WebQuest on Thanksgiving

 

  Thanksgiving in the US

 

Your American pen pals will probably mention a very special holiday called Thanksgiving in their emails soon. Whenever they talk about it, it will seem as if Thanksgiving is even more important to them than Christmas. So don’t you want to learn more about that special day to understand why it is so important to your pen pals?

 

Task:

Your task for the next two lessons is to research Thanksgiving on the Internet. Find out about the history and tradition of Thanksgiving. Use the following questions as a guideline:

  

Questions

·         When is Thanksgiving Day?

·         What is its history?

·         Is it a religious holiday?

·         Do people exchange gifts?

·         What is the traditional food on Thanksgiving Day?

·         How do children call Thanksgiving?

·         How does Thanksgiving Day often look like in a normal family?

 

 Materials

Here are some useful links that will help you with your task.

 

Check out these pages that deal with Thanksgiving:

 http://usa.usembassy.de/holidays-thanksgiving.htm

http://www.usembassy.at/en/us/thanksgiving.htm

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761569242/Thanksgiving_Day.html

http://www.ego4u.de/de/read-on/countries/holidays/thanksgiving/history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_dinner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving

è When you are looking at one of those pages, click on the hyperlinks if you want to learn more about a specific aspect. You might discover more useful information.

 

Watch these two videos on Thanksgiving food and on Thanksgiving traditions:

 http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=sjzyhNWvYOM

http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=hXclMnPQ88o

è Do not worry if you cannot comprehend everything that is said. Just try to understand the most important aspects.

è You can watch the videos over and over again. If you want to rewind just a bit, click the timeline.

Look at the vocabulary list before you start your research. Most of the given words will occur in all of the sources. If you have other vocabulary questions, use the online dictionary www.leo.org or ask me.

 

 

Working Process

 

à You are working in groups of four. Two students will share one computer.

 à You have today’s two lessons to research the Internet. All the information you need can be found looking at the links that I gave you. Concentrate on these sources!

 à You may look for further sources by using google.com, but you do not have to do so. If you decide to use material from other pages, you need to indicate your sources. Note them at the end of your presentation. But be careful with additional sources: not every website provides reliable information. You need to double-check all the facts to make sure that they are correct. You can also always ask me and I help you to find out if the website is reliable J

 à You are welcome to split the questions among your group mates. Two students can deal with the first four questions, the other two students can work on the last questions. Solve that problem within your group!

 à Your homework for Wednesday is to finish your research and write down answers to the questions. If you divided up the questions, not every student needs to have an answer to each question.

Do not just copy the information you find but try to paraphrase it: say it in your own words.

 

 Presentation

 On Wednesday, the groups will meet again during our lesson and each member will present their results to his group mates. Then, each group will prepare a PowerPoint Presentation on the topic.

 àThe presentation only has to be 5-7 minutes but each participant of the group is supposed to participate in the oral presentation.

 à If you have problems using PowerPoint, you can look at this Tutorial: http://www.linguakonzept.de/Praxis/PowerPoint/PPErsteSchritte.pdf

 à Your homework is to finish the presentation and practice your little part of it for Friday.

 à In our two lessons on Friday, each group will give their presentation.

  

Presentation Feedback

 

Because you want to learn and improve for your next presentation, the class will provide you with a feedback.

After each presentation we will take two minutes to fill out a feedback sheet. I will collect these sheets and return them to the groups next week after adding my feedback as well.

Please be constructive when filling out the feedback sheets: give a fair and realistic feedback J

 

 

 

 

My dream project using the new media in school

My always longtime-favorite project including the new media is still any type of email project. After everything that I have learnt about the use of new media this semester, I am still very fond of the idea of communication with native speakers of the language students are studying. After all, I think that motivation is most important when acquiring a new language, and authentic communication has always been my goal in language learning. Thus, I am looking to include as much communication with native speakers as possible in my lessons. This, however, did not always prove as easy. Of course, student exchange programs are the best way to provide an authentic communication environment but we can’t have an exchange all year around so other possibilities to communicate with native speakers need to be found. We discussed live chats a lot in class and I am not entirely against trying a live chat in my lessons but we’ve also encountered a lot of possible problems and factors that cannot be influenced. This leaves me concentrating my enthusiasm on email communication. Asynchronous communications seems to be the best solution of all because you can put more time and thought into a text. Snail mail might have been a way to deal with this in the past, but now, it is definitely email contact.

