Technology and its future role in highschools...

[nobrakes8]

In the Connecticut Technical High School system we are implementing Digital Classrooms. Wright Tech is supposedly 100% digital. Kaynor Tech is 100% digital in social studies and recieved 2 million dollars in laptops and electronic equiptment for our Physics labs.

A digital classroom use web based learning units teachers from all 17 technical schools publish. Instead of useing a text book, we use the internet and do independent study on a subject, then after everybody does their individual topic on the subject the students meet and talk about what they learned on.

We found a few failures as my class was the test mice as we were the first class to go through the system for four years. We realized we hate it when teachers don't talk to us. Some of the teachers that have a good sense of humor make their classes boring because we walk in and we're told "This is where you can find your assignment, when it's done print it out and you can use the computers until everybody is done".. Kids may hate lectures and stuff, but when you're doing assignments on your own just handing in essay after essay after essay, you do wish your teachers had lectures and gave you a quiz and test once in a while.

Also in math classes we used to have to go onto like math.com or regentsprep.org and go through lessons, then we'd need to write a paragraph about what we learned (CTHS has/had a writeing across the board policy to write in every class).. After one term our teacher decided to go back to the old fashioned way because students can't learn math and science just by reading a website, and more kids skipped math and science classes because they found it pointless when every other day you had to write about math on top of all the other essays in social studies, english, and even art.

In 2007 the Kaynor Technical High School will complete a 53 million dollar renovation, they will supposedly update our drafting shop to a 4D Technical Drafting shop, they will supposedly be moving our off campus machine shop and production room (only facility in Connecticut NIMS certified) next to our two current machine shops in the facility. All three machine shops will be equipted with MasterCAM and Asprie CAM software. In 2007 Kaynor will also be 100% digital with every academic classrom equipt with 24-30 Dell Desktops, and every shop theory room also equipt with 24-30 Dell or Gateway desktops.

Our school is a manufacturing based school. When we recieved the grant in 2001 industry had a major say in what our school was going to do with the new facility.

On the other side...

The local school in my town which is the home of Team #1071 is down sizeing their technology department. Rumor is, is that they will be shutting down each department as a teacher quits, retires, or transfers to another position. From the feeling the kids on my team told me, is the school is just giving them the attitude "Well you should transfer to Wilcox Tech or Kaynor Tech if you want those type classes"