First-grader, or cloud-based data stream?
By Joanna Weiss
WE HAVE nearly a month of school left, but the end-of-year activities are already piling up: field days and fairs, concerts and art shows, ways to placate fidgety kids who know they’ll be leaving their classrooms soon.
And it’s worth considering the kinds of classrooms many of them will leave: state-of-the-art, digitized. In my daughter’s elementary school, the chalkboards have disappeared, replaced by smartboards with digital bells and whistles, plus laptops and iPads used for math drills and touch-typing prep.
This state of affairs has led, perhaps inevitably, to inBloom, a controversial new data storage project designed to make it easier for schools to use educational software — or, if you view things more skeptically, for schools to use students as data streams.
Massachusetts is considering taking part. Everett is testing it out. But not everyone is so bullish about the idea, or the notion of technology as savior. Josh Golin, associate director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said he was stunned to watch an inBloom promotional video, filled with a gauzy images of students and teachers, blissfully hovering over tablet computers.
“You see this vision of teachers as being people who collect data and beam it up to the cloud, and the cloud sends