It does not have to be a simple email pen pal ship that I am thinking of for a good project in school. I liked a lot of other possibilities that came up in class during the semester. For example, I really liked email discussion about certain topics to enhance vocabulary knowledge in a certain word field. I also liked the newsletter email project that I presented in my blog in the end of November.

 This might not be everybody’s dream project considering that we were supposed to think about something we would like to do if we had all kind of time and money, but I am not much of a dreamer: I like email projects, I will use email projects in real life, thus, this is my dream project J

 

I also have to admit though that I started to like WebQuests a lot. As I already started writing my Term Paper, however, I realize how much work they are if you try to find decent material and anticipate problems that might occur.

Still, once you have a good WebQuest, I think that students can learn a lot from it and have fun as well. I have to admit that it is even fun to prepare them if you have enough time. You can still find a lot of interesting facts about the topic you are preparing on the Internet. It’s fun watching videos on the topic, reading through different pages, following hyperlinks, finding new pictures and so on. If it’s already that much fun for me, it just has to be entertaining for my students! But as I said, you really need to take your time to prepare it or else it won’t be good. And it seems as if teachers usually don’t have a lot of extra time… Nevertheless, I found a lot of WebQuests online while researching the Internet for literature on WebQuests, so it might always be worth to check if a WebQuest for the topic you want to deal with does already exist. Especially for teaching English you will have a good chance to find something because you can use most of the WebQuests made by US teachers who started with the whole WebQuest idea a lot earlier than we did.

 

 

The Internet and the Language Classroom. A practical guide for teachers. By Gavin Dudeney

While researching literature for my term paper, I found a really awesome book that I want to tell you about. It’s called The Internet and the Language Classroom. A practical guide for teachers and is written by Gavin Dudeney (Second Edition, Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers).

 You have to imagine how psyched I am about this book if I write a comment on it… It’s really, really worth looking at.

But let me tell you why I like it so much: this book gives 55 examples for activities using the New Media. You can look them up by level or by theme and the topics are absolutely up to date and applicable to the curriculum. Some examples are “20^th century news”´, “The weather”, “Film reviews”, “The same language?” (which is a GREAT exercise about the differences between British and American English), but there are also fun topics like “Celebrity dinner party” or “It’s a mystery”. And the best thing about these exercises is that you don’t have to prepare them yourself! They mention an aim, a focus, the level, the time needed and give you the exact sites that you can use. I tried a couple of these links and they all worked.

This is a fantastic way to include New Media in you class without having huge amounts of preparations to do. Most of them, you can just include in one lesson, maybe as a “treat” for the students after an exam.

Honestly, finding this book changed my view on New Media in the classroom!

If I had only known about this book all semester…

Really, go look at it, it will save you a lot of time once you are teaching and looking for projects!

 

Field Trip to Landschulheim Steinmühle

Next Wednesday, we won’t be meeting in class but we’ll take a field trip to a local school (Landschulheim Steinmühle) to observe the practical use of New Media in a real life classroom situation.

There are two questions that are really intriguing to me and that I want to find an answer to during our field trip.

1.       How is the technical equipment financed at “Steinmühle”?

2.     Do the students themselves see an advantage in using New Media in class?

I am not sure if I’ll find an answer to the first question because I would have to be able to talk one-on-one with one of the students. However, they might not answer truthfully because for them I am “on the other side” – being a teacher soon But we’ll see and I’ll do my best!

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Hello there

Since this weeks technical lesson seems to be learning how to edit posts, I thought I start by uploading the picutres I took during our fieldtrip and write my real article later…

Enjoy the pictures!

 

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As you can see above, my questions for our fieldtrip concerned the financial aspects of new media in the schools and the student’s stance on this topic.

Both questions are easy to answer in this article. The first one is easy because we asked one of the teachers and got a straight answer to it: “Steinmühle” is a private school so most of the money comes from the “Schulverein” who is also the employer for all the teachers. This is a very special situation because we do not have a lot of private schools in Germany. Moreover, the school also receives funding from the state (thus our taxes are paying the equipment) and receives donations from local or big companies once in a while. That was pretty much the answer I expected.

As far as the second question is concerned, I did not find an answer because I did not get a chance to talk to students. I misunderstood the goal of the fieldtrip and thought we would go to observe the use of New Media in a classroom. In that case, my question would have made more sense since that would have given me the chance to ask the students when their teacher isn’t around.

