We turned off our TiVo just this week, so I couldn’t record the special from Fox News Reporting: Fixing Our Schools. It aired tonight on Fox news. I honestly don’t remember watching live news more than three times in the past year, but I wish I had caught this one. I plan to go out and see what they have posted later this week at fox news.com/specials.
In a brief preview of the special with the title Fixing Our Schools: Finding Solutions that Work, I found quite a few pieces refreshing and right on the mark. I know that I am a Tech Integration Specialist. But I am also a literacy teacher. I am a mother. I understand that technology has its place. Technology is a tool. An iPad is not a solution to change education. It is one tool that makes so much transformation possible.
Did you catch this piece? What was your reaction? I look forward to coming back and reflecting on the message I hope was portrayed.
Here are some of the highlights that caught my attention…
The documentary reveals how the answer to troubled schools is allowing teachers to teach to one child, catering to the student’s strengths and weakness with the help of computers.
The results are evident in dramatic improvements in student performance in several schools nationwide. From the “Carpe Diem” school in Yuma, Arizona to the “School of One” in New York City and the Mooresville school district in North Carolina, pilot programs using “Digital Learning” have reported a marked increase in student performance and sharp decline in drop-outs.
The key is making learning materials from texts, tests and even assignments available electronically. That allows the students, their parents and teachers to track a student’s performance in real time.
“There are new technologies to make it easier, perhaps, to have an accurate assessment. There’s movement to make it so one test won’t be the end-all and be-all. There’s a way to test now that if you’ve mastered the information, you can move on to the next information, so we’re not holding kids back” he said.
As Joel Klein, the former Chancellor of New York City Public Schools who now works for News Corp. [the parent company of Fox News Channel] told me the computer revolution has touched every part of our lives but our schools.
“I think about how different the world is today in terms of the media, in terms of medicine, in terms of the way people really experience their lives,” Klein said. “But education is stuck in a 19th-century model. So I’m convinced that we can change the way we educate our kids.
“Use technology not [just] by giving a kid a computer but by really improving instruction, by helping teachers do their work in a much more effective way” he added.