They'd probably have picked up the cutting-edge laptops, keychain storage chips and multimedia editing programs in middle school.
“Fourth or fifth grade is when they're starting to use library databases,” Phillips said of children's technological savvy. “As an English teacher, I'm certainly going to be expecting typed work from my ninth-graders.”
Because if the kids don't know how to run the gear, the teachers better. Adobe software representative Jaimi Groothuis' laptop was displaying a portfolio of images and historical research on Ben Franklin produced by a class of second-graders - complete with their own voiceover commentaries. The teacher had fed the crayon pictures into a scanner, recorded the children's comments and spliced the whole thing together with a presentation program.
And for those who learn the technology all too well, there were the offerings of Marc Goldberg of Turnitin, a database company that checks for plagiarism in student papers. Between the gathering of huge reference sources on the Internet and the growing industry of homework-writers-for-hire, he said business couldn't be better.
“We're seeing places in India where they're just cutting and pasting essays from the Internet,” Goldberg said. “These people don't even know English very well and they just don't translate. It's sad, but it's funny, too.”
Goldberg's firm has a database of about 17 million student papers. It receives about 50,000 new submissions a day, he said. All are run through the firm's algorithm and compared to related topics for similarities. Each paper gets a report showing the percentage of suspected similarities and the source material where they may have come from. It can be set to ignore items in quotes, on the assumption that those are properly cited.
“About one-quarter to one-third of the plagiarism we see is students swapping papers,” Goldberg said. “The system shows students where proper citation is needed. It's up to the instructor to decide if it's plagiarized.”
About 60 percent of Turnitin's business comes from higher education, and 40 percent comes from secondary ed. Goldberg said Whitefish's school system is using the service, which costs an institution about $1,000 a year.
Apple Computers has already established a beachhead at UM's School of Law with an iPod lecture recording system. Recent innovations are making that even easier to use, Apple rep Josh Thompson said, by putting the list of recorded classes in an iTunes-style online library. Thompson said already, about five law school lectures a day are getting recorded and stored there.
“It's for students who are trying to keep up with the notes,” Thompson said. “They can sit on a treadmill and listen to the classes instead of just music.”
On the local side, College of Arts and Sciences information technology director Mike Miller said this year Vann's Appliances, Blackfoot Communications and Best Buy all sent store representatives to the convention. They set up alongside major industry players like Toshiba, Emery, Brother and Verizon.
Miller also expected visits from educators from around the western part of the state to check out how they might spend their technology budgets.
“This is our second year having a local convention,” Miller said. “Last year, we just sent notices to the surrounding counties, and we had people coming in from Great Falls. So this time, we reached out for a 200-mile radius.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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