Drilling down on Key Connotative Words and Phrases exercise: Year 12

VCAA 2013 English Examination Report

http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/exams/english/2013/English_examrep13.pdf

Issue: Laptops in classrooms

FOR AND AGAINST

21^st Century learning doesn’t compute!

As a respected educational practitioner with over twenty years of teaching experience, it has come to my attention that students are increasingly hiding behind the luminous seductive glare of their Mac screens instead of engaging in essential classroom coursework.  Students these days are typing a few lazy sentences ‘here and there’ whilst multi-tasking with sport updates, instagram feeds and checking superfluous emails. The students are continuously cuddled and tempted by their online cyber world instead of participating in the real world. Quite bluntly, they are playing ‘Flappy Shappelle’ instead of learning to spell.

As a leading teacher and former Prinicpal, it has become increasingly difficult to effectively teach crucial information to tweens twiddling on their distracting devices. I know I didn’t go to a prestigious university for 5 years, receive my degrees only to have students flagrantly ignore my careful imparting of information. The potentially life changing end of year examination entails them to sit them for three hours and write three comprehensive and insightful essays, not for them to be hash tagging and playing mind-numbing Candy Crush. It’s time that students closed their computer lids and opened their minds.

An Apple for the Teacher….too

Computers are a vital and instrumental way of how learning occurs in the 21^st century. As a Year 12 student in 2014, having a device allows education into avenues that were never possible before. Information is accessible at one click, and communication and enhancement of topics are accelerated due to new multi-facetted programs and apps being created EVERY day. I’m sick of these non-progressive, dare I say, Neanderthal attitudes of teachers who just won’t, pardon the pun, get with the program. If they invested into an invaluable Mac computer and utilised it appropriately, wouldn’t we be all winning?

These technophobes and control freaks have to realise that it’s not just about them anymore, it’s about what’s online and what can really help us. I’m pretty sure I’m not coming to school in a horse and cart so we can’t teachers log on to what’s really educationally beneficial? The classroom no longer has 4 walls, it is a global community and it’s about time these stick-in-the-mud teachers stopped living in their parochial surrounds and uploaded themselves into the 21^st century. That would really make all of us students truly filled with app-iness.