Education

Education

Within the information age education has blossomed to be one of the many fast and ever growing topics. As you can see the vast technology leaps of main frame computers to wireless laptops alone to help in an everyday average school. In today’s lessons some of us may find instead of using a traditional book, we will be given a hyperlink instead which would lead to an ‘e-book’ to learn yesterday’s lesson of by heart…

But with all this technology growing rapidly in our information age, we are slowly cutting out our normal things to do like note taking and communicational skills towards others. I will be talking about how education is used within the classroom and at home.

Books taken from Google Images

E-Book

An E-Book, otherwise known as an electronic book is basically an online book. Viewed as a webpage, enabling the decoder to flick too and thro from various pages. They can hold all the information that a book would hold and also you have the benefit of crisp/clear pictures within an e – book allowing you to zoom in/out on anything, you wouldn’t be able to do this with a book now would you?

Amazon Kindle 

E – Books first started out in the early 1990s. E – Book readers became apparent, as for today’s most famous electronic reader would be Amazons ‘Kindle’. These Kindles have done amazing with many households owning one. Now in the educational world an E-Book would be perfect for a student/pupil… The user would be able to download certain types of text and books to help them learn/revise. Here are some advantages/disadvantages for an E-Book:

Advantages:

• You can take an E-Book home
• Cuts costs of paper
• They are fairly reliable
• Could save teachers some time
• It’s a new fun way to learn
• Everyone would be in the same position/vote

Disadvantages:

• Battery life can run out when needed (whereas a paper - based system this would be eliminated)
• Very expensive (school would have to pay a lot to ensure that every student had one)
• E-Book formats are not really that contemporary (meaning upgrades would be regular, this could be seen as time wasting)
• What would happen if stolen (not likely for someone to want to still an exercise book)
• They would have to be protected from things that would damage it e.g. water, hot surfaces, snow etc…)

In my own experience, I have actually never lost one of my school revision/exercise books, and although the information may be on a book it isn’t to hard to correct mistakes, whereas if a mistake was made on an E-Book the whole class could be held back a lesson to actually fix the problem, although this may be a rarity it is still in the equation to happen…

Although I am used to paper based systems I would be happy to transfer to an E-Book to learn as its fun exciting and it’s a lot harder to lose. Some students would find it a lot more beneficial towards them and their learning. I would personally back and support the idea if the change were to happen to my school.

SIMS

This is actually a form of technology made to help ease the life of a teacher. SIMS actually stands for (School Information Management System) and is used by more than 21,000 schools in 150 local authorities across the UK. In the sense of education a lot of schools use this to make everything organised and easy to carry out. SIMS can do many things, and can check the following;

SIMS print screen taken from Google Images

Personal details – Having everyone’s personal details means that it is very easy for the teacher/substitute teacher to know how able their students are allowing to make more precise decisions and what is best avoided.

Attendance/Registration – This allows teachers and the school itself to keep an accurate track of whose attending and who isn’t. Having software that keeps up with attendance means you can find gaps and work to improve the statistics of the school attendance. It would also allow you to find who may be skiving or an unreasoned absence, this does happen, and by finding out the school is able to help and try to fix why those matters might be.

Academic performance – Like I mentioned above, this could be simply help a student progress to higher levels as it may also find a student struggling that may need help or moved to a more able class for him/her to benefit.  

Behaviour logs – One of the more beneficial parts of SIMS. As we all know, disruptive pupils can have an effect on a working class. Nipping it in the bud not only means you’ve helped the class itself not to be lured into misbehaving but for them to carry on achieving, and allowing a contract for the misbehaved student means they may pull their socks up too.

Photo – This is a very simple but very beneficial thing for a teacher, having new students and new classes, having pictures for every one of your student’s means that you are then able to see whose who!

Timetable – Not everyone always knows where there going, this isn’t just for students but it can also be for teachers too. Especially cover teachers who don’t really know their way around the school.

Advantages:

• Helps schools manage the whole student construction circle
• Allows you to keep a constant track on students
• Saves paper
• Teachers can access information easily
• Maintains real time information (teachers can edit the information keeping it all up to date)
• SIMS can be accessed from home this means teachers/parents can still be updated

Disadvantages:

• SIMS can fail to work, for example a power cut (this is when a paper based registration could be seen as a better thing)
• If the information got into the wrong hands that could be a big problem as well as a reputational one…
• Very expensive to up keep

In my own experience, my school itself runs SIMS and so far it hasn’t really failed at all, keeping all information intact and up to date. And another thing for me to witness, is for a new teacher to learn its class pretty quickly due to the functions that SIMS can perform. Without SIMS how long would it of taken the teacher to learn the class? This then concludes that it save a lot of precious school learning time. A lot of students complain about situations like these as do the parents, so by having SIMS this could be eliminated down by quite a fair amount.

SIMS logo

Interactive Whiteboards

Whiteboard taken from Google Images

Now this is a very interesting peace of technology allowing the blackboard/chalk boards to come to an end. But on a serious note, these things are incredible, for teaching these are very much a perk to a teacher, why? Simple, having a projected screen of what you want to show to a class means that everyone in the class can see it, and as its interactive, the students can also come up and interact with it teaching others as well as themselves, it’s a real fun way of learning.

Advantages:

• Everyone can interact with it
• Very easy to use
• Very easy for students to decode information from it
• Allows everyone to work together

Disadvantages:

• A very expensive piece of technology, not all schools can afford to have a few let alone one of them.
• Some teachers take more focus on the new technology rather than the students
• Over activity can occur and can then become a downhill pass rather than a successful one
• Lower ability groups can sometimes slow down the process of the whole class trying to learn

Not everyone knows how to use them, and some students would be scared to use them

In my own experience my school again is fortunate enough to have some whiteboards dotted around most of the classrooms, they are very easy to use and make a fun turn to learning. Many presentations are done on these and we also display the work on there to learn by writing all over it. The one thing I’m not to sure about is the calibration, this can be quite a pain sometimes, taking time off lessons by recalibrating it.

Pupils interacting with the whiteboard taken from Google Images