Computer training textbooks are published in fine printed format with hard covers. Most of these have graphical representations, documentation with a good explanation of topics and questionnaires. Computer language textbooks, computer application textbooks, programming and networking textbooks and technical reference books are mainly used in computer classrooms. These are useful for both teachers and students participating in a computer program. Apart from professional textbooks, custom versions of textbooks for specific universities are available in the market. These are typically designed with edited versions of full textbooks. Interactive computer textbooks are very useful for improving reading, reasoning, writing and content mastery.

Computer training textbooks are more expensive than other text books. But it is possible to save some money by smart shopping. For college students, the best sources of computer textbooks are university libraries and off-campus bookstores. Libraries feature a good stock of computer training textbooks that can be used throughout the course. For those looking solely for library books, weekends are the perfect time to locate them. Another method of buying computer textbooks is online purchase, because most teachers use the web to post the textbooks required, prior to the beginning of each semester. You can visit online shopping websites including amazon.com, ebay.com, and half.com for new or used textbooks. Leading publishing agents may also be approached for computer training textbooks.

Owing to increased costs, many publishers sell computer training textbooks as a bundle with extra materials such as website access cards, CDs, and discount coupons. Unfortunately, computer textbooks have a comparatively limited market.

Computer Training provides detailed information on Computer Training, Computer Internet Training, Computer Graphic Training, Computer Forensics Training and more. Computer Training is affiliated with Computer Science Education [http://www.e-ComputerEducation.com].

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Computer learning is an engaging tool allowing children to experiment with creative programs at their own pace without additional pressure. Children can work exclusively from their own worlds without a teacher telling them what to do. Therefore, computer learning is excellent for children’s motivation and allows them to question deeply their subject matter. Also, the computer offers a creative variety of programs on different levels and so, computer learning is not entirely boring. From the moment children flick on the computer screen, they can learning Math by working out the answers through a competition match with the computer. This method of learning can be a lot more motivating and challenging than children doing Math exercises in the classroom and for homework.

Also, with computer learning, there are no outside pressures or influences. The teacher does not make personal judgments or evaluation. Computer learning allows for the evaluation to be on the process and not on the person or on the product. By not being evaluated or criticized, children engage their minds and advance at their own pace without the teacher saying, “That’s not good enough” or “You could have done better on that Math test. You know the material.”

Computer learning is suitable for all levels and ages. It is an organized and well structured learning tool. With the rapid pace of technological development, a computer is also a sophisticated learning tool. There are computers with touch-tone screens, computer that talk and sing, computers with three dimensional graphics, and so on. More and more emphasis is being placed on computer knowledge as a prerequisite for many jobs. Some jobs simply require a simple understanding of how a computer works but children can and should have some computer exposure at an early age to prepare for their future.

However, teachers possess fundamental and important qualities, which computers do not possess, and are essential for a child’s learning process. one primary and necessary quality is personal interaction. When children cannot computer a certain math problem or they don’t feel well, the teacher feels it. The teacher has the ability to attempt to help them. Although the computer has been built and programmed by human beings, a computer is still not human. A computer cannot ask why a child cannot do a Math problem and offer advice on how to tackle the problem. This basic fact still explains why teachers are still needed in the classroom.

After all, human beings are smarter than a computer they are the ones who designed it. All the computer knows has been programmed and cannot think and sort problems out emotionally and intellectually. Children still need the classroom environment because of the student-teacher interaction and the relationships with other children. Therefore, it can be concluded that computer learning is user friendly yet supplementary, and impersonal.

Teachers may not be as technologically sophisticated as computers, but they certainly can be creative within a group framework. They don’t necessarily have to ask close-ended questions and bore the class to fulfill their roles as teachers. Teachers can and should allow learning to be enjoyable and stimulating like the excitement children feel when they flick on a computer. For example, a teacher has the option unlike the computer, to organize a project using several groups to ask true and false questions about the environment using the Internet to search for information. The winning team with the most points receives a prize. Not only do the children enjoy these types of mini-type research projects, but they are also benefited with knowledge about the environment as well. unlike the computer, the teacher, by working with the groups, allows for elements such as humor and teamwork together with the feeling of accomplishment and self-satisfaction to seep into the children’s learning.

