Classroom technology – one giant leap for child-kind
For many adults today, their experiences of using computers in the classroom in their school days would have been severely limited. As recently as the 1990s, it was usual for a school to have a very limited number of computers available for their pupils’ use, and if they were lucky, they would have had the chance to learn some basic programming.
Only now does it seem that all this is changing, and the main driver for this is the new generation of tablet or slate PCs. When a teacher wants to stand in front of a class and show everyone particular material which is integral to their particular lesson, it used to be the case that slides would be produced, which would then be shown to the class, and then, most likely, printed out for the pupils to take away and study.
For a class of 25, and perhaps even 30 or more pupils, giving each one a laptop computer would require more room than is typically available in an average teaching space. For this reason, until recently, it has just not been possible for every pupil to be linked up to their own computer during a lesson.
Recent generations will remember too that their main experience of being shown something on a computer screen meant queuing for long periods while groups of four or five of them were allowed to take a look at whatever it was the teacher was trying to show them. That, of course, meant that lessons were far less productive than they could have been, and pupils perhaps switched off while they were being forced to wait around.
Smaller tablet PCs, with high-contrast screens which render their content easily readable in all light conditions, are therefore being widely touted as the next big breakthrough for classroom technology. They even bring the possibility of books being made fully interactive, and allow publishers to update their content as required, via the internet – thus saving them the massive expense of a complete reprint of an updated version of a textbook.
We’ve all become used to getting our news through sources which are constantly updated. With the possibility that every school pupil could soon be carrying around their own mini-computer, and taking their lessons sat in front of one, educational syllabuses will be able to be regularly updated, so that they better reflect the pace of technology and innovation in the real world. And when it comes to preparing children for their adult lives, that has to be a major benefit.
Wider use of technology in the classroom is inevitable, and the use of items such as interactive whiteboards will ensure that places of study become far more like typical a typical workplace.
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