From self-tagging kiosks at Hawaiian Airlines to my classroom - Connections

Not only are there self-service computers at the airlines where you get your own boarding pass, but now there is one set aside for self-tagging. Good thing there are actual humans who warn you that you're on your own if you use these kiosks. I went to the semi-self service ones immediately. The agent there was in good humor, joking around about how we made a good choice coming over and then joked that in a couple of years he's not going to have a job. My brother and I were reflecting on the loss of human contact as automation and computerization increases. And there's something troubling about that especially in Hawaii, the Aloha state. (It would be worse if we were talking about Aloha Airlines.)

It made me think about the trend in education towards more computerization. We already have statewide online standardized testing. To prepare for that, all schools had to beef up their inventory of computers as well as their Internet accessibility. In my class, on a normal day, I have half of my class on laptops doing Moby Math, IXL, or Education City, while I teach math investigations to the other half, and then we rotate. I try to look at the results of their computer learning daily to,track,their progress or intervene if necessary. I like it because I can touch base with more kids more often. It's a good balance for me. It allows me to have more contact with kids, not less. But I hear that the next trend in education is more computer-based learning and less teacher-contact learning. In fact, there are several charter schools set up with that premise. It seems to be profitable because you have fewer humans to pay. Maybe the students will do well on the online standardized testing, but I worry, for the same reasons I worry about more automation in the business world - loss of the human factor.

Why does that matter? On Friday, I had some unplanned time at the end of the day. The scheduled bike education lesson went shorter than planned, so I had about twenty minutes to fill. Earlier, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth Artists in the Schools program for which our ELL get pulled out to participate, had started. I asked my ELL students what they had learned in drama class and they taught us one of the games they learned. The students walk around the room following certain guidelines about personal space, focus, and self-control. The teacher gives a signal to stop, and then a number, and the students get into that number of students in a group. Then the teacher gives a shape for the students to make. One notable round, the number was 2. I have 25 in my class. One of the rules is that if there is someone who doesn't have a partner, one group takes him or her in. So there was one group if three, which happened to be a triad that included 3 challenging boys. The shape I called out was "rectangle." It's easy for a duo to do a rectangle, but I thought there might be a problem with my one trio. But they came up with an ingenious solution, led by my one most hard-to-focus student who got the others to implement his idea. I was impressed with their solution to the problem. In the normal classroom setting, none of these boys are the star students, the ones who will volunteer the answers. But in this situation, they got a chance to experience being the stars.

A student who gets his or her education via a computer without much contact with a human, professional educator committed to encouraging and nurturing students' potential, will not have those types of experiences. So, yes. Welcome technology as a means to enhance education, but be wary of the potential for abuse, for overuse of the technology, for loss of the human factor.


Sent from my iPad