Obstacles
Stumbling blocks on the way of teaching and learning technology
Funding
Firestone high school’s technology director Chris Pashke, technology coordinator at the school is currently writing a grant for $100,000 to update the equipment in the building. Funding is becoming the biggest obstacle Pashke faces with the technology program.
“We’re having to write a lot more grants,” Pashke said. “Even now, there’s more funding cuts going on at the state level, which makes it more difficult to find materials.”
Pashke’s list of purchases is comprised of iPads, more student response systems teachers call clickers and high-tech projection equipment like Airliners and document views.
The building currently holds interactive microscopes and four Smartboards Pashke and a science teacher use consistently. Different teachers use the other two sporadically. Pashke says the school currently has 350 computers and 1,298 students.
Thanks to grant money, Linda Cottman, technology teacher at East high school, was able to get iPads for her students. As of now, students have not touched the iPads because Cottman is worried about theft, and she hasn’t written a lesson plan for them yet.
Pashke said the ever-changing landscape of technology makes it hard for the schools to keep up. And the lack of funding makes it even harder.
Click here for a spreadsheet of school expenditures
“We’re on Windows 2007 now,” Pashke said. “In the last four years—between 98 to 2007—there have been six versions.”
Pashke said in the long run changes to the Ohio budget will affect colleges because students will be ill-prepared for the curriculum due to a decline in the caliber of teaching. Teacher salaries are dwindling, and retirement is on the rise. In the future, tudents may not be interested in education careers.
Barbara Williams, former technology coordinator at Ellet and one of the first in the district to teach technology, said she doesn’t yet know how, but career education is in danger. She, six teachers and eleven students recently went to the state house to plea to the senators. The students told them how important the programs are, and how they are getting jobs from the education.
“The democratic senator said, ‘We’re going to fight to beat 5,’” Williams said. “The republican senator said, ‘There’s not enough money to go around, unless we raise taxes, and we don’t want to do that.’”
Pashke said funding used to be better, but technology classes didn’t need as many different things and technology didn’t change as fast. His class uses Adobe products and in the course of two years, there has already been an update to the entire suite.
“Colleges are keeping up faster than we are because they have the funding,” Pashke said. “And they want us to stay on their level because of the articulation agreement.”
Pashke is working on articulation agreements with University of Akron and Stark State. Students would have the chance to get 12 credit hours after completing four years in the Akron Public Schools’ computer IT program. All they have to do is take one class and pass it.
While Williams was simultaneously an adjunct professor at Stark State and the technology coordinator at Ellet high school, she set up a similar program for students who completed her the technology certification at Ellet. Her students could go to Stark State, take a test and receive 12 credit hours in information technology focusing on interactive media.
Even though students excel, sometimes students can be obstacles.
Williams said the reason computer-led learning didn’t work is because high school students are more interested in being social, and are not interested in staring at the computer screens to learn.
“The kids are different,” Pashke said. “Kids are more visual now than they were before—even 10 years ago.”
Sometimes the kids are an obstacle because sometimes some don’t know anything about computers and some are advanced. Some kids are apathetic. Teaching all these kids together sometimes proves troubling.
Space is also an issue. Classrooms are being converted into computer labs. Schools are so old they need to renovate rooms and install network hubs and additional electrical sockets to connect the computers to.
Skill Level
Chris Fahey, part-time technology teacher co-webmaster at Archbishop Hoban, sees students coming to the classroom with some basic knowledge as a double-edged sword.
Fahey said he believes it to be good to have students who have a “built-in, innate sense of what to do,” and who have acquired some of that knowledge by themselves. However, he said, students also end up picking up bad habits along the way. For example, he said, most students don’t know how to use the keyboard efficiently because they never acquired basic typing skills.
Overall, Fahey said he doesn’t get as many students in his classes as he would like. Most classes are also just taught once a year because other requirements get in the way. He gave the example of religion classes, study halls and even the need to do well in standardized testing as elements that may come as priorities to high schools.
