Some Mexican Classrooms Adopt Hi-Tech Teaching

An anonymous reader writes "It what is believed to be the most ambitious project of its kind in the world. In a program called Enciclomedia, giant electronic screens have been attached to the walls of about 165,000 Mexican classrooms. Some five million 10 & 11 year-olds now receive all their education through these screens. 'From maths to music, from geography to geometry, black and white boards have given way to electronic screens. During a biology lesson we watch as pupil after pupil comes to the screen to piece together the human body... electronically. One boy taps his finger on the screen and brings up the human heart. He then slides his finger across the screen, taking the heart with him and places it where he thinks it belongs on the body located on the other side of the screen.'"

Teachers

I know it's a slippery slope, but really this technology might make teachers a thing of the past. Looking back on my high school years, the classes I learned more than any others were the classes that had great teachers. Teachers who inspired and were excited about their subject... it was contagious. The human spirit can't be replaced by a machine, but it certainly can be complemented.

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I don't think so. In secondary school there's (ideally) a lot of interaction. Students may have questions, or need additional explanations or examples of presented material. This approach supplemented with a good teacher to answer questions and provide

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I don't think it will ever replace teachers, but I could see where it would be a good attention getter and help out the mediocre teachers. Even if they can't inspire the students, maybe all the onscreen stuff will keep the students interested.

I do think th

I wish...

This is kind of a rant. Oh well. I have had some of the worst teachers and some of the best. The problem is that the teacher is just a medium between content and the student. In all reality I learned more when we worked in groups and used a reference t

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Well, the primary goal of a teacher SHOULD be to teach the student HOW to learn. When a teacher uses the extremely poor excuse that they don't know how to use a computer, which is a tool of their trade, they make it absolutely clear that they do not under

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Nah. Our school (UK, 1700 pupils) has had similar boards in every classroom for years now, and after the first 3 months they're used less as clever interactive tools and more as whiteboards with pages. Of course it makes lesson planning easier, as you can

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I am afraid you are confused as to what constructivism is. Constructivism is a learning theory. It is NOT a teaching theory or anything that has to do with teaching methods or how bad or good a teacher is. When you are learning something you are "constr

Learning without work

Teachers love these gadgets because it relieves them from having to make an effort to teach. Students love them because it relieves them from having to make an effort to learn.

But learning requires work and effort. There's no shortcut.

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I learned more from reading "Realm of Algebra" by Isaac Asimov than I did in 1 year of 8th grade Algebra class, so yes there is a short cut. Or to put things in a different perspective, reading a good book on a subject is all it should take to learn it, t

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So far no one here has proven that this technology is indeed a "shortcut". More precisely this is an alternative, or a suppliment. The only ones preaching "shortcut" are the usual cliche of cynics, who would never be accused of thinking outside the box.

Responsibility

This is great! Now teachers can do even less work while the magic screen on the wall teaches the kids!

I had Bill Nye the Science Guy as a science teacher once. There was also some other guy there, but I think his job was to manage the VCR.

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I had Bill Nye the Science Guy as a science teacher once.

Bill Nye also taught my PE class Speed Walking [youtube.com]

Computers need electricity...

... but too bad some schools in lower-class and rural areas are getting the Enciclomedia equipment, even when they don't even have electrical power, or decent bathrooms for the kids. :(

I know, I've been there.

When will our government realize that wha

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Sorry, I mean *our* as in "I'm Mexican. Our Mexcan Government" :)

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Um, the answer is pretty simple. When the ballot box fails, it's time to turn to the ammo box. If you're not willing to deal with your government, by any means necessary, then you deserve whatever government you wind up with.

Am I supposed to be impressed?

In text alone, it is believed there is the equivalent of about 14 full-sized books inside Enciclomedia.

So it has a fraction of the storage of my low end Palm, a Z22.

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This has to be a typo... They act as if it's a big number then drop 14 on us... I figure it was more like 14K or at least 140.

Otherwise it wouldn't be "believed", as 14 full sized books isn't enough that you really need to make a guess.

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Or...it's no typo but the journalist thinks that 14 books in a device the size of a bookcase is a lot.

old news

I live in Mexico City, Enciclomedia has been used since 2 or 3 years ago.
Omar

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And yet, I just read in "La Jornada" (Mexican news paper) that a lot of the hardware conceived for the "Enciclomedia" project has no been used because of the lack of electricity in some places...

(Yeah I am from Mexico too)

Technology

If this was a Linux-based solution that fact would be in the submission, but of course it's not so there's no mention even of the technology being used. There's a Word doc here [enciclomedia.edu.mx] with the specs and requirements.

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Which says it is MS-Windows. Surprise surprise.