 

Still, there is a lot to say about our fieldtrip that has nothing to do with the questions but that I would like to share with the readers of this blog.

 

I really liked that we went on a fieldtrip to “Steinmühle”. Especially in this course (New Media in Foreign Language education), it seems very important to see the theory acted out in reality, because a lot changed in the field of technology and New Media since our own school days. Hence, it was necessary for me to see that there is a beamer in nearly every classroom and that there is enough equipment to use the New Media with a whole class. The “Steinmühle” seemed to be very well equipped. Although they only have one computer room, the presence of laptop-terminals seems to enable teachers to use modern technology whenever they want to.

I also liked that “Applied Computer Science” is a mandatory subject in grades 6 and 7 and strongly recommended in most of the other grades. I was surprised but happy to hear that the students learn a safe handling of instant messengers, social networks and shopping on the Internet. That’s just great! Honestly, this is so much more important than knowing Java!

Moreover, I was very impressed with the LAZ (working room for teachers). That is why I uploaded the picture of the sign on its door . It is so important to give teachers a place to work in their free time and those little desks with computers are just a perfect environment to work! At my old school and at most of the schools I taught as a substitute teacher, there was only one room for the teachers and there weren’t even enough chairs for all of the teachers… You had no chance at all to get some work done. This is actually very sad because most teachers have free periods in between their lessons that they could use to correct papers or prepare their next lesson.

I also liked a lot that teachers seem to receive training on using the laptops – at least for the technical part. That is an important issue because I think that you cannot expect every teacher to know how to use modern technology. Especially older teacher, who did not grow up with computers, have to invest a lot of time in wrapping their mind around this new way of teaching without being paid for their work.

 

Nevertheless, there is also one negative point about this fieldtrip: I still don’t know what students really think about using the New Media!

I have to admit that I do not believe what the teachers answered about the fact that the students don’t abuse these lessons for checking emails. I have noticed that every teacher seems to be either oblivious to cheating going on around him, or is ignoring it on purpose. I interpret that as a healthy self-protection because you go crazy if you take every attempt of cheating for serious as a teacher, and I don’t exclude myself from this phenomenon. But still, students are smart! You can see in your teacher’s face if he is checking the supervising-the-classroom-computers-application or if he is working on something himself and wouldn’t notice if you peek into your email account really quickly… Maybe the whole point is, that it doesn’t really matter if students trick a little bit whenever they are in the computer room. But I start to get annoyed by everybody just claiming it’s not happening. I don’t believe it!!!

Anyways, this couldn’t take away from the good experience which our field trip to the “Steinmühle” was, and I am glad that I got to see a school where computers seemed to be well integrated in the curriculum. J

 

Facing reality…

Luckily, I am still very up to date on the use of computers in my old school because I spent 80 hours teaching at my old school in the “Unterrichtsgarantie Plus”-program this past summer. Thus, I got a chance to talk to teachers and students about the use of computers in class. At that point, I just came back from the US where I participated in a project that enabled me to teach in different middle and high schools in the area around my college. While visiting all these schools and interacting with the students, the use of computers and new media in class became very natural for me. In the US, every classroom has at least five computers and a lot of classrooms have a computer included in every desk. The students use the computer all the time and I used it too while teaching. Now, I came back to Germany and had to find out that nothing had changed since I left my school. My school has only one computer lab with 38 computers, a beamer, and a big screen. In addition to that there are six computers with internet available in the library but only for students from 9^th to 13^th grade. I have to say that I was really shocked about this situation. But it also turned out that nobody uses the computer lab anyways due to different reasons: teachers think it is booked all the times or they won’t get it two or three lessons in a row so there is no point in even starting a computer based topic. However, I also taught as a substitute teacher at two elementary schools this summer, and those elementary schools were much better equipped with technology. In both schools, two classes always shared a little media-room right next to their classroom with at least six computers. The computers were not used in class so much but the kids loved to play educational games (à edutainment!) on them during breaks or before class starts. That experience makes me believe that it might only be my old school that is so old fashioned with computers and media.

I have shown in class and in my blogs that I am not entirely enthusiastic about using new media in class but there are still projects that I really like and want to try with my own class one day. That would be difficult if I taught at a school with only one computer lab for 1400 students. :-/

In my opinion, computers need to be part of everyday school life, which means that they need to be available at every school. I don’t really have an idea who should pay for that but to equip schools with computers seems much more important to me than other things the state spends money on!

