It's telling that MIT still lectures with blackboards while other universities spend oodles of dollars on expensive electric whiteboards, projectors and whatnot.

Depends what is being taught. Electric whiteboards, displays and projectors can provide obvious benefits and time-saving for things like updating values, neatness, illustration, demonstration.

Ever noticed when a lecturer writes a sentence on the chalk board, the only sound in the room is the sound of chalk? That isn't efficient use of time.

Most professors, you really gotta slow them down. This is their life's work and they know it bottom to top. If you let them run at their natural clip, you're gonna miss stuff. Making them write it down is great for that. If you let them use slides, you gotta ask them questions and break their rhythm or they'll just roll right over you.

Thank you, somebody other than me finally said it. I hate lecture slides with passion, so much so that I barely even go to lectures anymore. I mean, what's the point if all they're going to do is read them out loud? I can do that at home.

If your professor is just reading text bullet points from a slide, he sucks at public speaking and presentation skills.

Don't blame the medium for poor public speaking skills. I was just in a 2-day classroom setting this week and the presenter was brilliant - switching from slides, which they annotated with a digital pen while presenting, to whiteboard, to discussion seamlessly, without losing interest or focus from the students.

Public speaking is a skill like any other that any educator needs to be good at. Don't blame the medium for your educator's poor public speaking skills.

Using powerpoint (or related tech) enables sucking at public speaking and presentation skills, in a way that lecturing in front of a {black,white}board does not.

One of my favorite education-related blogs is University Diaries, by Margaret Soltan (an English professor at George Washington University). She writes quite entertainingly and excoriatingly about the use of PowerPoint as an alternative to teaching: http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?s=powerpoint

I had a philosophy prof that would put up his lecture on (relatively) dense slides and then proceed to stand in front of the slides (not looking at them) and give the whole talk exactly as the text on the slides. It was quite amazing. And since he wasn't actually reading them, it was a good presentation.

We've had the tech to box up big lectures since VCRs went mainstream. That's the easy (and cheap) part.

It often is in practice, because students need time to think and digest the material.

This is very true in practice. I lecture as a part-time professor every so often, and this is one of many good reasons why you should never lecture via powerpoint. The act of writing down a thought as it's spoken is an important thing for many people.

I do use an electronic Wacom tablet when possible, so that I can at least give out pdfs of the lectures.

It's super awesome, especially when the professor is effectively just transcribing the textbook onto the blackboard while mumbling in a monotone. Really demonstrates the value you're getting for that $40-50k tuition.

That is work, he could just project the same slides he wrote down 20 years ago on to the wall and tell you to copy them down. I guess that's what I get for not paying $40k, lazy profs.

But MIT records most lectures and has great online companion resources, which is where the tech in teaching thing is really helpful

Yeah, but in my book thats "technology done right".

No hype, no expensive toys, just the right tech to solve the right problems without getting in your face.

I doubt that MIT eschews computers for project based work. No MATLAB on a chalkboard.

Similarly, when computers are used sensibly in the classroom they are tools applied to certain parts of the instruction, and not the only medium of instruction.

That's true regardless of the equipment manufacturer.

I question the underlying premise that " each kid needs their own". Every time there's a pilot program that gives every kid a laptop or tablet, it seems to be a complete failure after a few months. My aunt is a teacher in a public school district, and has seen a number of such programs come and fail over the decades.

They don't need to give the kids laptops or tablets to take home, but having each child be able to do individual computer-supported exercises at their own desk—in effect, turning every classroom into a computer lab—has important benefits for lesson planning.

Such as?

I think having computers at home is the one compelling reason for all the "let's give everyone laptops/ipads" initiatives. It means that everyone has a device they can do typed reports or homework research on. I'm much less convinced that computers in the classroom are a clear value-add in many cases.

>It means that everyone has a device they can do ... homework research on.

I've known a couple of families where the children received take home devices they were expected to use to do further research or school work on, but who were unable to due to the lack of internet. A few had dial-up which can be unusable with some of the education sites (all the js resources take too long to load, time out, and leave the page useless), but some had no internet at all. Some of these families had no heat/ac, to give an idea of the level of poverty. There were no libraries within walking distance either (nor public transit options).

I think the devices are a good thing, because it gives some of these kids exposure to computers they wouldn't have otherwise and if the school handles it correctly they can be used to do work from home (have all needed resources already loaded on the device), but I've seen multiple teachers not be able to account for the most impoverished students lacking internet action (I somewhat suspect the teachers don't always have a choice in the matter either).

Internet access is an good point. That would seriously diminish the "equalizing" factor of giving every child a device.

The idea is that you're no longer constrained by planning around the use of a shared computer lab space. Instead, any activities that benefit from computer use can be used immediately.

You don't have a "pencil and paper" lab that is used the entire school day and scheduled around, and now computers have reached the commodity price point where they don't need to either.

I don't think the vast majority of education gets much value from a computer lab, either.

Well it's probably for the best that hacker news is not in charge of teaching our children. They'd be learning go or rust or JavaScript instead of how to read books.

> has important benefits for lesson planning

If computers help learning, why have school results essentially been flat since 1970 or so?

Perhaps the curriculum has changed. Almost certainly the tests have?

The premise is that when you to inject tech into teaching it is unarguably better and always an improvement. Why it's better is rarely explained sensibly and so far as I know never really supported with data. I think there are good uses of tech in classrooms, but much of the time it's forced and pointless and expensive.

Its really situational.

Every student at my school was given a laptop (2005, but that practice started years earlier) - but we were in a special situation being a boarding school. Every student having a laptop meant that teachers could reasonably expect every student to write/research papers, install/run software, use email, etc - on their own time (nights/weekends/study times, etc).

My laptop lived in my dorm room, and if I needed it for a class or to go study somewhere I could take it - but that was a 2-3 times a week thing, not every day and certainly not every class. Day (non-boarding) students had it a bit rougher, as they were bringing their laptops back and forth from home every day, lugging them around from class to class.

Even in 2005, I don't think campus could have operated with the efficiency it did without every student having a laptop. Important information was sent out via email constantly (Lotus notes...), BlackBoard for class documents, lecture notes, etc.

But that was our situation. At a day school, I imagine technology is probably a nightmare. If 1 class each day needs kids to have a laptop, that means every student is walking around with their laptop all the time for no good reason. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

Not to mention the effect of "students have this technology so let's go out of our way to use it whenever we can"

I'd just be happy if students had digital only textbooks. Would save a lot of back pain and locker trips.

I can think of several areas that having a computer for every child would help- but it requires training and adaptation by the teachers.

1) A large pool of free, open e-textbooks that teachers can customize and contribute to for the needs of their class. Textbook publishers are the scum of the earth and most of their textbooks used in education suck terribly.

2) Access to video explanations/lectures, etc.

3) Adaptive assignments and exams like Kahn Academy that allows students to work on solving problems that are at their level and progress at a different pace than the class as a whole.

4) Easier for students, parents, and teachers to track progress towards educational goals over time.

5) Learning about computers. (Keyboarding to programming...)

Might be some other ways to use computers in education that would pay real benefits, please comment :)