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TECHNOLOGY ON THE MOVE

Technology is moving forward at an ever-increasing rate leaving many users at a loss as to how to cope with our push-button world. The education sector in particular has recently been bombarded by ‘new gadgets’ to make teachers and AV staff life easier.

Do these gadgets really make life easier for the teacher? Do they really make life easier for the AV support staff?

It appears many retailers are only interested in dollar signs and not the users requirements. Sales people work on budgets. If they don’t meet quotas they no longer have a job. So who can blame the salesman for selling you equipment worth thousands of dollars only to find you use it 50 percent of the time or provide 20 percent of your real requirements?

Teachers are paid to teach not grapple with the ins and outs of an ever-advancing technology. The use of technology in the classroom has provided teachers with an enormous leap forward in useful resources. The Internet in particular, provides such amazing resources we could only dream of a decade ago. The down side to this technology is that not much of it is seamless and coordinated.

Classrooms still do not have the necessary integration of equipment and services. Teachers and students should be able to enter a classroom with the knowledge that equipment in the classroom will function 100 percent. In the real world, technology does not behave, as we would like it to behave and equipment does malfunction.

Simply installing an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom does not make it ‘smart”; nor does it make it an effective and efficient one. A ‘smart’ classroom is an integrated fully interactive system that allows the user to seamlessly access media from a central point with ease. Users must have access to the range of media that is vital to providing students with the best possible education.

Support staff should have the qualifications and the ability to quickly deduce a fault and get the equipment working in a minimum of time. Unfortunately, changes in technology are taking place so fast that even the support staff finds it difficult keeping up with the changes. Just think of all the technological changes we have had to cope with in our daily lives in the past decade; IPods, mobile phones, web cams, digital cameras,PDAs – you name it and we have it.

So how do we cope with this new technology in the classroom? For obvious reasons we cannot go back to the old days of books and rote learning while the rest of the world is moving forward. So what do we do?
The obvious solution is to install a system in the classroom that functions seamlessly and adopts the ‘KISS’ system. Rather than training teachers to be technological wizards it is much easier to install a system that provides access to all the resources by pressing a single button. A simple ‘ON’ button opens the gateway to all resources. A dream?

Integrated technology is not a dream. We have the ability to bring together, in a seamless way, all the resources that is available to us to move this country forward and compete with other technologically advancing countries. Interactive technology is not a dream; it’s a matter of making technlogy work seamlessly.

Imagine a student has to do an assignment on architecture and present it in class to his fellow peers. How would he do it? In days gone by, he would get hold of a large sheet of cardboard and draw pretty pictures with a whole lot of meaningless words and learn very little.

Today students have access to a range of digital media. They have digital cameras to record live events and actual locations, the Internet to research information from around the world and computer software that easily brings these media into a compact, intelligent presentation.

Students have the ability to easily understand and use the vast array of media technologies. Unfortunately, a large proportion of our schools do not have the proper resources to fully utilize these technologies. In order for our next generation to compete on the world stage we need to encourage them to adopt these new technologies so they can use them when they leave school and become part of the working society. To discourage their enthusiasm is to rob our country of our most precious resource.

Send your comments to dodwell@timenet.com.au