Although computer learning can be stimulating, fun and accessible to children of all ages, levels and interests, it is not a substitute for teachers. Teachers permit and allow for personal interaction which is essential for a child. Also, teachers can be just as creative by organizing fun learning projects for the class. Learning should be an enjoyable and enriching process and cannot be completed alone without the presence of a teacher. Computer then, are only secondary to the learning process.

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Dorit Sasson is a freelance writer, speaker, educator and founder of the New Teacher Resource Center.

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Teachers and high school students sample the water in Lake Baikal in Siberia while at other lakes around the world, other teachers and students take similar samples from local lakes and subject them to the same simple water-quality tests. Via their school computers, they exchange their results and their observations about how water pollution problems are the same around the world. They are part of a “global laboratory” project that includes scientists specializing in water pollution.

A similar computer network pins citizen activists, joined with students, teachers and scientists, in “sister watershed” groups throughout the world.

Amateur birdwatchers and biologists pool their rare bird sightings in a North American computer network that is linked with bird researchers in Central America and South America.

The differences between classroom and community education are blurred on the global computer networks. Voluntary organizations, government agencies, students and teachers are all involved in a real that has become, for many, a virtual classroom, without walls, and increasingly without borders.

Already, pilot projects have high school students sharing the methods and results from field studies of environmental quality, using computer telecommunication to leap national boundaries. Elementary school children share their life experiences end visions of the future the same way. Their messages to one another, passed with tremendous speed and shared simultaneously among many classrooms, provide strong, personal lessons in science, geography and human relations.

Environmental education curriculum development, pursued independently and often in isolation by teachers, school districts and universities over the past two decades, is now linked in a global forum that can respond immediately to the ever more complex and urgent environmental problems the world faces. Teachers the world over are connecting with their counterparts to discuss how they can do their jobs better. Co-ordination of international education projects is less burdened by the constraints of time and travel budgets as computer networks provide forums for collaboration.

The technology for this exchange takes advantage of the personal computer’s ability to communicate over standard phone lines using a modem. The simplest networks connect personal computers in a “store-and-forward” system that echoes messages from one to the next, until all have copies. These least-cost networks are linked to larger, faster computers that act as central information storage banks and relay stations. They in turn exchange information with one another and tap the power and data in computer systems at major research and educational institutions.

In many ways this vast new sea of information presents its own challenges, often akin to “drinking water from a fire hose.” The enormous glut of fact and opinion is impossible to take in, and has forced those who would taste its power to devise new ways for organizing and sampling the information flow.

Electronic mail services and computer “conferencing” let students and teachers communicate with each other privately, or publicly as members of large discussion groups. Computer conferences are organized much like those where people meet face-to-face, except that the meeting rooms are inside each participant’s computer. Computer conferences transcend time zones, since participants review and comment on each others’ written postings as their time and interest allows. Everyone gets to read and think about questions or statements posed in a conference, and everyone has a co-equal opportunity to reply.

Computer networking is making classroom walls disappear. Real environmental problems are entering the classroom with immediacy via computer nets, and students are jointly seeking understanding and solutions with scientists, citizen activists, journalists, government officials and community leaders of all kinds. While access to computer networks is still remote for most people on the planet, it is becoming more and more available to the gatekeepers and opinion-leaders who help shape common understanding of the global situation. The increasing abundance of the multiple information sources available via computer networks, if viewed as a well-stocked marketplace, may also stimulate demand for more and better goods by the world’s information consumers.

Citizen participation in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), for example, has been ccoordinated via computer networks on seven continents, giving NGOs access to complete text of the preparatory committee documents, and providing public forums for news and issue discussion. This availability of information has a dramatic effect on how an event such as UNCED permeates the mass media everywhere.

Underlying the often chaotic view presented by the mass media, structures are developing to channel the new rivers of information to empower this and coming generations to deal with the issues it describes. A variety of efforts at computer networking for environmental education provide some great models. At the root, these efforts are all based on the same notion: that environmental problems must be viewed with a global perspective, but responded to by individuals acting locally, in their own communities or homes.

