Filip Novotny A primary school classroom in which printed textbooks no longer have a place, but every pupil has a tablet or computer in front of them with all the interactive material they could ever be interested in. This is a vision that is talked about a lot, schools and pupils would welcome it, it is slowly becoming a reality abroad, but it has not yet been implemented in the Czech education system. Why?
This question was asked by the Flexibook 1:1 project of the publishing company Fraus. The company, which was one of the first to decide (with varying degrees of success and quality) to publish textbooks in an interactive form, tested the introduction of tablets in 16 schools for one year with the help of commercial and state partners.
A total of 528 pupils and 65 teachers of the second grade of elementary schools and multi-year gymnasiums participated in the project. Instead of classic textbooks, the students received iPads with textbooks supplemented with animations, graphs, video, sound and links to additional websites. Mathematics, Czech and history were taught using tablets.
And as accompanying research from the National Institute of Education found, the iPad can really help in teaching. In the pilot program, he was able to excite the students even for a subject with such a bad reputation as Czech. Before using the tablets, the students gave it a grade of 2,4. After the end of the project, they gave it a significantly better grade of 1,5. At the same time, teachers are also fans of modern technologies, fully 75% of the participants no longer want to return to printed textbooks and would recommend them to their colleagues.
It seems that the will is on the side of the pupils and teachers, the school principals managed to finance the project on their own initiative and the research showed positive results. So what's the problem? According to the publisher Jiří Fraus, even the schools themselves are in the confusion surrounding the introduction of modern technologies in education. There is a lack of project financing concept, teacher training and technical background.
At the moment, for example, it is not clear whether the state, the founder, the school or the parents should pay for new teaching aids. "We got the money from European funds, the rest was paid by our founder, i.e. the city," stated the principal of one of the participating schools. Funding then has to be painstakingly arranged individually, and schools are thus de facto penalized for their efforts to be innovative.
In out-of-town schools, even such a seemingly obvious thing as introducing the Internet into classrooms can often be a problem. After being disillusioned with the sloppy Internet for schools, there is nothing to be surprised about. It is an open secret that the INDOŠ project was actually just a tunnel of a domestic IT company, which brought a lot of problems instead of the expected benefits and is hardly used anymore. After this experiment, some schools arranged the introduction of the Internet themselves, while others resented modern technology completely.
It will thus be a mainly political question whether in the coming years it will be possible to set up a comprehensive system that would allow schools (or over time mandate) the simple and meaningful use of tablets and computers in teaching. In addition to clarifying funding, the approval process for electronic textbooks must be clarified, and the influx of teachers will also be important. "It is necessary to work more with it already at the pedagogical faculties," said Petr Bannert, director of the field of education at the Ministry of Education. At the same time, however, he adds that he would not expect implementation until around 2019. Or even 2023.
It's a bit strange that in some foreign schools it went much faster and 1-on-1 programs are already working normally. And not only in countries such as the United States or Denmark, but also in South American Uruguay, for example. Unfortunately, in the country, political priorities lie elsewhere than in education.
You all imagine it as a Hurvínek war. Merely replacing textbooks with tablets has no general meaning. The concept of so-called smart learning in its full form is much more complex and expensive. It's not just about buying tablets and uploading textbooks to them in an interactive form. In particular, the teacher must have a tablet/notebook with some kind of teacher application, through which it is possible to control student tablets, stream videos to them, upload documents and necessary teaching materials. It is also necessary to replace the classic blackboard and chalk with an electronic "smart board". For all this, you need to have a 100% Internet connection, a fast line that could handle the connection of tens/hundreds of children at one time, so you have your own data center (network, servers, storage). All this costs something and the schools don't have the money for it. In addition, it is definitely not worth it for each school to make its own solution/project. This needs to be a little wider in scope to make it worthwhile. Last but not least, there is one more big problem and that is the teachers themselves. A large part of them are relatively "older" and are not familiar with modern technology (you have to have trainers who will teach them everything and people who will be available if something doesn't work).
This is just a small primer of what is needed to make it work as it should and as it is really intended. Your article is quite superficial because you have no idea about it and you think that just give the kids a tablet and they will be smarter..
Dobrý den.
No one is saying that change has to happen tomorrow. It's just a wonder that it works elsewhere, and we are counting on a ten-year preparation here. There was some annual testing, from which the outputs are clear. (By the way, you are not saying that children will be smarter, but I understand that you were just trying to add dramatic effect to your comment.)
