Does the Computer Lab have a Future?

I just finished reading this article from Educational Technology:

http://www.assortedstuff.com/?p=3723

Below I've pasted the body of the text. Go to the link and read the Comments. They're worthwhile.

Read carefully, it's less about the Lab or Mobile Carts, or even 1:1 settings, and more about how technology is used. I do tend to agree that the geography of the Lab as a place set apart - especially when "Computers" is taught as a separate special subject permitting the classroom teacher a planning period - adds to a real disjunction. Yet, as is mentioned, even in a classroom, technology can be nothing more than a simple extension of traditional pedagogy.

I do see the Lab as a place that makes training and demonstration easier. And, I suppose, computer labs in public schools, with the increase in online testing/assessments, makes the process easier. Other than those functions - training and testing - I hope we can move to 1:1 - including the use of various devices, not just laptops or netbooks.

I think we've all discovered that real infusion is about a different kind of pedagogy and then developing the technologies that encourage and enhance those different ways of learning.

Oct
12

Time to Kill the Lab?

In a post from a couple of weeks ago, a colleague asked for help with setting up a computer lab at his school.

He was looking for something other than the “conventional wisdom” - 30 machines lined up inside a rectangular space in such a way to make it easy for the teacher to have everyone to work on the same assignment.

Over the past few months as I’ve been working with some of our school-based trainers, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the idea of computers labs.

Not so much the arrangement of the room but whether they are an impediment to the process of technology integration and need to disappear.

When I watch what goes on in the computers labs at most schools, regardless of the level, it’s rather depressing.

Rote lessons in which students are all doing the same activity (“open the map of Virginia and draw the four regions of the state”), as a reward for kids getting their real work done, to take tests (lots and lots of tests), or just to make sure we get our technology requirement checked off.

It seems as if very little about the way kids use the technology in their lab time is integrated into the learning that occurs back in their “regular” classroom, and it certainly doesn’t lend itself to the concept of a “lab”, a place in which experimentation occurs.

So what about mobile labs, those big carts full of laptops are rolled in and out of classrooms, that many of our schools have been putting in place over the past few years?

Well, the potential to do something better is there. But what I usually see looks very much like a traditional computer lab, often complete with the teacher machine projecting to an interactive whiteboard with no interactivity going on.

So, is this a chicken-and-egg situation?

If the lab went away (or the arrangement changed) would the way teachers use computers in their instruction change? Or if teachers wanted to change their instruction, would labs disappear?

Either way, I think it’s about time to kill the concept of the traditional school computer lab.

Am I wrong? Missing something?

Wordle

I just received my first issue of the CUE magazine, CUE is "Computer-Using Educators" basically California teachers using educational technology.

There is an article on "free" software, which I'll talk about another time. Presently, I'd like to pass on some ideas from an article about Wordle: Creating Word Clouds on Your Computer, by Lynell Burmark.

One technical tip - She made a word list in MS Word then did a Copy/Paste into the box in the Advanced section of the Wordle website. She writes that the numbers - indicating size - next to the words are more art than science, but for regular printing anything less than 600 is too small. For poster-size prints, you can have smaller than 600 because the print itself will be so much larger.

Now for some educational tips.

One idea was to create a Wordle of important words, words to know, etc., as a pre-exercise - before reading a selection, before watching a video. The same Wordle could be used for later discussion, or as a way to recall.

Another idea was to make Wordles of the Dolch Words. She writes: Because the brain thrives on making connections (and because the connecting 'glue' makes learning memorable and 'sticky'), the most effective Dolch Wordles would be ones where the words were grouped in some meaningful manner.

That thought would probably apply as well to other kinds of Wordles.

If you have a Projector and a Whiteboard, the Wordles would be especially useful.