Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Technology to Reduce Costs?
The Digital Day School from Jewish Daily Forward on Vimeo.
At Yavneh's Q&A in December, Rabbi Knapp said that while he is a big proponent of technology, because of its potential to educate children in an engaging way, he and the Board do not see it as a means of reducing costs. Take a look at the video. Seems that now he's changed his tune. Maybe He'atid really is on to something.
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thatguy · 685 weeks ago
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-201...
JS (hello) · 685 weeks ago
What if the secular education is a bit worse in your opinion? Say 10% worse. What if it was 25% worse? 50% worse?
Of course it could be the same or better. But, I'm just wondering what you'd be willing to sacrifice to keep costs down.
Would you rather they do online learning for Hebrew subjects instead of secular subjects?
411 · 685 weeks ago
The perceived true cost savings is from replacing teachers with technology.
These "enhancements" through technology have a cost savings over hiring additional staff & materials to implement. One may assume, that Yavneh wouldn't have the extra expense of these enhancements if not for technology keeping them lower.
George · 685 weeks ago
guest · 685 weeks ago
"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," says Richard E. Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC. "Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."
remom · 685 weeks ago
Children are rarely raised anymore - rather, parents stick their children into programs at a very young age which are truly sub par and as such, the children become mired in poor behavioral patterns. Mother's (sorry ladies) ought to be home with the kids early on and if they can't afford to do so than they should find top notch help - not bottom basement nanny replacements. Instead of spending a fortune on renovations and vacations and fancy weddings, etc... save money towards child rearing expenses!!!!
No more white boards or smart boards or anything but a blackboard! A good old fashioned teacher who stands at the front of the class and teaches a lesson to children sitting at DESKS with a pencil and paper at the ready! Prepared children plus attentive parents and no no nonsense teachers will yield better results than anything all this technology can offer. The child that can't sit still in class will not be able to maintain their attention with a computer - maybe with a game but not a true educational lesson.
What's wrong with all of you people? You're looking for answers to questions that have arisen due to YOUR negligence.
Good luck.
Miami Al · 685 weeks ago
The emphasis on student:teacher ratio shows the opposite concern, we are looking to de-automate.
Everything with the Day Schools shows that they have ignored the IT revolution. You have administrators available for phone calls (and secretaries to schedule) instead of simply carrying a Blackberry and responding to emails 24/6 like the rest of us. You have individual secretaries instead of at most a receptionist and a groupware solution for scheduling everyone.
The schools like technology if it is new toys for them to show off.
They ignore technology if it is a way to reduce the expensive component (labor), by making capital purchases in terms of software for managing process.
A long time ago, "cutting edge" language technology were "language labs," rooms with headphones so you could hear the lesson. Nevertheless, the schedule was once/week in there while the teacher started at the wall, instead of figuring out how to have a teach teach twice as many students while having half the lessons be taught via language lab.
There is no interest in technology driven religious studies, because that would cut down on the requirements to have so many highly paid Rabbis... hence the emphasis on a "personal relationship with a Rebbe" for an 8 year old. We talk how important it is for the kids to be happy and having fun, but not important to impart large amounts of material.
thatguy · 685 weeks ago
Second, if you truly believe that a school could exist with a single secretary then you have no idea what goes on in a school office and what a secretary does. Hint: it goes well beyond taking phone messages and scheduling meetings.
CJ Srullowitz · 685 weeks ago
The U.S. is full of young Torah scholars eager to teach with no jobs to be found. Only the very best find positions, and most of them are underpaid. In Bergen County, and maybe a handful of other places, do the rabbeim get a descent wage. Don't kid yourselves; it's highly competitive out there. There aren't "rabbi jobs" floating around for any lo yutzlach to latch onto.
remom · 685 weeks ago
You completely miss the point - this is not just a discussion about money but about the effectiveness of using technology as a teaching tool. And yes, of course it is useful and would cut the cost of a teacher here and there, but the issue of RECEPTIVITY of the learner still remains. The same difficulty that exists between the teachers and their non-responsive or lack of optimally attentive students will not be mitigated by the use of technology - it will only be further left to pasture. One needs highly qualified teachers who can pinpoint those students that are unable to or not yet ready to learn and to either redirect their educational efforts towards either a different school or the use of different teaching/learning materials but NOT simply seating them across from a computer. This is just nonsense and will lead to the further dumbing down of an already somewhat dumb generation.
Years ago, when I was a student and learning French in school, we used both a teacher in a classroom setting twice a week followed by three full 45 minute periods in an old fashioned language lab with cassette tapes and a printed dialogue (text). The language lab was useful only as a means to furthering what we'd learned in class but not instead of it - this is just more lunacy.
