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Color me hopelessly geeky. What impressed me most about my son's first day of formal schooling 14 years ago was not holding his hand, slippery with sweaty anticipation. No, what I remember was a back wall in his elementary school's library. There, stacked to the ceiling, were unopened boxes of PCs.
Those unopened boxes said more to me than the school's 10-page, single-spaced technology mission statement. Looking at them, I heard school administrators saying: Are you happy now? We bought scores of computers as parents demanded, aping every other school around us. But now we don't know what to do with the things, and we really don't want to know.
Today, the boxes have been opened, and nearly every school has set up a computer lab. But nearly 30 years after the advent of the Apple II, the first commercially successful PC, educators are still wondering whether the computer is friend or foe.
TOO LATE FOR LABS. I see the ambivalence everywhere, even at my son's high school. Located in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, it's the top-ranking school in Georgia. Yet its graphic arts studio is powered by decade-old Macs running on OS 7.6, an operating system that hasn't been on the cutting edge since my son was in kindergarten. OS 7.6 can't handle today's versions of Adobe and Quark software. Which means kids in my son's school are learning yesterday's graphics skills. The teacher recognizes the problem but can't persuade the school to finance an upgrade to OS 9, let alone buy new Macs.
In fact, the whole idea of a computer lab is as dated as my record player. Inexpensive new wireless technologies, such as Apple's AirPort system, are liberating computers from the lab. At the last Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple built a cheap network of AirPort base stations that gave everyone at WWDC wireless access to the Internet. Yet computer labs remain the norm at most schools.
Why do schools continue to lag a generation behind when it comes to computers? The answer, I'm afraid, is fear and ignorance. Only 15% of K-12 teachers have received adequate training -- considered to be a minimum of nine hours -- in how to use computers and the Internet, according to a national commission. That's like graduating high school without having to learn typing. "Teachers aren't comfortable and familiar with how to use technology in the daily practice of education," Larry Abraham, associate dean of teacher education at the University of Texas, recently told the Associated Press.
APPLE CAMP. How can this be, when today nearly every kid entering kindergarten knows how to use a computer? Teachers want our respect, and the best ones deserve it -- but not those who bury their heads in the sand. Would you respect a doctor who offered you the same pain medicine he offered your grandmother?
The schools' inexcusable ignorance about computers presents a great opportunity for Apple -- and the company is seizing it with a vengeance (see BW Online, 7/11/01, "How Apple Is Reclaiming the Classroom"). Apple is sponsoring seven technology boot camps this summer for grade school teachers in Texas, California, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida, and Vancouver, Canada. It's also sponsoring a separate program for college teachers at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The idea is to use the latest in Mac technology to show teachers that computers are indeed friends and not foes. Teachers are learning how to use a digital video camera, stream their video onto a Mac, then edit the video with iMovie and post it on a Web site, and more.
"COMPUTERS AS TOOLS." Sounds like fun to me, and it's proving the right bait to draw technology-shy teachers. More than a hundred of them attended the recent session at the University of Texas in Austin. Says Abraham: "We want them [teachers] to use technology the way they do grade books and blackboards. They're going to use computers as tools, not subjects."
I like Abraham's approach. He's not arguing, as so many technology adherents do, that computers will solve everything from illiteracy to ignorance. I've seen many a computer-generated school report with big pictures and little ideas. Let's not kid ourselves. Computers will never replace a great teacher.
However, in the hands of a great teacher, a computer can do wondrous things, such as connect wirelessly to a Web site displaying live shots of the Great Wall of China. It's just such digital magic that might hook a child long resistant to learning. And maybe, just maybe, a growing number of students and teachers will connect learning with the Mac.
Haddad, Atlanta-based correspondent for BusinessWeek, is a long-time Apple Computer buff. Follow his weekly Byte of the Apple column, only on BW Online Edited by Thane Peterson
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