week 8 : the confirmation

1. What is my thesis?
Computers cannot take the place of teachers in classroom.

2. What types of source am I using to defend my thesis? 
I am using expert opinions, articles, and explanations of  ICT

3. Are my arguments mostly based on evidence, logic or emotion?
My arguments are based on objective evidences, and logic. However, I think I have to refer to the various information such as articles, statistics, and many other things.
My Confirmation

 Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of last week’s breathless coverage of Apple’s new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple’s plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook including highlighting passages, making notes and pulling out passages or chapters that are especially important to them. Apple says it also plans to cap the price of textbooks available through iBooks at $14.99, a significant departure from the price of many textbooks now.

  Critics were quick to pounce that Apple wasn’t being revolutionary enough. Former school superintendent and current ed-tech investor Tom Vander Ark chided Apple for not thinking past textbooks, which he considers hopelessly 20th century. Others worried that Apple’s real goal wasn’t to open up the textbook industry but to control it and profit from it through restrictive licensing agreements and a platform that dominates the market. I’m sure the for-profit company’s shareholders will be horrified at that news.

  Textbooks or tools that look a lot like textbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And since high quality educational material isn’t cheap to generate, simply tearing down distribution barriers will only go so far in reducing the costs of producing good content. Lost in the heated claims, however, is a more fundamental question: what have educational technology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?

  As a field, education is easily seduced by technological promises. Textbooks? Thomas Edison saw movies as way to replace them. In a prelude to today’s debates, the phonograph and film strip were lauded as technologies that could replace live teaching. These days, conservatives are in love with the idea that technology will not only shrink the number of in-classroom teachers but render the teachers’ unions obsolete.

  The experience to date is less grandiose and more worrisome considering the billions that have been spent on technology in schools in the past few decades. Interactive whiteboards have been around since the early 1990s and done little to transform how teachers teach, and computers are often unaligned with classroom instruction, even though 90% of classrooms around the country have them. Still, according to Department of Education data from 2009, just 61% of students use computers to prepare texts “sometimes or often” and just 45% do more complicated tasks, for instance to “solve problems, analyze data, or perform calculations” on a regular basis.

  Usage aside, there is scant evidence that technology is improving learning even the cheerleaders are reduced to arguing that various education technology tools are obvious rather than supported by much evidence. And when you watch, say, high school students use the Internet to prepare research papers, it’s questionable whether technology — especially when coupled with poorly trained teachers  isn’t doing more to enable the superficial rather than open up richer veins of information for students.

   As a parent and an analyst, I want technology that includes rich content or enables students to access it. And I want technologies that are engaging for students but actually teach them something. Plenty of applications err on one side or the other. And as with lots of offline schoolwork, there are time wasters that aren’t helping anyone learn much of anything. If anyone tells you an ed tech tool has “gaming elements,” make sure it’s not just a game.

  American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. It’s the last major American field relatively untouched by technology. But Jobs was right: technology by itself won’t fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers’ unions and archaic practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I’d argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.