When Gadgets Get in the Way

August 19, 2004, NYTimes, pages 1,7

By LISA GUERNSEY

NOW that computers are a staple in schools around the

country, perhaps the machines should come with a warning

label for teachers: "Beware: Students may no longer hear a

word you say."

Today 80 percent of public schools have high-speed Internet

access in at least one classroom, according to Market Data

Retrieval, an education research company. Among colleges,

69 percent have classroom Internet access and 70 percent

have wireless networks. Students start tapping away behind

laptop lids with no way for professors to know if they are

taking notes or checking Hotmail.

"I've never been in a lecture where I haven't seen someone

checking their e-mail when they were supposed to be doing

stuff," said Bill Walsh, a student at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology. Instant messages, news tickers and

games like solitaire beckon too.

Joe Huber, the technology coordinator for the public

schools in Greenwood, Ind., said that teachers routinely

complain about gadget-distraction among students. "It is a

huge problem with anyone who teaches with any kind of

technology," he said.

Even in rooms without computers or Internet access,

students have other devices to draw their attention away

from academics. Cellphones may be prohibited at many

schools, but that doesn't stop students from putting them

on vibrate and trading text messages under their desks.

That is, when they aren't fiddling with their organizers or

music players.

Teachers have started to fight back. All agree that the

best weapon against attention deficit is the same one that

worked before the dawn of computers: strong teaching. But

new strategies don't hurt, either. Some teachers have

found, in fact, that the best defense against the

distractions of technology is other technology. Here are

five examples of teachers who are fighting fire with fire.

Polishing Skills Through Games

Anyone who stepped into

Mark Greenberg's class at Camelback High School in Phoenix

last year probably saw an entire class of students immersed

in computer games. That's the way Mr. Greenberg wanted it:

He designed the games to keep his students focused.

Mr. Greenberg, who will teach English at North High School

in Phoenix this fall, has written dozens of games. He said

that when he gave them to his remedial students last year,

their scores improved on the state's English test. His

library also includes Jeopardy-like games to train students

for the Academic Decathlon, a student contest.

Mr. Greenberg said he had heard the criticism that

educational games are nothing more than "drill and kill."

"But now we're finding we're not drilling the kids enough,

because they don't know the vocabulary or don't have the

computational skills," he said. "So there is a resurgence

back to drill and practice."

When he sees a skill in need of polishing, he works over

the weekend to program a new game, like a multimedia quiz

on comma placement or the multiplication of polynomials.

One of his early creations required students to fill in

blank speech balloons from Calvin and Hobbes comic strips,

as a way of teaching dialogue.

One of his newest games is based on the role-playing card

game called Magic: The Gathering. It requires students to

"dress" historical figures with qualities that best fit

their names (like adding the "poet" quality to John Keats).

The game then pits one student's character against another

to do battle and see whose attire wins the day.

He can almost understand, he said, when students get

distracted in computer labs where the machine is reduced to

a "really expensive typewriter." "There are a lot more

discipline problems when you tell kids, 'Now type this up

on the computer,' " he said. "I mean, how boring can that

be?"

Vintage Curiosities

Nancy Kemp, a drafting teacher at Cairo High School in

Cairo, Ga., has been known to haul out some old technology

to seize her students' attention.

A few years ago she set up a film projector and showed a

1956 film about the basics of drafting. She advanced the

frames slowly, projecting the images onto a white board,

pointing out techniques and making annotations with

dry-erase markers. "These kids had never seen film strips,"

she said. "I had that whole class in the palm of my hand

for an hour and a half."

"I don't think I could do it as a steady diet because the

newness wears off," she added. But for those three days,

she said, "it was just wonderful."

A teacher for 30 years, Ms. Kemp said she doesn't put much

credence in PowerPoint - "all pomp with no circumstance,"

she calls it - and she avoids showing anything on video.

"They'll tune it out," she said, adding that the students

are already inundated with television images, including

scrolling announcements on the monitors at school.

She acknowledges, however, that computers are a must these

days. The machines in her room feature AutoCad 12, a

program used by architects and designers. Of course, the

computers also offer the enticement of the Internet.

"I have to be vigilant," Ms. Kemp said. When she notices

students using instant messaging software, she waits to

make sure that they have closed the program instead of

simply minimizing it. But her most effective tactic, she

said, is to threaten to reboot the computer without giving

the student a chance to hit Save and keep the day's

schoolwork. "I'll walk over and say, 'Do I need to reboot?'

And they say, 'No, no,' and they do the right thing."

