Post 1491

by billso on Sunday, 22 August 2004

Tech: Teach­ers dis­cuss var­i­ous prob­lems with com­puter class­rooms. Stu­dents surf the web, check e-mail, and don’t pay atten­tion unless instruc­tors have a strong teach­ing plan and worth­while activ­i­ties. One teacher devel­ops com­puter games tied to the course mate­r­ial. Oth­ers walk the class­room constantly.

Teach­ers and IT staff need to work together. A proxy server works won­ders. I have always wanted a cut­off switch that kills the out­bound con­nec­tion for the stu­dents. Some net­work mon­i­tor­ing pack­ages force the same image to appear on all the screens. One teacher dis­cusses how she uses NetOp to record stu­dent com­puter activ­ity for later use in parent-teacher con­fer­ences. Those time-date stamps always help. But as more uni­ver­sity stu­dents bring in their own com­put­ers, we get new issues of own­er­ship and con­trol. Stu­dents own their com­put­ers, but the uni­ver­sity pro­vides the bandwidth.

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