River Oaks School, in a suburb of Toronto, opened in 1990 as a showcase K-through-8 school. The principal, Jerry Smith and a core of avant-garde teachers, recruited the assistance of a number of technology companies, particularly Apple Computer, to allow the school to take advantage of the extraordinary powers of computers and their related technologies, such as scanners, CD-ROMs, and the Internet in order to teach.
Using computers and the Internet, the students at River Oaks started doing joint projects with other schools around the world in cyberspace. They got help on projects in biology with researchers who were at the cutting edge of their fields. They were advised on music they wrote by graduate students in music theory. They produced and distributed CD-ROMs on their projects, and built a website.
I met Jerry Smith in 1993 when we were both guests on CBC Radio’s Morningside program, and he invited me out to see what they were doing. I did, and went back several times, to observe, to lecture, and finally to work on a brainstorming project on the future of communications with their grade 8 class under teacher Brian Alger. Shortly after I first went to River Oaks, I spoke at a conference in Tallahassee, Florida on the future of technology. One of the comments I made was that computers were going to work their way into the classroom, whether teachers liked it or not, and that part of the reason was that they were dropping in price by about 20% a year. Educators came up afterwards and told me I was dreaming, and that there was no way their schools could afford computers. At that time, a desktop computer probably cost somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000, depending on the bells and whistles, so it was rare to find a school that had many computers, and those that were in schools were generally obsolete and falling apart.
I recently went back to River Oaks because there’s been a changing of the guard. Jerry Smith, who had been principal for eight years, was going to be reassigned by the Halton board of education. He refused the transfer, took a leave of absence to work in private industry, and I suspect he won’t be back. Several of his teachers left as well, some of them, again, leaving for private industry for substantially more money. But I wanted to see what had happened to the revolutionary school sans the revolutionaries.
I met with the current principal, John Conlin, who has seemingly picked up where the revolution left off. River Oaks has just bought 40 new iMac computers, pushing the older computers down into lower grades, and giving the more powerful ones to the older students. And it was Conlin that brought me to a vital realization: River Oaks isn’t special any more! At least, not in terms of availability of computers. Apple Computer is out of the “School of Tomorrow” business, and sells its computers to any school that wants them – at the standard educational price. River Oaks financed its purchases on a three year lease, with the parents’ association picking up the tab through fundraising.
Today computers aren’t $5,000, but closer to $1,000. This is making a quantitative, and a qualititative difference in education. Suddenly, what was the preserve of a small handful of showcase schools is becoming available to lots of schools, and will become available to lots more. Website are rampant. Producing CDs is simple and inexpensive now. Computers are all over classrooms.
But that doesn’t mean the revolution is over, or that the technies have won. In fact, quite the contrary. The January 24th Globe & Mail quoted a national study showing that about 55% of Canadian teachers have had some sort of training in new technology in the classroom, yet 75% reported that they didn’t feel comfortable or competent using it. And yet, the number of computers in classrooms is steadily rising.
And it was when I reached this level of understanding that I started to fully appreciate the real revolution River Oaks had accomplished. I’ve said for years that River Oaks’ approach to using computers was the right one. Computers are used pervasively and casually. Where other schools make technology the focus of what they do, River Oaks’ attitude is much simpler: computers, the Internet, and related technologies are tools like books or blackboards, nothing more. They happen to be very powerful tools, but they are neither the focus nor the purpose of education.
I worked on a brainstorming project with a group of River Oaks grade 8 students in 1996, and have kept in touch with a couple of the students since then. I asked them how well their experience at River Oaks prepared them compared to their peers from other K-through-8’s. They told me that they learned how to use a much wider range of research tools, including both print libraries and on-line resources. They also learned how to plan and assemble complex documents, ranging from hyperdocuments to plain-vanilla Duo-tang reports, and, most importantly, how to think, organize, plan, coordinate, and develop projects within teams, and with minimal oversight from their teachers.
When I first toured River Oaks, I went into the second grade room, where two teachers had combined their classes, and jointly taught somewhere upwards of 50 second graders. There were, I think, four computers in the centre of the room, as well as wall charts describing how to write and polish an essay. The students seemed to be doing quite a lot of self-directed work in what looked like orderly chaos. Playing devil’s advocate, I asked the two teachers what possible use computers could be to second graders, who should be learning penmanship, and fine motor and writing skills. They remarked that the children did work on these things, but that the computers made them much more willing and even eager to improve their composition skills. Why is that? I asked. “When a child can make corrections or improvements without having to physically re-write the entire essay, they are much more willing to do so,” was the reply. Moreover, the final result was clear, good-looking, and made them feel proud of what they’d accomplished.
Moreover, Smith and his teachers had re-written the curriculum to take best advantage of the new technologies, and Conlin and his teachers had adapted it once the new Ontario “Common Curriculum” became mandatory. This makes perfect sense: you wouldn’t teach a subject the same way with blackboards, paper, and books as you would if you were using the oral tradition, and the same applies to computers.
So we can now look at the landscape and come to a number of conclusions:
- Computers in the classroom are not the future any more. They are the present.
- Educators are not well equipped to deal with this new reality, which means that money, time, and resources are being wasted.
- It is possible to use computers wisely, and to have them support learning, as opposed to becoming the point of learning. But it takes careful thought, a revised curriculum that exploits the advantages of the technology, and a clear understanding that the technology is there only to assist the students. Technology may be sexy, but technology is never enough.
- The days where computers and the Internet were cutting edge, and you could get the assistance of cutting edge researchers for your grade six class project are mostly past. The Internet is a working settlement today, not a frontier where everyone helps everyone else.
- Don’t go looking for corporations to donate equipment for a “School of Tomorrow.” You’re going to have to come up with the money out of your own budget.
- The long-discussed divide between have and have-not is here, with parent associations in well-to-do neighbourhoods buying computers for their schools, and schools in poor neighbourhoods doing without.
by Richard Worzel, futurist
© Copyright, IF Research, June 26, 2000.
|
|