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$67 per student! Wow, you can barely buy a cheap cell phone for that much. Here comes another major boondoggle from the NYS DOE. I can’t wait to hear how the nincompoops at the NYC DOE will piggyback some ludicrous idea on this one. There is really no other way to catagorize this decision as anything but plain, old STUPID. There will never be enough money to fund a proper technological upgrade for all schools in the state and not even a glimmer of hope of affording the maintenance necessary for computers abused by careless students and teachers. Also, will someone please explain why EVERYTHING must be blamed on pensions. If you can’y afford to hire teachers, DON’T. Tell parents to keep their tax money and home school their treasures. Hey, let them buy a computer and the kids can lear from the internet!!!!!

Hey, I’ll take $67 per student at my school. With 3,300 students in the building that’s over $220K. If my school purchased smart — which is where I personally start to lose a little faith — and trained teachers appropriately — which is where I lose a little more faith — then that would mean that we could purchase 14 full class sets of ChromeBooks (which we’d have to do through an outside bid as ShopDoe doesn’t offer them) of good quality along with the storage/charging carts for the sets. (About $15K per set total, soup to nuts.)

That way we’d have non-DOS-based units that required little IT support, would not get viruses, and would do one important thing: Get students online. All work could be done via the cloud including digital portfolios, digital group work based on file sharing protocol, and we would be able to focus on real College & Career skills.

If we had that we could do a lot. There’s no need to purchase software in 2013, no need for Office, no need for USB flash drives. With some training, teachers could do some great work. I’ve had this setup in the past (at another school where I was IT Coordinator and piloted this type of 21st century classroom model in the building) and it’s amazing when implemented correctly. The tech doesn’t replace the teacher. It is a powerful tool in the right hands. We used slide rules once and calculators didn’t kill us.

The biggest problem that the NYC system faces is that too many people don’t understand technology or what it means to work in a technology-based economy. Many of my fellow teachers don’t even know what the term “Information Worker” means, much less what it’s like to work in a cubicle paradigm. If teachers don’t even know what’s in the world then they can’t possibly prepare kids for it.

Also, we have a Chancellor and a Mayor who won’t even unblock YouTube. It’s a great teaching resource. Yes, you need to have good classroom management to make sure that kids aren’t playing around, but that’s always the case. If our leaders are afraid of freedom of information then we have no vision for technology in this city. In New York City. That’s just sad.

We have no vision or plan for technology as a city system. Without this you’re just throwing money at schools and schools are just throwing money out the window. My school purchased new OVERHEAD PROJECTORS this year!!! Why are those available on ShopDoe but ChromeBooks aren’t? More cronyism and no-bid B.S. that results from greed, myopia, and burying our heads in the sand.

We are failing our kids. Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott should start by sitting down and reading Mark Prensky’s “Digital Natives Digital Immigrants”, which is something akin to John Dewey’s “Experience and Education”, but for the Digital Age.

We are entering the Digital Age, but we’re not fully in it yet. Teachers are being asked to differentiate instruction, conduct Inquiry studies, track data, and much more. We are being asked to carry a digital workload in terms of productivity, but we are largely being given analog tools to accomplish the task. Of course it’s causing anger, consternation, pushback and chaos.

If you’re serious about improving the schools and not just breaking the unions and furthering a neoliberal agenda of privatization, Mr. Mayor? Then start in the RIGHT place: Get the vision right, provide the resources, provide the right training, and then you can hold people’s feet to the fire. But continuing to say, “Do more with less,” only shows your lack of commitment to real social justice and demonstrates your ignorance, arrogance, blatant classism, and public hypocrisy. Is your legacy destruction and greed and nothing more? As of right now I think that history will answer, “Yes.”

If you want to get on the right side of history then we should follow the lead of men like Aaron Swartz, whose recent passing reminds us of what the Digital Age can and should be. Or are men like Mr. Bloomberg simply afraid of empowering the masses and promoting real social justice, for fear that it bring their empires tumbling down?

I’ll take the $67 per child. Now I just want to see leaders who will use it well. More than anything, that is what we are lacking: Women and men of vision, character, and the discipline to follow through.

English teacher here. Typing, in general, is more efficient than hand-writing, which makes it easier for everyone, but especially students with special needs who have trouble writing. Specifically, these idea do make a lot of sense:

Digital Portfolios – If you do all of your work online, it’s all saved in one place that can be accessed by any computer (“the cloud”). Once you have a lot of work compiled, you can curate that and comment on it and create a “portfolio” that shows your best stuff.

Digital Group Work – Google Drive (and even Microsoft Office, slowly) are allowing multiple users to edit documents concurrently. This is great, if, say, you’re doing a research project and multiple students need to edit and access a database. I personally use it so students can revise each other’s writing (some of the comment tools in these services are more elegant and efficient than destroying a draft with red ink).

Real College & Career Skills – He doesn’t elaborate on this, but just understanding how work is done on the Internet in modern businesses, not just how to type and send email, is a very important and marketable skill that kids need to learn. More and more, the model of sitting at a desk for an hour writing an essay by hand is becoming irrelevant to the kind of work students will be doing in the real world. Please don’t misconstrue this to mean that essays are not important, just the medium of solo, handwritten ones. You can get the benefits of using technology and still teach the skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It’s not a zero-sum game (or “trade school for office workers”).