The speaker first talks about remoteness and the quality of education. The finding was that the more remote (in terms of distance from an urban area , OR the isolation within an urban area based on poverty), the lower the achievement on standardized tests. This is rather predictable, but the surprise here was the correlation between the desire of the teacher to be in the school or not. Teachers wanting to be elsewhere had students with poorer results.
The exploration of whether educational technology would improve the education of the students was interesting. Given the opportunity to interact with a computer and touchpad without instructions, a number of children were obviously intrigued enough to try and eventually learned a modicum of things from their interaction.
The lessons are these:
From Arthur C. Clarke, the quote "Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be".
A teacher commited to their post and their charges will be more successful.
Educational technology can be extremely motivating and effective in translating human curiousity into educational learning.
Putting educational technology in the hands of enthusiastic, commited teachers will result in greater student achievement than might be expected otherwise.
Thanks for these comments, Pete. You've gleaned some great ideas from this. The Clarke quote may become my email quote! Thanks for all your contributions to class.
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