Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9309080425
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Of course, it's also been used for years in public schools - but its classroom persona is yackety-yak, don't-talk-back.
That will change soon at four high schools in Southwest Virginia.
Students and teachers at those schools, and at two community colleges, will be linked via pipelines of fiber-optic phone lines. Through interactive TV sets in the classrooms, a student at, say, Thomas Walker High School in Lee County can be instructed in French or Russian from a teacher at a high school many miles away.
The student will be able not only to see and hear the teacher, but to ask questions and receive answers from the instructor who can also see and hear the long-distant student.
This venture into high-tech teaching holds exciting promise for expanding educational opportunities for students, particularly in rural areas.
Imagine: Highly specialized instruction, available perhaps at a school in Roanoke or Richmond or Fairfax, could be piped into a remote school district that otherwise would never be able to make it accessible to its student population.
Indeed, the electronic-classroom concept should be seen as an important tool in addressing nagging disparity problems in Virginia, wherein the quality and extent of course offerings in some poorer school districts fall far short of what's available in other districts.
No one should be fooled, of course, into thinking it's the total solution.
Disparity exists not only in the course menus from which students choose, but also in the number of library books that are available, in the size of classes, in laboratory equipment, in computers, in air-conditioning, in teachers' pay, in resources for addressing social problems that are stressing out many schools today.
And make no mistake: The equipment and hookups for electronic classrooms don't come cheap. They cost money - and the root of the disparity issue has been reluctance on the part of state and local governments to come up with more money for solutions.
The public also needs to remember that good teachers don't just stand up and lecture on a topic for 30 minutes. Often, it is the personal contact - a Socratic dialogue in the classroom, a friendly greeting in the hall, words of encouragement before or after class, inquiring about a student's problems, personal as well as academic - that inspire a student to learn. And that earn apples for the teacher.
Some things can't be done by sound bites and remote control.
What's more, there are problems inherent in encouraging or requiring students to spend yet more hours gazing at television screens. They do that too much already.
All this notwithstanding, there are more positives than negatives in the electronic-classroom idea. We're ready for the Brave New World.
Where is your homework, Johnny?
It's in the fiber-optics pipeline.
by CNB