The level of computing in schools is low

This is what Education Minister Yuli Tamir said at an online conference for learning, held by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with Intel. According to her, this is even more noticeable due to the high level of computerization in parents' homes in Israel

From the left: CEO of Intel Israel Maxine Fassberg and manager of the Intel factory in Kiryat Gat Jenny Cohen-Derfler

The article is published in the upcoming issue of InformationWeek from the People and Computers group

"In Israel, the rate of computers in homes is very high, on the other hand, in schools - the level of computing is low, even below the average in the OECD, and even worse, a large part of the computers are unusable. This is what the Minister of Education, Prof. Yuli Tamir, accepted at the "Online Learning Conference" held by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with Intel Israel, in which hundreds of teachers and computer centers in schools from all over the country participated, which was held one day about a week ago at Bar Ilan University, organized by The People group.
According to Tamir, students come to school and find themselves bored due to the variety of stimuli they have at home. The Ministry of Education is looking for a way to bring about a change in mindset and teaching, and in its assessment, only introducing sophisticated learning tools without training the teachers is of limited significance. "This day touches on a place where the education system in Israel is debating how we as an education system remain relevant in a world where there is a tremendous variety of stimuli and learning possibilities and the school is left behind. Do the education systems understand what we can and should do in a world that is different from the world we grew up in as children, a world that has the possibility of allowing every child a tremendous variety of experiences that the school of a decade ago could not reach? Minister Tamir wonders. According to her, last year various sets of experiments were started under the leadership of Hana Wiernik, the purpose of which is to choose the best way to integrate the new options into the teaching system in the schools. There will probably be more than one answer. Everything gets old by the time we finish the experiment."
In addition to all these, the infrastructure of the system is very shaky. The colleges also need to teach the teachers to take advantage of computing, not to mention that the budget is not enough, so there is still no systemic change that must come."
She later referred to the ongoing teachers' strike: We are in a process designed to achieve reform. If I had a choice and had to decide where the first amount would go - I decided that it would go to teachers' salaries and not to ICT, the restoration of the physical infrastructure of the schools. It's a shame to me that even though we made a move that was not optimal, not perfect, but that would allow for a salary increase for teachers, we are at odds with the upper elementary teachers' organization and are unable to reach an understanding. It is important to understand that when the education system allocates NIS 5 billion to salaries, it does not allocate to other things. I hope that despite all the bumps and difficulties we will not be left with a system that has reached an agreement without including the upper elementary teachers as well and will give us the opportunity to make a real change in the education system. Many times we talk about a reform that eventually after negotiations turns into an experiment. In the currently proposed reform, there is no new essence. I hope we will return to the discussion table and implement a reform that is suitable for secondary education. "

Global Vice President and CEO of Intel Israel, Maxine Fassberg said in a conversation with The People that "Intel has been investing 30 years in education. We believe that the natural resource of the State of Israel is only the human resource and we are all obligated to invest in it, through this we will be able to bring the country to maintain the achievements on The innovation that characterizes us and also in the end to continue the development of the future audience of engineers, doctors and chemists and everything that the State of Israel knows how to produce to this day. I think that if there is something that is not the private domain of the government or the Ministry of Education, it is the subject of education, which must be the domain of the public. I would be happy if I could see more of the industrialists here. We have a significant part in promoting education in general and developing the abilities of teachers in particular."
As part of the Intel To The Future program, we trained 20 teachers who are known to use technology to teach their subject in the classroom, and then the Learning with Intel program that we taught 200 children was designed to bring the skills to every child. The partnership we have with the Ministry of Education and with other parties such as Topuf form the basis of what I believe - this is not the work of one party, we are working to create the partnerships and only with the help of a true partnership between the Ministry of Education, the parties in the industry and non-profits of all kinds will we be able to take action and have an impact. This is a national project.
On stage, Fassberg said: "We need a vision like countries like Japan and China have that look ahead 25-50 years and not what happens in the next election. A national plan is required that will be strong from a change of government and that will be able to take on clear challenges with the investment of resources from both the government and other parties that will be allocated to education. Changes in systems are not generated in one day."
"(Leshara Tamir) you met some of the children who represent the 200 children who went through the program studying with Intel, these children were reinforced that it is allowed to dream, it is allowed to experiment, to dream of big things. There was a boy who wanted to show you how to make energy with the shoe. We are looking at the next generation of scientists and if it is not right, it will not succeed. If you want to take the load off teachers, we will find a way to computerize all matriculation exams."