All of this new technology is not without cost, and the developed countries are clearly ahead in providing computer access for education. But even in the United States, where computer telecommunication is becoming commonplace, profit rather than educational reform is a dominant force in determining who gets access.

The harsh reality has motivated citizen computer networks to band together in the international Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to make computer network access broadly available. The APC hosts several promising educational efforts on its partner computer networks that now extend to more than 90 countries around the globe. These services may be tapped by anyone with a personal computer and modem, often via a local call, at costs roughly equivalent to a newspaper subscription or monthly telephone bill.

The education projects offered on the APC networks are examples of how low-budget computer communication can fit into community programs and classrooms.

Mathew Simond is a journalist and copywriter. He is also a webmaster of many websites including http://www.paralegal-degree.org and http://www.humanservicesdegree.net

He aims to provide healthy information and advice on academic degrees.

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I found it hard to find research that had been done on this topic because not only is the research on the effectiveness of computers in the classroom scarce but the research that is there is often done by software companies and therefore may be biased. (Emmans 2001). Even though there is no clear-cut answer to the question of a computer being a friend or foe in the classroom, having an unsolvable question of good or bad brings many issues to light.

For example, the fact that much of the software designed for children is appealing to them. If nothing else, it at least holds the children’s attention. Though this may seem like a positive characteristic, consider this, just because a television show holds your attention, does it necessarily educate you? The answer to this is simple, maybe some do, but certainly not all do, mostly they are just simply entertaining. This causes me to raise an eyebrow at some, not all, software. As a teacher, one must not use time-fillers, cause a child can watch television or play on a computer at home, but as a teacher, we must educate, and if there is no educational value in the software, what good is it for a teacher?

On the defense for teachers, another reason for computers being a shortcoming is that sometimes the software is not obvious that it is non-educational. This can be a common mistake of any educator, being fooled that a product could be educational when it is merely entertainment software dressed up in an educational costume aimed at these gullible teachers.

According to Cindy C. Emmans (2001), a professor of Educational Technology at Central Washington University, on software in the classroom…

“ Often feedback is the key to learning, and computers are appealing because this feedback can be immediate, which is of course a very effective learning tool. Unfortunately, this feedback is not often as effective as it might be, perhaps because it is not easy to return to the original question to try again, or the student must begin at the beginning to review the original content rather then backing up a step or two. In some cases, the feedback for the wrong answers is more appealing than that for the right answer, causing students to try and get the wrong answer simply for the entertainment value”.

Gerald W. Bracey sums it up adequately in a journal article called Principal by basically saying that the bells and whistles are all there, but the education is not, because it was not produced by someone who understands how children learn. (1996, p.6).

More arguments in the research area continued in September of 2000, the Alliance for Childhood published a statement against the use of computers in schools. More than 85 experts in various fields including psychiatry, education, and philosophy signed the statement in which calls for a suspension on the promoting introduction of computers into the nation’s elementary schools until there is a more careful assessment of their effect (Hafner, 2000). Another influence in opposition to computers in classrooms is that of Jane Healy, an educational psychologist and the author of “Failure to Connect,” a book criticizing educational applications of computers. Thomas Crampton interviewed Mrs. Healy and she declared that computers “can hurt children’s personal skills, work habits concentration, motivation, (and) the development of social skills” (IHT, October 2000, p. 19).

Another reason that computers in the classroom would prove to be a disadvantage is the availability of computers in the classroom to each individual student. It is rare to find a school that, in each classroom, has a computer supplied for each student. This then brings up the problem of scheduling and rotating the students to the computers available. (Tiene 2001) This begins a whole new ball game in which you are now consuming a lot of time in which could be used for more productive measures rather then scheduling computer time for each student. If this is the case, and only a specific amount of students can be on the computer at one time, then you are dividing your classroom, and not integrating it, as it should be. This causes many difficulties in teaching a whole group instruction, which leads to problems in skill development, since the attention of some students is lacking. (Tiene 2001).