Catching up to the other countries

I live and studied in Mexico some time and some in the US. The differences are: In US there's no government agency that takes care of education. In Mexico, we have the Bureau of Public Education, which handles textbooks, adult education, and every aspect of making the people better informed. We Mexicans are more open to accept that we know nothing- Most of us come from a time when we had so little, that up to this date, there are people who never got past Elementary school. Thus, as adults, we worry about our children, and that the same doesn't happen to them. I've been around americans, and some of my best friends are americans, to know that american people (most, at least the ones I met) trust their schools systems more than we mexicans do. Back in my days (about 15 years ago) my mother got to help build the school where I studied, which is 5 blocks away from my current location. About 6 months ago, my brother, an electrician, got hired by the same school to install those high tech boards the article talks about. In general, Mexican people mind more their children's education, trying not to repeat history. Science is a big thing- I keep hearing the creation vs. evolution in the US. There's no such thing in Mexico. In fact, in the textbooks there were 6 theories of how life could have come to exist, and students were encouraged to seek their own answers. That way, even the most naive pretty girl once came to me, the library worm, to recommend a good book on the Paleozoic period, and sat reading it for HOURS. We were forced to learn through curiosity. Teachers in mexico are TEACHERS- Mexican teachers are hard working individuals who sometimes don't make a living teaching. In a small town in chihuahua where I lived, some alternated between farming and teaching, and one of my best teachers made a living selling wood. Those people knew their stuff and knew that learning was important, to prevent (redundancy alert) repeating a history in which we have to work hard to make a living. (Joke entry starts here) Mexico is a country of former slaves. Our ancestors didn't go through the trouble of shedding their blood for our independance from slave labor so that we would end up in sweatshops! I apologize for the long post (and bad grammar/spelling, I'm to lazy to edit XD); and hope not to make any stereotypes of any people, nor insult anybody. I am aware that people everywhere are the same (and I've been around plenty of different people to know that). Oh, and I don't mean to say that the american school system is bad, it's only that the Mexican school system is designed to get us all out of ignorance, while the american school system is only meant to teach. PS. The time shall come soon when EVERY country will have to either sink or swim , and pretty soon, maybe not in our life time, we will have to start seeing each other as equals through technology, knowledge, etc. I don't know about other countries enough to know what their progress is (but most so called 3rd world countries are stepping out, even faster than mexico), but I do know about Mexico, because I am in Mexico. And I know that someday technology shall unite us all. (Corruscant, anyone?) Peace.

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In US there's no government agency that takes care of education.

Uhhhh... wha?

Exactly how long were you in the US?

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>and bad grammar/spelling, I'm to [sic] lazy to edit XD)

Despite your laziness, I read your entire post. "Mexico" and "Mexican" were capitalized all but once. "America" and "American" (each used several times) were never capitalized, even once. Looks

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Despite your laziness, I read your entire post. "Mexico" and "Mexican" were capitalized all but once. "America" and "American" (each used several times) were never capitalized, even once. Looks like the Mexican school system has a long way to go.
Mexico

I applaud you, sir.

Not only do I applaud you but I applaud the entire Mexican people. FFS you've got a constitution that won't alow you to be charged with more time if you break out of a prison because you have the *RIGHT* to *SEEK* freedom. Here, we punish those that try to

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Hey! Some of my best friends are Mexican Nazi Supremacists!

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Me añado a la petición de wakaramon.

P.d. estos pinches gringos están bien locos, criticando la ortografía de la gente cuando ellos apenas pueden hablar el Inglés...

Me fail english? thats Unpossible!

Why not go all the way?

From this essay I wrote:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html [sourceforge.net]

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
    "To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l [csmonitor.com]
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite
end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand",
for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or
the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools
to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ...

And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative
work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and
creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html [gnu.org]
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based
ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as
opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy [wikipedia.org]
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making
things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much
sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if
you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a
challenging task) is its own reward.

But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a
way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by
automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the
drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything
you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
  one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn
something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50
contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap
themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so
of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm [greenstar.org]

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The problem with compulsory schools is just that -- it's compulsory. Compulsory attendance, compulsory compensation (taxes), compulsory curriculum.

The killer is not "gain", but the compulsory nature. If you are forced to do anything, even for "gain", yo

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Well said!

A Global Reply

Interesting what people can misread and misinterpret.

1- As a teacher who has one of those boards hanging in my room right now, 25 feet in front of me (I'm on my planning period, thanks) I can tell you:

THE BOARD DOES NOTHING UNTIL THE TEACHER CREATES THE LESSON TO OPERATE ON IT.

Very, very few high-quality lessons are available on the internet. Teachers are (disappointingly) a very territorial bunch with their lessons. At best, you'll find perhaps two dozen lessons attached to your grade/subject. Of those, at most five will be appropriate for your class/skillset of students.