The third speaker at the conference was the Director of the Administration for Science and Technology at the Ministry of Education, Dr. Hanna Vinik: "I asked myself how many of us hear sayings - we go to school to learn, to the university to acquire an education. A perception is created that in order to study we need to go somewhere. The perception distorts the internalization that we learn anywhere, at any age, at any time. The introduction of technology allows us to apply the desire to learn. Computing helps thinking, information processing, outputs that we didn't have before. A school is not the book's home. This e-book is everywhere and we face new challenges of equal exposure to technologies. Exposure to their abilities to activate cognition. We have a long way to go to outline the right way to use a computer, as well as maintain ethics and values. The industry today is rich in knowledge and experience and we have a lot to learn. I thank the community relations at Intel - beyond the material contribution, you are also pleasant people."

Will the traditional structure of the classroom survive?

Then there was a panel that dealt with the question of why go online - how the Internet revolution affected and will affect learning in schools. The moderator of the panel, Prof. Shizaf Refali, says that the basic, almost classical, traditional situation of teaching is also the situation that is reproduced at the conference - one speaker many hear, a flow of information coming from an authority to an audience of listeners, even on the computerized topic, which should be saturated with talking innovations and are often taught using technology of the previous generation. Is this the future of the education system? Will we be left talking about the future using the technology of the past? We are starting to see new technologies, but they still lean from the singular to the plural, from the active to the passive.
To what extent will we progress beyond this model, to what extent will we be able to harness the technologies from the teacher to the teacher and between the students themselves. The new technology brings globalization, poses new questions of ethics, technology attracts privatization, poses new and intense questions of both centralization and ownership, a great challenge to hierarchy, affects lifestyles, they have a message about demographics, we are an aging global community, if there are digital gaps, Only some people will benefit from them, there is potential for change and we see it for example in Wikipedia, online communities, YouTube and more.
Dr. Alon Hesgal from Bar Ilan University spoke about social networks and teaching: "500 Israelis enter Facebook every day. A student decided that he would make a Facebook page for lecturers and the next step was that next to each lecturer he uploaded lesson summaries, some of his classmates started correcting lesson summaries, the lecturers saw and turned the site into a mechanism for communicating with the students. The ability of Facebook is that anyone can interface applications to it and the most important application is the whiteboard, the ability to work together on the same problem. Each of the participants - teachers and students see what the others are doing and can even intervene. In the USA, every student receives a ring - to network - that is, a list of contacts that includes his classmates and teachers. The network continues even after graduation, and the teachers become gurus. Google people claimed that for the first time students at home have higher technology than in organizations, but I'm sorry to say that the education system has never had a technological advantage."

Dr. David Pasig, also from Bar Ilan University, spoke about the enormous rate of change that the information age brings with it: "We are moving towards an unusual point in the evolution of the human race where everything we know is being turned upside down. In 1993, the mathematician Stephen Vingee stated that the rate of technological and social changes entered an exponential curve. Any technology that will emerge in the next few years will take much less than seven years for a quarter of the population to use it. According to the rate of development of computers in the 2040s, they thought that in 2020 we would have a computer that would cost a thousand dollars and their computing power would be like the mind of one person. The pace is increasing and today it is estimated that this will happen in 2060. The supercomputers at that time will already be able to do a complete simulation of a person's brain processing (for comparison, about a year ago, scientists were able to imitate the brain activities of a mouse for one second, on a supercomputer) if we already have such systems in our hands Think about how we will have to teach the next generation? If we project the pace of changes into the more distant future, then in XNUMX we will have a computer that costs a thousand dollars and its calculation power - as that of all the minds of the human race. Something unusual is going to happen - this process is called an information singularity. We will develop devices that are able to imitate a person's thought - identify patterns and add information to these patterns. The question arises, what is taught in such a world."

