Education and the information age

Information has changed the way that we get educated from being registered in school to actually learning.  I will talk about how the information age has changed the way that we get educated from the start of the school day to the end of the school day.

First of all start of the school day, you usually get registered at the4 start of the day. A couple of years ago you used to have a paper register that had to be ran up the school office after every class,  nowadays you can get programs that electronically register children programs such as SIMS do this with lots of other features.

SIMS – School information management system

SIMS is the leading school and local authority administration software which is used 21000 schools and over 150 local authorities across the United Kingdom and boasts an amazing 80% of the market share of administration software within schools and local authorities. SIMS is built on the Microsoft SQL Server which stores and receives information which is requested by other applications such as SIMS.

SIMS manages to store so much information on any individual pupil; it stores information such as; Personal details e.g. address and emergency contact details, the pupil’s attendance to their lessons and coming into school, the pupils behaviour e.g. if they have any behaviour issues that need to be warned to a teacher in case anything kicks up not only does it do it for behaviour it also does it for pupil’s achievements that they get throughout the school term which can be tracked by any teacher, it also includes the pupils full timetable so that they can be traced from anywhere in the school if an emergency happens and they can be alerted easily and last but not least a school photo so they teachers and other members of staff can identify the pupil if they don’t know what they look like.

In my opinion it is a great bit of software that teachers can use because its all in one place and it very convenient for them to use, not only is it much easier for them to use it also saves the schools resources that would be used on paper registers so it is also good for the environment at the same time.

Smart Boards

Smart boards are created by Smart Technologies; they were originally released in 1991 and have developed a lot since then. Smart boards are a great bit of kit that is used in basically every single classroom in my school, they are basically an electronic version of a blackboard, but allow interactivity with the kids. The developers have also managed to create software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux which is great, because in my school at the art rooms we have iMacs and it means that the smart boards can be hooked up to those and you don’t even need a windows pc in sight! The interactivity of the smart boards provides so many convenient uses for the classroom, for example with the software that you are provided with when you purchase one it contains lots of cool and interesting features that can be used to benefit children within the classroom. The software contains a great but simple feature called smart notebook, which allows teachers to record each step of the lesson on the program, and then if a student gets stuck they can review the notebook at a later time. Having an electronic version of a notebook is a great feature because, it can’t be lost, no one can steal it, and you can provide your notes to your friends without any hassle.

In my personal experience smart boards have been great to use within the school because when I was doing GCSE maths, the teacher used to have interactive games that she would put p on the board and pupils would come up to the front and actually use the smart board to answer questions. As you can see from the picture below, it is a classic example of the use of interactivity that it provides to a classroom.

Information can be transferred over anything, although the most popular one is probably Computers, at my school we have at least 1 computer in every single room, and at an approximation we have at least 600 computers in my school. This is great! A few years ago you used to only get 4 or 5 computers in each room, nowadays you have a room, which is full of about 35 computers! Our life really is evolving around technology, and the way technology is developing we will have to be educated a lot more.

Recently in the news, a school located in Colchester actually gave 1200 pupils and iPad 2 each to use for their school study’s etc. It is reported that Honywood Community Science School in Colchester actually spent over £500,000 on iPad 2’s but only asked the parents to pay £50 for insurance for the device itself.  This in its self is a clear sign how modern technologies are a great asset to help children in the twenty first century learn.

Saying all of this I wonder, are we going to loose that skill of writing in the future. With all this new technology developing and being introduced into children’s life at such a young age, will they stop learning on how to actually write? Some people prefer to write down notes with a pen and note pad, the majority would prefer to use a electric device of some sort, although there are pros and cons against this. The biggest con I think is that if you write using an electrical device you might not actually get it in your head, because people can touch type so quickly now that they don’t even have to think about what they are actually writing. On the other hand it is so much quicker and easier to take notes with a computer, but they just might not get into your brain.

In my opinion we are slowly loosing touch with the paper and pen side of things, because at my school we have eBooks. This means that instead of text books that we are given, all the books are hosted on our schools server, doing this they automatically assume that we have access to a computer at home, and to be quite honest the majority of UK home have at least 1 computer in the household.

The main thing that really helps in schools and technology is that when you tend to use technology for work you can usually get instant feedback which is great compared to handing work in and waiting a while to receive it back. This is a great advantage of information age in education because the pupil receives interactive and instant feedback.

Overall I think that the information age is great when we use it in our education system, although I still think that something’s still need to be hand written otherwise we will loose touch with writing things, and although there are computers that can do the majority of things they cant do exactly everything for us in this day and age.