But since I don’t want to become political here, I want to talk about my own experience with computers and new media in school. Actually, I only had very few contact with computers in class. I cannot remember ever using the computer lab till 11^th or 12^th grade. In 12^th grade, we had a teaching sequence on Microsoft’s Excel in Math class. I remember it as being very problematic. We even had two teachers at that time because we had a teacher in training and her tutor. But everybody faced so many problems while trying to calculate using Excel, not even two teachers were enough to help us out and show us what we did wrong. I can recall that those lessons were fun but mainly because they didn’t affect the grade, their content wouldn’t be on the test, teachers were too busy to supervise us so we had a chance to check our Email and talk a lot. Still, thinking about it now, I am happy that the teachers showed us how to draw functions in excel because it brought math on a whole different level. It opened my eyes for why people would study math and that math helps to develop things. It was something I had never thought about, never seen and that impressed me on a very abstract level. Nevertheless, this being my only contact with computers in school shows that we didn’t use new media in class. I don’t know, maybe this has something to do with my resentment and distrust for a lot of projects we have seen this semester?! 

Email Newsletter Project

The teaching project that I found and really liked is called “Email Newsletter Project”. It was one of the first projects I found during my research and I liked it at once. I was looking to find an email pen pal project that I could present in my blog because this is pretty much the only project that has really convinced me so far. Not that I don’t like some others projects we have talked about in class or that I found on the internet, but I am very much into realistic chances to use the projects in everyday school life and most projects just couldn’t convince me of that. Anyways, I wanted to be open to other ideas and continued my research but over an hour later, I came back to the “Email Newsletter Project” because I still liked it most.

Hence, I want to share the project and my thoughts on it with you.

First of all, here is the link to the website: Email Newsletter Project. This project is not a one-to-one email pen-pal-ship that I expected to find. In a lot of ways, it is even better. The main idea is that about eight classes of the same age (in middle school) have an arrangement to prepare one newsletter a month for each other. The topic of the newsletter is always given in the beginning of the month and then the whole class works on it together. The topics are of course adjusted to the interests of the specific age group. That way, each class receives seven newsletters written by their peers at the end of the month.

 There are a lot of reasons why I like this project. First of all: it is simple! There aren’t a lot of technical difficulties to be expected. But still, it is not limited in its use of modern media, because it is explicitly said that the classes can always decide to make use of video conferences, pictures or audio devices in case everybody agrees on it. So the students learn about technology aspects of communication in class.

Moreover, as this is an American project, German classes that participate can use the editing of the newsletter to improve their written English skills and the newsletters  they receive to learn about cultural aspects, traditions etc. I think that it is most important that they just see that there are children their age at the other end of the world that have the same interests as they do and that they communicate by using the exciting foreign language they are leaning. That must be a huge motivation for the students.

Another big advantage that I see in this project is that it is designed for 5^th or 6^th graders. There aren’t a lot of projects that you can use with English learners of such a young age because their language skills aren’t good enough yet to communicate without problems. Since this newsletter is a class project, though, nobody is left behind. Even the weaker students can participate because the communication is supervised by a teacher.

A last advantage that I want to mention is, that the newsletters the class receives every month build a very good starting point for a classroom discussion and to get the students talking. The topics are topics that are apt for their age and because they wrote a newsletter about it too, they already put thought into it and thus everybody should have something to say. In addition to that, they learn about traditions first hand. That is also always a good starting point for a discussion.

To verify all this, here is a link to some sample newsletters.

The only problem or disadvantage that I see with this project is, that it might not work with older students who are much more eager to communicate one-to-one with a pen pal abroad because their language skills are already more developed. But this does not necessarily have to be taken into consideration when judging the project because there are enough projects for older students and it’s good to find one for younger students.

 Another aspect that I should mention is that this project is already from the year 2003, hence five years old. In modern media that seems to be a lifetime. But thinking about it, I would still use it today and although the use of email might not be a novelty to students anymore, at least their language skills and cultural knowledge benefit from it J

 On the homepage it says, that the project has been in use successfully for seven years with “terrific results”. I can see where these “terrific results” are coming from and I am glad that I found a project that could convince me!