Fahey said getting students to enroll in technology classes can also be a challenge to teachers. He said some students are afraid of not knowing enough to get into a class, so they don’t enroll, while others may think they may know more about a particular program than the teacher, so they don’t enroll either. When students do enroll, it is still not easy to teach technology to a class in which students are of different skill levels.
“They are difficult to teach because you have such a wide range of students in the class from those who are willing to try, and do anything to those who are kind of afraid,” Fahey said.
Nathan Ruyan, systems analyst for the Akron Public Schools Career Education, agrees with that premise, and adds that teaching technology is not only different between public and private schools but also from a public school to another.
Ruyan, who gives technical support to several of the Akron high schools, sets up new equipment and helps with curriculum development, constantly interacts face-to-face with different students in the district. To him, given the environment that his students live in, not the equipment available to them, plays a bigger role on whether they will learn the technology content given in the classroom.
“It basically starts at home,” Ruyan said. “We find that kids take stuff from mom and dad and those who don’t have a strong home life, they are the ones who literally you have to stand beside to the whole period, and you answer their questions first because you know it is going to take the longest.”
Ruyan said teaching students with different skill levels is one of the biggest challenge that teachers face.
“It is not a leveled playing field,” Ruyan said. “Honestly, we have kids who don’t know how to save a document, and that’s something, I assume, you are 17 years old and you can save on the desktop, but they didn’t know how, and that’s not necessarily their fault.”
To try to level the students skills Ruyan said the district is trying to institute technology electives at middle school level so students can have access to core technology skills before they get to high school, which would facilitate the job of tech teacher then.
“It is one of the biggest complaints,” Ruyan said. “High school teachers are saying the kids aren’t prepared when they get to high school in terms of being able to properly type essays and things like that.”
Environment
Ruyan notes that part of the obstacle that separates high school students from a decent technology education, is not only their skill level or the equipment available in the classroom, but the environment these kids are coming from.
“Our kids, they all come from different backgrounds,” Ruyan said. “To put it bluntly, a lot of them have kind of a thug mentality. It is very difficult because they get demotivated very, very quickly.”
He said some of the students get frustrated in class, and end up sleeping on their desks while he and whoever is teaching the class try to help others with their questions. Other students, he said don’t realize the importance of simply being in class on time. That, he explained, is a current scenario at the intercity schools, where some students don’t understand the importance of getting educated to enter the job market or to get accepted into college.
“The kids are unable to place any value on what you are teaching because they can’t relate it to their on life,” Ruyan said. “The number one thing that we run into is that the kids don’t place any value on what you are saying.”
But Ruyan sees showing students places where technology, like what they have in the classroom, is used on a daily basis as a solution for this problem. For example, he said, some schools in the district have been using 3D printers, the same several companies uses to create prototypes.
“One thing that I think we can do better is to physically take them to go see some cutting edge places like the Timken Co., and see what they are doing with 3D modeling because I know they are doing some pretty neat stuff. Even people at Firestone, that’s how they design their tires, using 3D modeling,” Ruyan said.
Although field trips to show students what is being done in the real world with the same technology they have in class is somewhat possible, Ruyan said it is getting harder every day because of budget cuts.
Ruyan explained school funding is also related to student enrollment and as that declines, support staff, like him, gets cut down. Because field trips requires staff to take the students, and staff gets eliminated, so do field trips and extracurriculars.
“We’ve done quite a bit of arguing, but it is a big issue with us because we in the IT [department] we simply don’t have enough staff to support our technology needs,” Ruyan said. “And that is a shame because we have a lot of great tools.”
As of now, the Akron Public School district has about 12,000 computers and four full-time workers going to schools to help with equipment and to fix tech issues.
“I label it as fire fighting. What we do is we go where the biggest problem is, wherever the biggest fire is,” Ruyan said.
For example if a problem occurs in a class with 26 computers, and another in a class with three computers, the staff will go where those 26 computers are because they are most needed at that moment.
“That’s not necessarily the most equitable way to do it, but it is like triage on a battlefield,” Ruyan said. “You’ve got to basically stand by and do the best you can.”