October 20, 2003
Get PowerPoint out of school
Teaching PowerPoint in elementary school is like teaching kids how to pick their noses. It has no place in the classroom because:
1) They can figure it out for themselves given a little experimentation.
2) Sure, everyone else does it, but that doesn't make it tasteful.
3) There are better ways to get the task done.
Throwing a PC and some office software into a classroom doesn't equate to teaching children how to use technology responsibly and productively. (I spoke to a woman from Intel about this at BloggerCon.) Millions of office workers have already been trained to drift into slumber at the sight of a bullet point fading onto a gradient-blue background. Do we really want to be passing on such a lowest common denominator skill set to a fifth grader? Showing them how to make something blink in a slide is nowhere near as valuable as teaching them good oral presentation skills.
Recently, a teacher had to go around to each child's computer in the lab to ensure they had typed in whitehouse.gov (the actual white house site) and not whitehouse.com (pornography). Instead of teaching the children how to vet sites on their own, it was done for them. Are we going to stand over their shoulders for the rest of their lives typing in URLs or are we going to show them that typing "whitehouse.gov" and "whitehouse.com" into the Google Search box, you can quickly see from the descriptions which site is legitimate without viewing the content of either?
Our school spent thousands of dollars on an interactive white board. I have to wonder what pressing educational need was filled by this expensive tool. Here's the marketing propaganda from the interactive white board site:
- Touch the screen to control your computer — Which assumes that teachers are already using the computer as a teaching tool. Kind of hard to do given that the location of most computers in the school were in the far corner of each room.
- Write in electronic ink — Because regular ink is so 1984.
- Save, print or e-mail notes — Because all students are wired and accept class notes via email, integrate them into MS Project and schedule homework in their Palm.
- Highlight key information with easy-to-use tools — Easier to use than say, a highlighter?
I'm no luddite. I'll be the first in line for a refrigerator that emails me the groceries that I need to pick up on the way home from work, or better yet, sends it to my cell phone. That technology that will streamline an existing task, not invent a new task just to throw some silicon at it. In this case, let's start spending money on getting classrooms out of hallways and save the interactive white boards for a Fortune 500 conference room.