Students of the Chalkboard Are Becoming Students of the Smart Board

Reuven Glezer, Reporter

The Tampa Bay Times reported earlier this month that a middle school student, after accessing a teacher’s computer, was charged with felony computer crimes and suspended from school for ten days. The student, Domanik Green, allegedly changed the background of his teacher’s computer to that of two men kissing as a prank. One of the computers contained Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test answers.

It is this fact that has cast doubt over Green’s case, with county sheriff Chris Nocco, who the Times reported as stating, “even though some might say this is just a teenage prank, who knows what this teenager might have done.” It is the sheriff’s office that is pressing the charges. Nocco has also threatened that other students engaging in such activities will face similar consequences.

With the slow trickle of technology entering the classroom, the relationship between students and the technology they’ve been encountering is shifting. These relationships, however, have had wide range of both good and bad effects. In 2006, a New Zealand teenager was detained for leading an international crime syndicate out of the city of Hamilton. He allegedly skimmed millions of dollars using the power of the web. However, events like these are rarities that fuel paranoia, causing educational systems to restrict technology education.

Two Duke University economists examined the way education affects teens in the classroom in the early 2000s to measure the impact of this trend. The results were less than appealing. Grades dropped dramatically when students were made to use computers as learning tools. Students from poorer backgrounds did worse, and the researchers, Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd, postulated that perhaps this was because screen-time was a more common activity among people from lower-income backgrounds.According to the researchers, children of lower-income backgrounds spend closer to 40% of their time in front of a screen and experienced less supervision when in front of those screens. Putting them in front of a computer without supervision did not assist as a substitute for learning, and their grades subsequently dropped as a result. Further research shows that technology should work more as a supplement and with teachers who are extremely competent in technology, rather than tools to teach kids exclusively.

“I think there’re positives and negatives,” began Jason Otto, dean at MBHS. “I think it’s always great in today’s society to be able to communicate and access data, however it’s up to each individual person how they’re going to use that access. Are they going to be on Facebook? Not necessarily a bad thing, but it takes their attention – focus – away from classwork.”

With this in mind, vastly different approaches have been carried out with technology. One of the most recent is the Crash Course series on YouTube, a series of educational videos in a vast array of subjects that conform to Advanced Placement standards, were designed and written in part by brothers John and Hank Green. Their goal in mind was to provide free education to everyone through the growing use of technology and they actively encouraged teachers to use their videos, in which they also took on the roles of educators themselves.

Finland, whose educational system regularly achieves the highest test scores internationally, and beat the United States in science and math, is on the opposite end of the technology spectrum. These classrooms use technology minimally, and feel that technology can be replaced by closer peer-to-peer learning and encouraging students to tutor one another in subject areas they feel strongly in. One examination of a Finnish classroom found that the most tech used was an overhead projector.

“Old ways are still the best, they’ve just changed shape,” said Deepak Khemraj, a senior at Millennium Brooklyn High School. “I still read textbooks, they are just in PDF form now. The SMART Board is still a board, with markers.” In regards to services such as Crash Course, Khemraj remarked, “I think they have gotten so good that it undermines teachers. Often it’s the best way to learn ‘X’ without the distraction…of school.”

With technology’s growth continuing at a rapid pace, we can likely expect to see the classroom try and take advantage of these new found transitions. Whether the long-term will benefit from a generation of students who learned from computer screens rather than chalkboards, however, is something that needs to be seen for itself.