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?! 

~ by inesrosenbaum on December 4, 2008.