2- Technology will only eclipse teachers when you show me the tool that will deal well with the kid who got his ass beat by dad last night for trying to get him to stop hitting his mom, who speaks a dozen words of the school's language, and has the unfortunate-but-true "Living for now" survival instincts of a child raised in poverty. When you develop a program that can educate that, all while taking role and helping Sarah get to the nurse because she's having her first period, I'll bow out of this classroom and go on welfare.

3- These boards, as great as they sound, are simply glorified mouse-pads with projectors hitting them. You synch up where the projector is aiming with the board, and you've basically got a supersized tablet that also happens to have the monitor on it. In short, something very similar to bank screens for the last ten years. The difference? Someone made the screen even bigger and got the cost low enough that a few principles caught on, and the rest followed like pigs in a pen, as most things in education go.

Do I use mine? Absolutely. I'm probably using it now while you read it - but it's just a tool (albeit a high-potential one), it's not the Educational Messiah, and technology is surely not going to destroy this field, popular Slashdot views to the contrary. ;)

-A teacher

Article could have been written 20+ years ago

"It is fabulous," says the teacher Arturo Vazquez. "The children concentrate more, they interact more and so they get more out of each class".

If they just bought this system and it's really that useful, what, exactly, is the "teacher" needed for? (More l

Some Mexican classrooms...

Some Mexican classrooms adopt wrestling masks. They say the use of a uniform dress code helps students' concentration, and since the teachers are usually bigger than the students, nobody starts any trouble.

I must dissent

As an educator, I must say that I'm quite opposed to most uses of computers/TVs/projectors/etc in the classroom. While interactive math games might be good for memorization (the least important part of learning, in my opinion), it's useless for teaching using other paradigms such as the Socratic Method (my personal favorite) or facilitative teaching (the paradigm preached by my public school system).

Also, unless you have both the source code and plenty of time on your hands, it takes control of the curriculum out of the hands of the teacher and school and puts it in the hands of the company doing the programming and politicians. Somehow I fear there will poor messages in the material, such as commercialism, materialism, sexism, ageism, and other ideas that are often pushed in commercial kids TV (and TV in general), among many other concerns that occur when either career politicians or private businesses are involved.

Mexico and human hearts -- Yikes!

"One boy taps his finger on the screen and brings up the human heart."

This wasn't part of an Aztec ritual, was it?

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This wasn't part of an Aztec ritual, was it?

You're thinking of the Aztechs.

Extra point to anyone who gets the reference.

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And best of all- Oxcala families now have good reason to work in American-owned factories instead of migrating north to work on American farms, because their kids now have a better chance of getting a good education in Mexico than in the Luddite United Sta

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But construction paper requires trees. What do you want them to do, cut down the rainforest?

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Is why in some variants of English is math pluralized to maths? It seems not to be the case with most other things, for example they didn't say "musics". Where I grew up (southwest USA) it was always math, singular, which makes sense to be. Though there ar

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Is why in some variants of English is math pluralized to maths? It seems not to be the case with most other things, for example they didn't say "musics". Where I grew up (southwest USA) it was always math, singular, which makes sense to be. Though there ar

English English vs. American English

In the UK we call it "maths" short for mathematics. I am not sure what other English speaking countries prefer.

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You (by which I mean, Americans) wouldn't say "mathematic"... or would you?

No, but I wouldn't say "maths" either.

It's a lot easier to say it without the 's' on the end.

American English is full of things like this. Get over it. It's just like how we chang

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because it looks like it sounds that way. Or how we got rid of the 'u' in colour, etc., because it's not pronounced.

Hey!, I am a Mexican living in the UK an I can assure you the U in Colour and Behaviour and flavour DOES indeed sounds over here :) and btw

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and encouraging people to leave the country is a viable economic policy

Well... how is it not, exactly?

Making your country's unemployed and impovershed go away and be some other country's responsibility? Pretty clever, actually.

Re:Good for mexico

You don't know what you're talking about.

From the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov]:

Literacy Rates for Mexico:
Total Population: 92.2%
Male: 94%
Female: 90.5% (2003 est.)

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Nice stereotype, it's like saying most Americans are arrogant fat-asses who only care about making money.

You mean we aren't?

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"Maths" is the term used in England, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. "Math" is exclusively an American term. The word being abbreviated is "mathematics", which is plural and has an "s" at the end, so saying "maths" makes more sense than "math".

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There is no rule that says every plural has to have an 's' on the end. What about fish, or sheep, or mice?

It's silly to put the 's' sound after the 'th' sound, so we don't do it. Sticking to something that's silly because of some imagined superior etymol