That the schools don't have money - what do you say about the pilot schools that managed to get the funds despite all the administrative difficulties? The same with teachers - three quarters had no problem with modern technology. Moreover, if there was a clearly defined concept, these problems would be passé. Which, by the way, is the core of the text - if it's not clear enough - that some kind of vision is needed that cannot and will not come out of the Ministry of Education.
As I wrote, you are only talking about some pseudo-smart school, where you buy tablets for students and it goes away. There is no other interaction here. Of course, schools can get money for that, but that's not the case. The problem would arise if they wanted to do it in consultation with everyone. It is difficult for a school to afford its own data center for 20 megabytes. That is why I say that it is necessary to grant it collectively for everyone and not for schools to do it themselves and always differently.
And did you read the article at all? After all, its second half mentions precisely the issue of fast connection in schools, and the needs of a comprehensive system and overall concept. The need for teacher education and the need to build a technical background are also mentioned. As far as I know, nowhere in the article does it say that all you have to do is hand out iPads to children.
I don't really believe in the use of tablets in school, and I've been using a computer for 20 years. After all, even university students cannot resist the temptations offered by laptops and Internet connections. And if it is again restrictively limited by the teacher, then it is just a kind of tinsel that will get tired in a while.
IMHO, the problem of our education is somewhere else entirely. They learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, but the children do not understand the meaning. Fractions and decimals are taught, but even in the sixth grade, children still know NOTHING about the number system they are working with. Pupils are told words, but they miss the meaning of those words. It is understandable that they cannot yet process so much abstraction and so many new concepts, but why flood their brains with additional ballast?
Tablets, interactive whiteboards, computers in the desks... these are all just distractions that are interesting for a while, but then distract from important things. It is a simple victory of form over content. We didn't use textbooks at school, we didn't need to because I was lucky enough to get into "maths class" so instead of textbooks we had quality teachers who had it sorted out in their heads. In this way, for example, in the seventh grade of elementary school, we used to divide a polynomial by a polynomial - that is, something that even some graduates of several universities are not capable of.
So what about tablets instead? First, you need to change "job" to "mission". Then it is necessary to indoctrinate society that a teacher has the same, or higher, social status than the director of a large company or even the president of the Czech Republic himself. I can imagine how extremely humiliating it must be for a teacher when he hears from everywhere what a burden he is on his fellow citizens, because he has 2 months of vacation and is still hanging around somewhere (that he works almost constantly unpaid overtime, sometimes he can't take vacation, and his parents throwing away all the problems with the upbringing of their tails) Consequently, teacher salaries and also the demands for the selection of teachers must be raised radically. When all this is done, only then would I allow myself to deal with "tablets for schools".
PS: I am not a teacher, nor have I ever been one, but I know several of them, and many of them try with their own bodies to prevent the dam from breaking even at the cost of personal sacrifices (quite a few of them ended up in the hospital with psychological problems). Everywhere for his admirable effort he receives only insults, ridicule and ingratitude.
Complete agreement! I'm not a teacher, but any sane person can see this.
No matter how hard we try, we will continue to vote for the same parliamentary parties, NOTHING will ever change, those parties have already shown where their priorities are.
A huge, huge plus! I am glad that nowadays there is a person who appreciates the unusual demands of the teaching profession. What a standard high school cantor has to go through - it's hell! I don't agree with today's increasingly spoiled fags, who have nothing better to do than (haha, what irony on this site) permanently tapping away at their iPhone under the bench. More aware people!
Unfortunately, you are mixing pears and apples. Tablets for schools are not there to make the teacher feel better or to raise his level. The tablet has great potential to increase the quality of teaching. Dale saves time, money for books and a schoolboy's briefcase.
I myself have started studying again and I am very sorry that there are no textbooks on the iPad, instead I drag a bunch of books and notebooks.
I am grateful that there are at least a couple of PDF books from Fragment. Otherwise, we have a lot of teaching materials in the school system, where teachers provide them for us. It is very convenient to download, save and work with these materials.
I don't think that everyone needs to be such a genius that psychology needs to be learned and memorized during classes, the same applies to law, history, etc.. and that's why we still need books that can be replaced by a tablet. You can also write tests on them and then save them to the system, there are a lot of possibilities, but you have to start somewhere!
