cageymaru
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2003
- Messages
- 22,060
Students at Brooklyn's Secondary School for Journalism staged a walkout in protest of the adoption of Facebook sponsored educational tools. Summit Learning is a web-based curriculum designed by Facebook engineers and is financially backed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Students complained that they felt as if they were learning on their own as the teachers assigned to the program didn't know the answers to their questions.
Students only have access to their teachers during weekly 10 to 15 minute, one-on-one mentoring sessions and spend most of their day studying on laptops. Ninth and tenth grade teachers are being trained using Summit Learning and it has been adopted by other schools in the state. Parents have concerns about data privacy after the recent Facebook data breaches.
But senior Kelly Hernandez, 17, who organized the walkout, said her Environmental Science teacher wasn't trained, leaving kids adrift. "It was bad enough that we were lost, the teachers were lost," Kelly said. "We have done absolutely nothing in that class." David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, said the online system "fits the Facebook business model," but came into city schools with little input or review. "It's educational experimentation on our kids," he said.
Students only have access to their teachers during weekly 10 to 15 minute, one-on-one mentoring sessions and spend most of their day studying on laptops. Ninth and tenth grade teachers are being trained using Summit Learning and it has been adopted by other schools in the state. Parents have concerns about data privacy after the recent Facebook data breaches.
But senior Kelly Hernandez, 17, who organized the walkout, said her Environmental Science teacher wasn't trained, leaving kids adrift. "It was bad enough that we were lost, the teachers were lost," Kelly said. "We have done absolutely nothing in that class." David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center education professor, said the online system "fits the Facebook business model," but came into city schools with little input or review. "It's educational experimentation on our kids," he said.