Yeshiva_Dad 69p · 685 weeks ago
When you listened to the cassette tapes without the teacher present, wasn't that an example of using technology to reduce teacher time & thereby reduce costs? No one is suggesting eliminating teachers altogether...
remom · 685 weeks ago
Miami Al · 685 weeks ago
One of the moves to "block scheduling" is that you save down time (5 minutes between 4 class periods vs. 8 adds 20 minutes of education time "for free"), help focus better (homework to reinforce lessons for 4 classes can be both MORE in-depth and less time consuming than 8 periods, etc.
Take exams, there is ZERO reason that a professional education, a well paid (comparatively) and skilled professional sits there while students take an exam. The only reason for this is that there is no obvious alternative.
But if you had rotated schedules, and a rigid exam schedule, then exams could be proctored by a responsible adult, instead of the teacher.
Manufacturing robots hasn't eliminated the need for humans to direct the manufacturing process. However, one person can do the job of 10 to 20 when automation is kicked in.
You wouldn't eliminate teachers altogether, but to suggest you couldn't drastically reduce them is silly.
Think about college/university. In our "big classes," we'd be in a lecture hall of 250+ people, with one professor teaching 300 people. Freshman schedule was 2 days/week lecture, 1 day/week "sections" where you had a TA that went over the material and made sure you were on target. Therefore, the expensive tenured professor bought 300 students/hour, the MUCH less expensive graduate student taught 15 people. This was way less expensive, and more productive, than having 10 tenured professors teach 30 person classes, mostly lecturing.
For the "teacher at the blackboard lecturing" there is zero difference whether the classroom is actually empty or there are 200 people in there. It's for the student having questions and needing to interact with the teacher that you need smaller settings.
Hence the superficial appeal of a Master/Junior Teacher split. The Master Teacher should be able to work with MANY more students for the primary lecture component (though in time, lectures should be able to be delivered pre-recorded) and junior teachers working in small group settings.
In a typical classroom setting, how much "personal time" does a student get during the day? A few minutes?
That's where technology can play a roll, students can get one-on-one time with a machine that can adapt to their abilities, and MORE teacher one-on-one time when it's planned for virtual tutoring.
We have changed EVERY OTHER process in America in the last 80 years, but schools still run in a similar manner.
If you told me that teachers should get 1 hour/week of paid time to grade standardized tests, I'd tell you that you were out of your mind, even the old scantron systems let you grade multiple choice questions in seconds not hours, with less errors. So technology speeds up the grading of multiple choice, letting the teachers focus on grading free-form answers.
If Universities can use graduate students to "grade papers," why does a highly trained person (Masters degree) need to grade 2nd grade homework, that seems like a great thing for high school kids to do as a part-time job.
guest · 685 weeks ago
Maybe, but most tests are not standardized. These multiple choice tests don't show nearly as much as essays or even forcing the child to write an answer, which will show creativity, penmanship, etc. Teachers are not robots, and neither are our kids. Schools shape and develop minds. They are not there to create mindless automatons that can copy standardized answers from their neighbors.
Miami Al · 685 weeks ago
You want the schools to develop the bigger picture elements... that's much more possible if your teachers aren't spending hours grading factual questions (multiple choice components). Time spent checking the letters A/B/C/D can instead be spend on essay questions. That's PART of gaining efficiency through technology.
Thatguy,
"I don't agree with a bunch of points here but two jump out -- one is about the "highly paid Rabbis." People get paid based on 2 factors, what the consumer values and what the market will bear. If, in fact, the Rabbis are "highly paid" (a contention with which I would vehemently argue) it is because the public values their service and because the market allows for that level of compensation."
I said highly paid because they are relatively well paid, they are certainly paid over the median income for Teaneck.
I didn't say OVER PAID, I said highly paid.
My lawyer is highly paid. I would be VERY upset if I was paying his bill rate for him to take a letter to the post office to send out certified instead of them having one secretary for SEVERAL lawyers that does that. I'm not upset that I pay a decent amount per hour for his specialized expertise, I AM upset if I pay it for routine office work.
If your Rabbis are doing generic clerical work, that's having a VERY expensive resource doing that work.
Similar to the tenured professor, you should be using your expensive resources in a highly leverage manner.
thatguy · 685 weeks ago
I don't think that a 4th grade rebbe is making more than that, unless he has been working for a whole lotta years.
And just a note about multiple choice and exam grading -- any good teacher will review the scantron sheets to ensure that an erasure or stray mark doesn't hurt a student's grade. And the teacher will often look at the type of question a student or class got wrong, or at the scrap to see the work put in to isolate why an answer was wrong. Getting an assistant to throw papers through a machine and record the results misses out on one of the purposes of the assessment. Having a grad student check 2nd grade papers will remove from the teacher the insight that a good teacher gets from the handwriting, the cross outs and everything else beyond just the answer. There just seems to be a whole lot about the actual running of a school and real life teaching that is missing from your summary of how things should be.
CJ Srullowitz · 685 weeks ago
thatguy · 685 weeks ago
http://jewishedd.blogspot.com/2012/02/its-not-abo...
thoughtframewoks · 332 weeks ago