 Let me know what you guys think about J

 

 

 

Turkey-Day :-)

                     Happy Thanksgiving to everybody

Comment on the virtual session “Internet Communication”

I have to say that I enjoyed this week’s virtual session much more than last week’s session on “Internet Research“.  I gained valuable insight into new aspects of virtual communication and learned specific vocabulary that I was lacking in order to talk about this topic. I especially liked the part on asynchronous and synchronous communication because I have thought about ways to include these tools in class before. In my opinion, asynchronous communication activities should be a solid part of the foreign language curriculum. Having a pen pal in the country where the language you are learning is spoken is helpful in so many ways. Not only does it improve one’s written language skills and conveys personal insight into another culture, but it also shows the students that learning a language has a specific goal: communication with a foreigner. I feel that in our school system, the subjects taught are often too far removed from the real world. Hence, using the foreign language to communicate with a native speaker of the target language works as a strong motor of motivation for the students. Of course, means of synchronous communication (live chats and so on) sound like a good idea as well; however, I doubt that they are as easily practicable as asynchronous communication. It seems much more difficult to find a class abroad that is meeting at the same time your class is meeting in order to get together in a virtual real time environment with them – especially with different time zones or technical difficulties like the unavailability of the computer lab at a certain time of the day.

I was also a little surprised that the virtual session mentioned the possibility to communicate with experts on certain topics again and again. I am not convinced that this is a realistic option in our schools. Seeing how difficult it is to contact or even meet your own professor at university, I think that experts are in general too busy to chat with students at school. But I would love to be convinced of the contrary [<-- smiley!]

On the other hand, I loved the idea of virtual office hours. That would be sooooo helpful! I spend so much time going to office hours including going to the right building, finding the room, waiting in line to be with the teacher for approximately 2 minutes to have them nod about my structure for a term paper. As you can tell by my tone, I am not a big fan of this! A virtual office hour, however, could be accessed from wherever you are and waiting time could be used reasonably by doing something else online. Aw, I have a dream of progress now!

But to come back from my dream of virtual office hours to this week’s virtual session, I want to finish by mentioning that this week I missed useful examples of the contents again. I read so much about MOO’s now and still do not really understand what they are. I always thought that the big advantage of the VCT and VCL was that they would give a link to examples of what they are about. But in last week’s and this week’s session I was missing these examples. In the end, I might have found examples in the Utilization part but as that one is still not working, I am not sure. I think that the VCT course will improve immensely whenever the Utilization part is working too. It is just lacking the practical side of what we are learning very much :-( [<-- emoticon]

 

 

What came to my mind while working through the virtual session “Internet Research”

Let’s enter the world of Internet Research…

 

 

 

I am doing research on the internet many times a day; but on a very basic level: I am looking up office hours, restaurants, train connections, movie times, phone numbers and so on. I realized, however, that I am hardly ever researching the internet for term papers or other university based projects. Stop, that is not true either. I do research the internet for presentations that I have to give at university, I am just not admitting it when professors ask. I know that this is bad but it is reality and the question should be: “what does this tell us about the acceptance of internet sources by professors?” There seems to be a certain generation of professors (and teachers in general) that regards information found on the internet as the end to academic work ethic. I understand how they came to this opinion since in the beginning of common internet use, some students abused the system by downloading whole essays, and plagiarism became a bigger issue than it was before. But times changed since then! I honestly never even thought about just downloading a term paper and trying to hand it in as my own. You can track sparknotes-summaries by typing in five coherent words of the summary in google. Five words out of a whole essay are enough to prove your plagiarism! Who has not figured that out yet and still tries to cheat that way might not belong at university in the first place!

Anyways, there is also very useful knowledge in academic sources on the internet and most students are not using them because they are afraid of even quoting that source in their bibliography.

Not all professors are like that though. I remember writing my first term paper ever for Mr. Handke and he required the use of at least one internet source. That seemed unnecessary to me at the time but now I understand that he does that to force his students to use the internet as an academic tool as well. That is actually great, and I do not know if anybody ever thanked him for that .

 Coming back to the virtual session, I can say that I was familiar with at least 90% of the contents presented. I did not know that I am using “and, or, not” in search queries because Mr. Boolean invented this system, but at least I use them frequently. Still, it is good to know the background on this in case I am presenting Internet Research in class some day (which I probably will because I think it is important and this virtual session will be a good starting point for planning the lesson J ). Same about how to quote internet sources and how to evaluate internet sources… It was not new to me but it is always good to freshen up one’s knowledge!