On the Colorado state education web site (2003), I was able to find questions that were asked to teachers regarding computers in their classrooms. The teachers were asked, “What do you find unattractive about teaching in a computer based classroom?” The one teacher commented that, “ Students have a tendency to come in a print out their papers at the beginning of class instead of coming into class with a hard copy…” Another teacher said, “ Technological difficulty, your whole lesson could be shot for the day if the computer would go down”. When the teachers were asked about the difficulties they faced themselves and with the students due to computers in the classroom, they answered, “ It is hard to get the students attention when they are on the computers.” Another teacher commented, “ There are times that I send them to work and instead they are interacting with each other.” Another teacher stated her fear of the computer classroom by saying that, “ Students are at their own screens, they’re in their own little world, and they are not talking to their classmates, sometimes I think that they don’t even know half the names of all the people in their class.” (Barnes 2003)

I feel that these teachers comments are very important when looking at the issue of computers in the classrooms, because these are the people that actually interact with the children in the classroom, they are not just some random research study by a software company, these people are the real thing, and they see how computers are effecting their classrooms.

Another issue of computers in the classrooms regards the child’s health. If a child were to be functioning on a computer for a long interlude of time or with incorrect positioning they will inadvertently obstruct their own health, some problems caused from this include muscular-skeletal injuries and vision problems. (MacArthur & Shneiderman, 1986).

Another issue concerning computer use in classrooms is that a lot of teachers have not been trained to use a computer, and many do not know how. An enormous amount of time would have to be consumed for the teachers to learn both the hardware and the software of the computer. They also would need time to collaborate with other teachers. Time is something that many teachers spend planning lessons and the weekly events of their classroom. The other problem that was just mentioned was the training of the teachers. Some educators do not have local training options available to them. Some do not have the time or money to spend on it. Another issue is that even if a teacher does go through training, there are always unsuspected things that can go wrong with a computer. If a teacher were to base their whole lesson on a computer, and it were to crash, and the teacher just being minimally skilled in using computers, would not be able to fix the system so that they could continue their lesson. (Tiene 2001).Therefore an on-site technology expert would be needed on site at all times in case any of these incidences would happen, and quite frankly I do not think that there are too many school districts looking for another expense.

Another reason for computers being a disadvantage in the classroom is that if the computer is Internet accessible, if this is the case, then the children can be exposed to Internet content that is not appropriate for their age level. They can also be exposed to child predators, which is a huge concern in today’s world.

Though this may seem far-fetched it truly is not in an article published on the gurdian angel websitein 2000 states,
“The facts are plain. Children are being targeted, solicited, and made victims by pedophiles. What do the ratios or statistics matter? Isn’t even one too many? These predators range from the simple minded closet pedophile who has surfaced because they believe they are safely anonymous behind their account alias, to the highly organized and skilled child pornography rings that operate predominantly off of US soil, behind quick discard web sites, and anonymous re-mailers, pushing their hideous wares for big profits. Have you ever heard of a child being molested or kidnapped in your hometown? Don’t you teach your kids to watch for certain things and, not to talk to, or go anywhere with, strangers for just that reason? This is our point. Just as there are real world lessons that you teach your children, there is a necessity to teach them cyber-world lessons. “ (Hook, 2000).

To put this quite simply, are you sure that your child is being watched very closely when accessing the Internet at school? It sure would be hard for one teacher to keep a close eye on each individual student in the classroom when they are all accessing the Internet at the same time. Therefore are you, as a parent or a teacher, really quite sure that a computer is necessary to learn in school? I mean, didn’t you, the parent or teacher, learn in school without the computer? I agree that learning the latest technology is a necessity, but I do not agree with using computers for classes like mathematics or reading.

To sum it all up, Computers in the classroom lacks research of it being an advantage in the classroom. Computers in the classroom may not provide the students with the proper education that they need if the software being used is not adequate. Computers may not be, depending on the school, made available to each student. The attention of the students is harder to get when they are on the computer. An inexperienced teacher in the technology area may cause many problems in the classroom, and consume valuable time that could be used to educate. Most schools do not provide an on site technician in case a difficulty may arise. The children’s health may be affected by long-term use of the computers, and probably the most frightening one is that these children can be exposed to child predators and unfiltered inappropriate content through the web while they are in school and in their classrooms presumed to be receiving their education.

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Katie Criss is a graduate with a dual degree in Early Childhood Elementary Education, who enjoys writing and wants it to be seen! Also enjoys doing research and saving money!See this Authors Research by clicking ==>here

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