Prof. Yoram Eshat, head of the information technology program at the Open University, disagrees: "Despite the exponential development, our cognition has not changed. Technologies allow us many options. However, Eshat admitted that "these tools that look like toys have quite a bit of educational potential."
Why don't girls go to study technology?
A second panel that dealt with women leading technology led by the chairman of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women, MK Gideon Sa'ar. At the beginning of the panel, Dr. Ronit Ashkenazi from the Ministry of Education presented the results of a survey that showed that girls choose less technological professions, but those who choose - persevere and succeed. Ella Matlon, CEO of the MIT Forum for Entrepreneurship says that: "The State of Israel is small and we must reach our potential, and that if we want to allow everyone to realize her potential and if someone has the potential to become a mechanical engineer or a nuclear scientist, it is right that she should do it and not go be Clerk or psychologist, she'd better go where her talents can take her. On the personal level - the professions that are considered masculine are the ones that provide self-fulfillment, allow for promotion and development, and also make it possible to bring home a very nice salary, on the other hand, the professions that are considered feminine yield a lower salary. We have so few resources, the Jewish mind is divided equally between men and women, we hardly see women in science and technology and if we do see them we will make better use of a national resource."
Jenny Cohen-Derfler, CEO of the Intel factory in Kiryat Gat: "The added value of women is in the need in the country for these professions. We have now established another factory and we had to recruit almost 2000 people in a very short period, and we are in a period when the high-tech sector is booming, and what the universities provide is not enough for what we need. Only between 20 and 25 percent of women complete degrees in engineering and technical professions. We need more workers in the technical fields. There is a resource that we are losing and we need it. Those that arrive, sometimes do not survive after birth. The women also bring a different way of thinking, which is important in product development."
Mia Halevi, director of the Science Museum in Jerusalem, says that diversity is essential for success in high-tech, "In Jerusalem this is mainly evident in the integration of ultra-Orthodox - especially women in software and other high-tech professions. "In a study conducted in the USA, we examined how much time parents spend visiting science museums to explain to boys and girls, and it turns out that they spend more time explaining the processes and exhibits to boys than to girls, and this is also one of the things that causes a gap in the desire of girls to learn technological subjects."
Miriam Schechter, who is in charge of gender equality in the Ministry of Education, in the last five years the Ministry of Education has emphasized gender equality, the issue has received resources, a standard and everything that entails. "A returnee came out of the school and activities began. What I see as important is the partnership with other parties in the Ministry of Education, such as the Science and Technology Administration. At the same time, things are based on policy, changing teaching skills - girls like to study in groups, so we are introducing a module on the importance of studying in a group. Also the study content on science and technology - when girls receive content that is considered boys' content, such as two blessings filled in two pipes or a train from Haifa to Tel Aviv, etc., a screen immediately comes down and they don't hear anything beyond that, on the other hand, boys don't care about the content of the question, they know or they don't , girls are very important - if it's boys' content the screen immediately goes down, if it's neutral content or girls' content they cope much better. It is important for us to know that if there is the awareness, the change in our consciousness regarding boys and girls in the subjects of study, therefore it is important for us to raise girls and boys with the knowledge that it is permissible to dream about anything and it is important that they dream and dream as far as possible and we as a system do this to allow each and every student to fulfill their ambitions and when the individual Provided, society is provided, the economy is provided, science is provided, everyone is provided."