 I really liked that this virtual session did not denounce Wikis and especially Wikipedia as the born evil. Bringing up Wikipedia in class at University seems to be worse than talking on your cell phone while the teacher is speaking! I get it, Wikipedia is not a very reliable source but it is not as bad as professors think!!! It just depends on the purpose of its use. Of course, Wikipedia is not the place to find information for a term paper at, but you can still use it in order to prepare for class. If I had a course on Flannery O’Connor, I would not use Wikipedia when writing my term paper but I would use it find out before the class starts who that person is, when she lived, what she wrote. And believe it or not, Wikipedia is a great source for basic information like this. So, I was happy to read in this week’s session that Wikis are good to gather basic knowledge and to start research.

 To come to a conclusion about the virtual session “Internet Research”, I can say that I took some advantage from it by gaining background knowledge on certain things. It would have been even more fruitful if the Utilization part had worked; and I would have wished some examples for Meta Search Engines or Catalogues, though.

Still, I feel the urge to try a guided or half-guided Search in class with my students now. It is always great when something you learn at University inspires you for the real teacher life J  

 

A world without Steinbeck?!

Personal Response to Practical Task 6

Do we want to live in a world without East of Eden? Are we all perfect human beings that can have the arrogance to claim that we do not have to learn from errors in the past anymore? Can we live in the 21st century without teaching the next generation of scientists in biology and chemistry?

 

A 1996 poll of US teachers found that they ranked computer skills and media technology as more ‘essential’ than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemmingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare. (The Atlantic Monthly, July 1997.)

 

This week, I want to comment on the above quotation that was given as a discussion topic in last week’s ‘Practical’. In its one-sidedness, this quotation somehow reminds of Mr. Bauerlein, so I thought it would be interesting to discuss the statement in further detail.

 In the following, I will try to find an answer to the question whether computer skills and media technology are more important than knowledge that comes along with the traditional curriculum.

The students that worked on this task in class, created their poster around the first question that comes to one’s mind after having read the quotation: “What if computer skills and media technology were the most important things to learn in school?” This question is only the first step to discuss the problem, but it is an important step. So, what if??? How would class look like if computer skills were most important? Students would come to school in the morning and instead of Math, Hardware Analysis would be their first subject. Next period, instead of History, they would be learning about Software Application. In the end of the day, these students would have learned a lot about computers but now, they are supposed to apply it… just to what? What to use the software for if there are no other subjects that you can use your knowledge for in order to facilitate the learning processes? Okay, let’s see how the next day goes… On Tuesday, the students learn media technology and media competence. Very important of course to be able to process information found on the web! But wait, information about what? We need media competence to be able to extract useful information about a certain topic from the web. But what is this information about? Isn’t it usually about content dealt with in class? Don’t we use it most of the time to prepare presentations or papers for other subjects in school or at university? This looks like we are facing a ‘The-Hen-or-the-Egg?’-Problem here! It turns out that we would not need computer skills and media competence at all if it was not to apply it to the traditional curriculum.

So, for me the first answer is obvious: No, computer skills are not more important than the traditional curriculum.

Nevertheless, this was an easy one to answer. Much more important seems the question that follows if you do not see the quotation as drastic as it seems on the first glance: If computer skills and media technology cannot stand alone in the curriculum, how important are they after all? Are they maybe almost as important as the traditional subjects? Can we cut back on dealing with one or two authors, or a special phenomenon in biology in order to have more time to teach media competence?

I think we can. It can be seen as a privilege compared to other countries that German students have a very specific knowledge in a broad range of topics when they leave school with an ‘Abitur’. If you compare our ‘Abitur’ to foreign systems, students with an ‘Abitur’ are about on the same level with Juniors at an American College. This shows how much time is invested in the traditional curriculum in Germany. Of course, this is great, but it also says that we might be able to do alright with a little bit less background knowledge about everything. Hence, we could take that time and invest it into teaching computer classes and media use in school. And I am talking about installing these subjects as mandatory subjects for every student from 3^rd grade on.

Dealing with new media and computers becomes more and more important and I feel like today’s curriculums do not meet the need to teach them enough at all. But, of course, we as future teachers always have the chance to include them at least in our class as much as possible J