Technology, for Better or Worse

Dug out of the draft files from back in April, when Dean Dad's Brother posted this title as a good one for a job talk.

Could not resist. Now it is time to fill it in.

My first thought was not about laptops and SmartBoards, topics that dominated the recent discussions that brought this back to the top of my list. My first thought was about graphing calculators. I banned them years ago from my physics exams because of cheating, but I'll admit that three factors had an equal weight:

• A student using "study cards" downloaded from TI themselves to cheat on an exam
• Learning that professional engineering exams ban them because they can also be used to communicate between students as well as cheat
• Seeing a student solve a linear equation by graphing it and tracing to the zero while proctoring from the back of the room

The kid can't solve 3x+17.5 = 9.76 using algebra? [Certainly explained the ones who got points taken off for not showing their work.] What would happen when (not if) he gets a problem where the values are given symbolically rather than as numbers? How can you do a "u substitution" integral if you can't solve a linear equation? Short answer: you can't. That student should never have passed his pre-calculus algebra classes without taking some tests where he had to show his work without ever using a calculator.

So the NYTimes (May 4, 2007) article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" cited in several places plus a group of articles over the weekend by the kitchen table math folks from the K-12 wilderness about budgets eaten alive by SmartBoards got my attention. And not just because I cannot imagine how a SmartBoard would replace a book or a smart teacher in my 3rd grade experience.

I like the SmartBoard when it is in its place -- which is not in the middle of the room. I like it next to a blackboard, where the real process of problem solving can play out. I love it as a tool for annotating and correcting what is in the textbook. I love it as a tool for displaying a problem, and sometimes for animating a sequence of events. But entire lectures on it? No way. Entire classes structured as a dog-and-pony show? Where all they do is watch, entertained? TV on, minds off, I say. I can even see the evidence on tests. A problem that was worked entirely on the SmartBoard is always harder than one that was worked out on the board, because they watched the first one and put pencil to paper on the second one.

But my conclusion would be "for Better and Worse". I am far more effective having certain tools available. My students learn better now that they get problems with realistic numbers rather than the few that could be memorized or looked up in tables, and then manipulated on a slide rule. My use of a computerized homework system has demonstrably helped learning, but only because it is fully integrated into my teaching style. Yet my students also have to work harder to learn that 10^7 meters is not the likely answer to a projectile motion problem, and I don't let the availability of a certain technical tool dictate what I am going to do in the classroom.