(a small example, a paper textbook 170 kc, the same one in PDF 69 kc - you can easily issue a textbook at the expense of the state and then distribute it in some school license for free, and already millions have been saved)
You again do not understand the written text. And you don't understand in general.
Look, I have dozens of O'Reilly books in electronic form alone. I also basically only read fiction electronically. The important thing is that it affects the quality of teaching only slightly positively and sometimes even very negatively.
My entire text is about the fact that the essential element is a *quality* teacher who will be well paid for his abilities and, above all, will want to practice his profession. He doesn't need a tablet for that (I didn't even claim that anywhere and I don't understand at all how you could get it so wrong from my text). Such a teacher alone will reduce the amount of time needed to understand the material exponentially and always much more than any textbook on a tablet.
There is still a very significant obstacle in education, but it is on the side of pupils/students - the inability to concentrate. The tablet exacerbates this inability because it diverts attention to non-essentials.
By the way, for people who can't remember everything (don't worry, there are most of us), wide blank margins in textbooks, a tear-away notepad and a pencil with an eraser on the other end were invented. A unique piece of technology with a long life. And the display is also very easy to see in direct sunlight.
The things you write about are nice, but they are not critical and they are, if you're sorry, rubbish.
I think I know what you are talking about. But we each have a different view of the situation and the article. I don't think that a tablet should replace a quality teacher or solve some school crisis. And don't even think that in the USA, where they came up with it.
I understand that the illustrative photo can lead to the idea of seeing a first-time student with an iPad behind the project, but that's not the point. We don't only have primary schools, there are also secondary and high schools.
Mathematics is not fooled, a tablet really doesn't help there, but why do teachers give out bad xeroxed copies on which to do homework?
I understand the tablet as a great helper and especially the shift to the 21st century, right from the pencil with the eraser. And it doesn't have to be just a tablet, just a PC at home - but where is the content?
So to sum it up, e-learning is a definite yes for me (it's about the content, not the cake).
Mr. Slávek, I don't know what you have in mind, but probably... Where on earth did you come up with the saved millions? You save one hundred on a textbook, well that's really a bomb, but that stupid ipad costs around 7000-12000, so you won't really save millions, but you will be in a loss of billions. Example: there are 30 people in our class, then there are B and C, in 8 grades, that's 720 students, THAT'S JUST OVER 5 MILLION IN TABLETS, if they cost ONLY 7000 CZK, then you have to buy textbooks for them , all in all, school textbooks last around 6 years, tablets maybe 2 years, then they just fall apart.
Better shut up financial intelligentsia next time….
So I don't write anywhere that tablets will be given away, so I don't write anything about it being an iPad. And we don't just have primary schools. No textbooks are given out at the secondary school, and when I calculate it, the average is 150/book x 10 subjects x 4 years is 6000 kc. I don't feel Sesity, but one costs 20kc. And I am writing from email. textbooks could be written under a free license and given away for free.
And if you have such a limited view of it, I feel sorry for you.
PS those who don't have arguments use insults
P.S2. my daughter already has a tablet and when the mini 2 comes out, she will have another one.
Out of the question: The main problem is really in the quality of the teachers, what can be added when even the quoted director does not speak Czech well and forgets the word "We got the money from European funds...
The fact that we sometimes read that a class somewhere was equipped with Apple tablets is evidence of smart corporate marketing, the desire of the school's staff to dispose of prestigious electronics without paying for them, and the incompetence of journalists who enthusiastically report on it (recently Respekt). .
Of course, it is fundamentally desirable that computers become a basic tool for children in schools, but for it to be meaningful and worth the cost and effort, it must be computers on which content can also be created, not tablets. In order for the project to be feasible, it must be a cheap technique while maintaining essential aspects of functionality. And it must be a system for which schools (or the entire education system in a given country) will be able to create applications easily and without obstacles. On the contrary, it must not be a system that will be dependent on one monopolist. Without further ado, I will say that netbooks with Linux come close to these requirements, while Apple's technology is at odds with them. Unlike Mr. Novotný, I think that the iPad as a standard in all schools is impossible without any "buts" (I note that I am personally a satisfied user of Apple products).
The conclusion of the article is a pleasant non-serious campaign. The results of trials in a few advanced schools say very little about how feasible the plan is in the entire school system - and only on this assumption does it really make sense. Has this already been achieved in the mentioned USA, Denmark or Uruguay?