Playing catch-up with digital realities

Students were told again and again that information on the Internet was unreliable; that you couldn’t trust the entries in Wikipedia, and that it was cheating to download information from webpages when writing essays. But the warnings fell on deaf ears, and the students persisted with their preference for their online and ever-changing digital knowledge base.

Most net savvy kids grew increasingly frustrated with the old practices of the school. A computer might be placed in a classroom only to be treated with suspicion by the teacher - who understandably, didn’t know what to do with it. Often it was kept locked away so it wouldn’t be broken - or stolen. And if and when it did see the light of day, it was generally regarded as some form of typewriter; the students who had already acquired a sophisticated online life were then subjected to lessons on naming the various parts of the machine, and how to open a file.

“You have to power down when you go to school”, the students declared as they also came up with a new definition of homework: “I can hardly wait till I get home so I can do on my computer all the things they won’t let you do at school.”

Some schools got the message and made the big shift to cater for the needs of their students - to rethink teaching and learning in relation to the impact of computers. But they haven’t always enjoyed much support.

Parents who had been worried that they didn’t know what their kids were doing all day on their computers at home - soon started to worry about what they were doing all day on their computers at school. What about handwriting? Mental arithmetic? And weren’t calculators and spell check a form of cheating? Shouldn’t they be banned in the classroom?

Didn’t students have to know their work? It wasn’t good enough just to be able to find it when they wanted to do something!

Politicians got in on the act when they were confronted with classrooms where the kids were “wired” - where they worked in groups, wandered round, and made a lot of noise in the process. Even Prime Minsters were out of their depth when they realised that students were presenting their work not as essays - but as webpages, graphics packs, podcasts - or videos.

What about the old standards? What about the old subjects and the old familiar textbooks? Where history was history, geography was geography, where the answers were right or wrong, and everyone knew where they stood?

What about learning? It was accepted that there was a point in sending kids off to learn a chapter from their textbook, but how could they learn a webpage, or an animation? This wasn’t learning - it was playing!

Administrators and assessors faced unmanageable problems as they tried to stick to the old system. When a group of students made a movie, how could they be marked as individuals? Was the job of scriptwriter worth more marks than that of the actor or the director?

This evidence of the education revolution is to be seen everywhere. It has created havoc in every institution and disrupted every aspect of learning and teaching. The system is reeling under all the pressures. Amid all this chaos are the teachers whose training has not even begun to prepare them for the classrooms they now find themselves in. And there are precious few teacher-educators who know how to teach teachers to teach in the age of the Internet.

No one has been here before. There are no tried and true models that teachers can follow to deliver an appropriate education to today’s students. The best of our teachers are being driven to distraction as they continue to be judged by the old standards, (literacy tests and a quiet classroom) while they desperately try to survive in the cut-and-paste context of the new.