Round Tables and Loud Noises

To keep his students

focused, Eric Hudson, an assistant professor of physics at

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has an ally in

his classroom's layout. Instead of tiers of seats, they are

all on one level, arranged around 12 round tables. Each

table seats nine students and holds three wireless laptops.

If those laptops were used in a conventional lecture hall,

students could hide behind the screens. But in this room,

professors and teaching assistants wander, keeping an eye

out for students opening Yahoo Mail or 3D Pinball.

"Stealth works," Professor Hudson said.

The classroom

layout is part of a larger education project called

Technology Enabled Active Learning, which was organized by

another M.I.T. professor, John Belcher, two years ago.

TEAL, as the project is known, uses collaborative work

groups, hands-on experiments, computer simulations and

remote controls for instantaneous quizzes and class-wide

feedback sessions. Hanging on the walls are white boards

and projection screens for discussions and presentations.

Professor Hudson said he also deploys a high-paced lecture

style. "I'll try to cover topics in five- to 10-minute

chunks," he said. Anything longer, he added, and "there is

more of a chance that they'll lose what you're talking

about and will turn to IM-ing their friends."

Sometimes in his demonstrations he will make a capacitor

blow up, with its bang reverberating down the hall.

"You have to make loud noises once or twice to snap them

back to attention," he said.

Large physics lectures typically have a high rate of

failing students, partly because so many enrollees never

bother to show up. "It used to be that the fail rate for

this course was 15 percent," he said. "When we went to this

format, it dropped to 1 percent to 2 percent." And what

about attendance? It's up to 100 percent, he said.

An Onscreen 'No No'

It doesn't take long for the students

in Donna Lee's class at the North Gulfport Seventh and

Eighth Grade School in Gulfport, Miss., to realize that the

computers at their desks are not under their control.

Ms. Lee, who teaches keyboarding and Microsoft Office

skills, uses networked software called NetOp to take over a

student's computer screen whenever she sees fit. Her

desktop computer has a master control panel that enables

her to see thumbnail images of every screen in her lab. If

she spots an unauthorized Web site, she clicks a button to

freeze the student's screen. Using her mouse like a red

pen, she writes "No No" across the screen. The scolding

suddenly appears on the student's screen too.

"The kids turn around and look at me," she said. "I give

them a look, and they get off there real quick."

Ms. Lee also uses the software to rein in all of her

students at once. "If I want to explain something, I can

freeze every screen," she said. "And in big neon letters I

say, 'Pay Attention.' " Without the software, she said, she

could ask students to turn to face her and turn off their

monitors, but not everyone would obey.

To Ms. Lee, the Web demons that beckon to her students are

online chat rooms - "the horrible, horrible teenage chat

rooms" - where people can post anonymous notes, sometimes

in foul or graphic language, about anyone they know.

Using NetOp, she can record exactly what a student has been

viewing and for how long. "I save it to my hard drive and

put 'No No' on it and call a parent conference, with the

student there," she said. A student might plead that he

just looked for a second. But, Ms. Lee said, she can open

the file and say, "Let's look where you went."

Zooming In on Details

When Greg Malone takes charge of

his science classroom at Capital High School in Santa Fe,

N.M., he takes a tip from talk show hosts. With a tiny

microphone pinned to his collar, he walks between tables,

asking questions about what he has projected on a

six-foot-wide screen in front.

"If you can amplify your voice but still speak in a normal

conversational voice, the children can actually concentrate

better," he said. "There is a focus."

He carries a cordless keyboard and mouse so that he can

project new images from his desktop computer no matter

where he is standing. Using a list of Web sites that he

calls up before class, he bounces from one site to another.

The projector's zoom function is a favorite tool. Mr.

Malone said he pulls up images from the Hubble Space

Telescope and zooms in on tiny galaxies that would be a

strain for the students to see otherwise. In texts on the

screen, he zooms in on numbers and words. "I watch their

faces," he said. "They are absolutely riveted."

Mr. Malone, who used to work in the computer gaming

industry, hands out remote controls, too. By pressing

buttons, students can respond immediately and

simultaneously to quizzes on the day's lesson. Their

answers are tabulated wirelessly, and the totals are

projected for all to see.

"We'll suddenly stop, and I'll flash a question on the

screen and I'll say 'Respond to this,' " he said. "If there

is anything that these kids relate to, it's holding a

remote control in their hands."

Still, Mr. Malone said that working in a classroom with

computers creates problems that even high-tech props cannot

solve. Teachers, he said, have to be constantly watching

for students who "drift off."

"It's more than just e-mail. It's looking at Web sites with

cars, with sports, playing games," he said. "As a teacher,

you have to have those antennas up."

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