Tuesday, May 31, 2011

ICT in schools [Part 2] aka. why I hate my school

Just spent another 20 minutes learning about how my school wants me to learn. So I was sitting there putting my time to an actual practical use, instead of sitting and filling in a paper timetable that I would most likely never look at again. I decided to organise my timetable that is on my HTC android, the teacher walked past and saw me twiddling on my phone. To which he commented and I quote "organising your time is more important than texting" as he indicated at the timetable in front of me. To which I replied that I was not texting and in fact I was reorganizing the calendar on my smartphone... he let me do my thing. But I must comment that for a school that prides itself on using and teaching technology it seems to do very little of either.
This is most defiantly not the first time that a teacher has told me off for using productive and helpful technology in class. Another example is in my English class we were told to get out our planners, so hence I pulled out my old phone, a blackberry. And started typing in her instruction, my English teacher harshly told me off. I explained that this was my PDA and I was doing what she asked, she exclaimed that I could have asked/told her that I used a PDA over a planner. I had done that with all of my teachers, including her at the start of the year. What I failed to mention to all of them was how much of a fool I felt as I did so, its hard doing something different than everyone else at my school, especially in regards to technology. There is only one teacher who is qualified in I.T. and there are few who even understand the basic "have you tried turning it on and off again" and the "is it plugged in" rules. The teacher who was/is the I.T. manager of the school (according to a reliable source) actually caused the school server crash (not intranet or internet) and it took the I.T. dept. A week to fix whatever they did.
Maybe the school should focus on keeping their teachers upto date with technology before they start making exaggerated claims about their "wonderful techsavvey" school.

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