continuing to invest resources in proprietary software. Proponents for OSS in schools argue that, since public schools already have considerable budget constraints, acquiring and maintaining proprietary software is an unnecessarily burdensome expense. Proponents argue that there exists cheaper or free OSS versions of essentially all the major software that schools use. Moreover because OSS can be modified, without violating intellectual property rights restrictions, schools can modify such software to fit their individual needs.
However, there is also a considerable contingency arguing against the complete overhaul of current proprietary software in schools in favor of switching to OSS. One argument from this side of the debate is that proprietary software is, in general, of higher quality than OSS. They argue that proprietary software has a higher price tag than OSS, because considerable research and development is invested into developing proprietary software. Moreover, proponents of keeping proprietary software in schools argue that one major function of K-12 schools is preparing students to excel in colleges and workplaces. Since most college computer labs and office work places use proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows and its applications, students will be better equipped to excel in those environments if they have had experience with such software at school.
My opinion falls closer to that of the latter group when it comes to U.S. schools. Since proprietary software is, in general, more user-friendly and is unarguably more prevalent at colleges and businesses, I believe our students should be exposed to such software while in school. Any students that show interest in programming or having experience with more sophisticated software could probably seek out resources or referrals for working with OSS from their schools' computer teachers. However, the average student (who does not grow up to be a computer programmer, but rather, a college student or full-time worker) will find it invaluable to their future success to have experience with proprietary word and spreadsheet documents.
I realize that I have focussed my discussion on U.S. schools, in particular. This is because U.S. schools have far greater resources to invest in software than some other developing countries. The OSS debate is raging in, for example, Brazil and several African countries, where public school resources are much more scarce. In such countries, there is a strong push to convert not only public schools to OSS but also all governmental functions. Maybe I'll discuss this in a future blog...

The Simpsons on Grad Students

Bart: Look at me. I'm a grad student! I'm
30, and I made $600 last year.
Marge: Bart, don't make fun of
grad students. They just made a terrible life choice.

So funny, so sad, so true. See the clip here.

Copyright Law and Technology at Romulus High School (Sept 14 class)

1. Liz's section on fair use of non-public materials in schools was very interesting. Having conducted economic research involving intellectual property, I thought I would be able to score well on her pre-quiz, but I was able to get only three out of the six questions correct. I was especially surprised that use of copyrighted music in schools is illegal if it extends beyond thirty seconds. I knew this to be true for public playings of music, but since the classroom is considered private space for use of printed materials, I thought that the same would hold true for streaming media such as music and video. I guess this means that all those lip syncing acts in elementary school talent shows and those cheerleading routines to the latest Beyonce song are illegal.

2. In Jeff's section we discussed technology availability and use in our various placements. I found that Romulus High School students and teachers have access to a relatively large amount technology, both hardware and software. For example, there is a computer, television, telephone, and projector in every classroom. In math classes all students are expected to own calculators...even if it's just a simple, dollar-store-purchased calculator. In addition, teachers may reserve computer lab time for their classes, borrow the schools' digital recorders, laptops, and smartboards. Teachers take attendance and record grades electronically.
During section, it became clear that the Romulus student teachers had differing opinions as to what degree of access students have to computers outside of school. On one hand we see them playing the latest hits on their iPod and discussing their MySpace pages. On the other hand, students turn in hand-written papers and don't know how to look up the news online.
I'm somewhat conflicted with respect to how much I want to prioritize integrating technology into my lessons, especially the math courses. I recognized immediately the value of using online news and other electronic resources for economic discussions in my economics classes. However, I wonder how much value technology would add to an already packed mathematics curriculum. Should I really sacrifice class and test-prep time to introduce online math lessons or math software? (And how would this reconcile with the fact that I already feel like students are too dependent on their calculators for basic arithmetic operations?)

e-Portfolio (Sept 8 class)

I was able to attend only the last hour of class since other classes I'm taking for my major conflicted with this time slot. Thus, I'm only able to comment on Liz's section about creating our e-portfolios on WikiSpaces. I think that this portfolio is a fantastic idea! I am very excited to compile a portfolio of my background, philosophy, current academic and secondary classroom work, and references in one, organized web space. An e-portfolio gives potential employers the opportunity to explore my credentials before and after interviews as well as presenting to them that I am passionate about secondary education, organized, motivated, and technologically savvy. (My only complaint about this project is that I will have to compose a separate e-portfolio for my MAC thesis requirement. I would rather put my full effort into composing one comprehensive e-portfolio for both the 504 and the MAC requirements.)