The sad song about the quality of our education has been performed on these pages more than once and no one has any questions. The world is rapidly changing right before our eyes, knowledge and information have become the only real currency, and in our schools and institutes, tired teachers of very retirement age and pragmatic teachers still rule the ball, changing students' money for their autograph in the test. What kind of knowledge, what kind of breakthrough can we talk about here?
Nevertheless, progress is inexorable and sooner or later new trends will come to such an ossified industry as education. We want to share with you a few recipes on how the school can work, not even tomorrow, no, today! All the technologies for this already exist and work on every computer.
It remains only to start using them.
Previously, a big obstacle to the use of modern digital technologies in school was their relative high cost and poor distribution. Today, everything has changed significantly and almost every urban family has at least one computer connected to the Internet. As for software solutions, there is a huge selection of various commercial and free solutions. We focused on the widespread, free and easy-to-use Google Docs office suite and considered several options for using it in the learning process.
In the first weeks of the training cycle, the schedule of classes is a big problem for students and students. Firstly, it often changes until all the approvals with teachers and administration are settled, and secondly, no one really remembers it yet. To avoid all these problems, it is enough to create a simple table with a grid of classes in the Google spreadsheet editor and share it with all students. All changes made will be immediately available and brought to the attention of students.
I am sure that very soon children will perceive stories about a forgotten diary, torn pages, and miraculous transformations of some numbers into others as a kind of school folklore. To do this, it is enough to simply keep a list of all grades in a publicly accessible (read-only :) a table in Google Docs. And let the talented twos test the strength of Google's protection.
Tell me, how many times have you heard from your children «and we were not asked anything»? And how many times has it turned out to be true? You can solve this problem in just ten minutes. A simple table containing the names of subjects in the rows and dates in the columns will be able to save students from the need to write down assignments in a hurry at the end of the lesson and will enable parents to conveniently monitor the completion of homework.
Despite all the efforts of our education system, we still have children who can and want to learn. Many of them have significantly outgrown the standards of the average training system and are striving for more. For them, the teacher may well post additional materials on the topic in separate folders. Links, videos, audio, texts. Learn the Earth's Crust — here's a documentary about the most famous volcanoes. You are studying the work of Pushkin — watch «Eugene Onegin » in the best production. Interested in physics — here is a website for you with a description of various phenomena and experiments.
Writing independent papers is a great way to develop individual work skills, search and information processing. But the way it happens is a funny example of the absurdity of our school. The student searches the web for information, processes it and forms it as a file in a text editor (possibly in the same Google Docs), then prints it out, files it in a beautiful folder and takes it to the teacher. Let's save trees, printers and time and just fumble our work with a mentor.
Some academic and extracurricular issues require taking into account the opinions of each student or their parents. If the teacher needs to find out who wants to participate in school competitions, who will go on the next excursion or the opinion of parents on the organization of the learning process, then it is enough to simply create a survey form and send it to all participants.
Most children at school and even some older students need parental supervision. The availability and easy accessibility of all the materials listed above will make it possible to easily control the schedule, homework, current and final grades. And if necessary, a simple conversation with a teacher in Google Talk can easily replace going to a meeting at school.
As you can see for yourself, all the solutions described are quite ordinary, easily reproducible and do not require any investment or preparation.
Everything is already there — take it and use it.
However, it will not be long before our schools adopt the existing tools. Our children see the computer only as a source of endless entertainment, and teachers are generally afraid to approach this «shaitan machine ».
Or am I wrong and somewhere something similar is already being used? Write to us about it in the comments, it's interesting.
