Education is a very important key to success in any time or era, and, due to the information age, has been made much easier than ever before. The introduction of technology has made learning much more convenient for teachers and pupils while also making it easier for teachers to teach and pupils to learn.
Many years ago pupils would arrive in school and be greeted by teachers ticking their name off on a register on many pieces of paper, most different lessons comes with a different teacher and the pupils would then have to register again for lessons to make sure they are in school, once again this would have been done on paper. In 1984 came the release of what would turn out to be something that would be used in over 21,000 schools across 150 local authorities in the United Kingdom, School Information Management System otherwise known as SIMS.
SIMS allows schools to manage every to do with the students profile whether it be the student’s personal details, timetable, behaviour record, attendance record, academic record, it also holds things such as medical records. Another feature of SIMS that makes it such a success across thousands of schools, leading to an 80% market share, is the SIMS Learning Gateway, this feature allows parents of students with a required login username and password to browse through there child’s data from home to make sure that the child is attending school and how they are getting on at school academically and behaviour wise.
Education over the last few years has come a long way due to new technology being introduced. One of the most used pieces of technology that have recently been introduced is the Interactive Whiteboard. An interactive whiteboard is a large interactive display board that allows users to interact with the computer. The computer is connected to a projector which, in turn, projects the image seen on the computer onto the board’s surface where users control the computer by using a pen/stylus or just simply their own finger. The idea that they are so popular in both primary and secondary schools was made fact when a survey taken by The Becta Harnessing Technology Schools in 2007 showed that 100% of primary schools had interactive whiteboards while secondary schools had a near perfect percentage of 98%.
The uses of interactive whiteboards include such things as running software that is loaded onto the computer such as the internet and things such as Microsoft Word etc. Another key use of the whiteboards is the fact that a teacher is able to save notes that have been written on the whiteboard maybe by students to the computer that is connected to the board. The interactive whiteboard has replaced traditional flipcharts and normal whiteboards, and, if you want to go back even further, blackboards. Another feature that is very clever but is also in the early stages of development is a piece of software that enables the notes that have been written on an interactive whiteboard to be converted into text in a word processing document.
In the last 10 years laptops have become a huge part of the technology industry and have been introduced to education in the same way the computers where. A laptop is seen as a portable computer as it processes in the same way a computer would and due to its simplicity of the laptop there have been many calls from schools across the United Kingdom and the United States of America to introduce a system into school where there is a laptop for every student to use on a day to day basis, at school or at home, to complete work and learn through the laptop itself. Many schools have introduced this system into their curriculum and have seen a great improvement in their student’s behaviour; their activity towards learning and the outcome has been seen to improve dramatically.
One of the biggest advantages to this system, in which every student and teacher have their own laptop, is the fact that students from an early age are able to develop skills that are going to be required of them in the future, it allows students and teachers to interact with each other like never before as they are able to virtually send work to each other over an email service. Another advantage would be that if a student or students are not able to get to school on a certain day or the school is closed then this, before introduction of laptops, would mean that no work would be able to be completed that day, but with the introduction of laptops for each student means that teachers are able send the work over an email server directly to the student who is at home.
Everything I have written about so a far in this blog post are advantages to technology being introduced to education but there are a few things that are disadvantages to this technology. One of the main disadvantages being that from an early age when at school, children may be taught only through means of a computer and may not learn how to analyses text books and actually physically write something down a piece of paper as it may all be done on the computer. With social networks becoming a huge importance in 12 - 18 year olds across the globe it just makes things worse as there is a so called ‘text chat’ where words are shortened and abbreviated to make typing quicker and easier, if children are using these types of words on the internet and computers they would start to use this language in everyday life which as a results could cause wrong impressions of people to be made.
To conclude, education has greatly benefited from the information age as things that were never available to be accomplished before are now able to be achieved through the art of technology, new systems have been created to benefit both students, in the sense it improves learning efficiency, and teachers, in the sense that life is made easier for them.
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