Reinventing the Square Wheel

Most of District Administration is puff, but I'm finding more and more I like reading Gary Stager's columns about technology. In Reinventing the Square Wheel, he actually slams PowerPoint and most of the typical ed tech juggernaut, and he doesn't mince words: "PowerPoint sucks the oxygen out of educational computing." Congratulations--with him and Larry Cuban (his "The Laptop Revolution Has No Clothes" in EdWeek is wonderful) focusing on these issues, perhaps we'll bring a bit more strategy to the educational technology world.

Stager closes his piece with a bit on podcasting. I'm not quite as enamoured with this as an educational tool as Stager is--it's certainly great for communicating, but just creating RSS feeds of MP3s isn't going to change student achievement levels dramatically. I think of it more like websites and email lists--essential tools for doing work in the year 2006, but not something unique to teaching and learning. Focusing on the instructional core  will make the difference.

Comments

[Gary Stager]

Thanks for reading and reviewing my column. You may find others at http://www.districtadministration.com/pulse and http://www.stager.org/articles

I tend to agree with you about podcasting, except having a new audience and medium for sharing can't be anything but a good thing for kids. The larger point I was making is that hijacking podcasting as a way of cramming more textbook information into a kid's head is the wrong way to go.

All the best,

Gary

[Gary Stager]

PS: I will be writing about Larry Cuban's latest tirade in the near future. Keep your eye on your mailbox.

[Rick Navarro]

At LAUNCH, we found some links on - The Tyranny of PowerPoint™ Click on my name for the archive.

The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation is my favorite.

http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Thanks for your last link to us, the encouragement is very welcome. We have a new science/math post going up tomorrow.