Now: Californian public schools struggle daily with budget constraints, fighting to retain staff and pay for basic materials like whiteboard markers and crayons. Investment in new technology comes way down the list of priorities.
- The reality is that San Francisco teachers and parents are posting requests on Freecycle for donated used equipment.
- In our elementary school, children practice their keyboard skills on laminated photocopies because there aren't enough real keyboards.
- Our elementary school has 3 LCD projectors to share between 24 classrooms, 485 children. .
- All the computers in our school are donated and used. Most are at least 6 years old. Many are unreliable. Monitors are old, large and unwieldy.
- Our teachers struggle to share important educational material with their classes because they have one copy of a book and no document camera or projector.
The future?: The teachers and parents are hoping to bring some of the wonderful educational tools now available into the classrooms at Flynn. Our vision is of a school with a 28 seater Mac Lab in our library and every classroom with a minimum of a laptop, LCD projector and ELMO document camera. More importantly it is of a school where technology is used to inspire, engage and help our students to explore their world.
