Computers in school … ? Not an easy question!

In my first article named “Des ordinateurs dans toutes les classes ? On l’a testé pour vous”, I gave you an humorous glance at how does a class function (or dysfunction) when we work with computers.

Every single twist that you can read actually happened in real life in that school. I’ve been able to experiment each one of them. So yes, when you experiment all those problems (low battery, updates, dysfunctional printer, no earphones, ports problems etc.), you begin to really think : who is the guy that shouted that computers would revolutionize class teaching? Indeed, it seems that it only transforms traditional class problems into new technological problems.

Fortunately, computers CAN bring a lot in a classroom and can bring great new opportunities to the teacher in his teaching methods.

Indeed, when you are teaching history or science, it is not unusual for the children to have many questions that you didn’t really prepared to have. Very often, in those subjects, it is really hard to explain complex things in a few words (and trying to draw it on the whiteboard can be even worse when you are as good as I am at drawing! ). Computers can save you time and energy because internet offers you a wide variety of pictures, diagrams or even videos in the exact subject they wanted to talk about at this very moment.
Furthermore, the new generation is much more visual than ours. A picture worth a thousand words.

Nowadays, heterogeneity within students is a big issue. Some can finish an exercise in 2 minutes while others can spend hours on it. Usually, you would give books to read or new exercises on a paper to the fastest. The problem is that they always come to you asking you what they can do and it disturb the class a lot. With computers, you can use lots of tools that can be adaptable to the different students’ speed. Many teachers developed websites that generate automatically tones of exercises with different levels. It enables every students to work & progress at his own speed.

If we now look at this issue from a different perspective : the disabled children one, computers can reveal themselves as “learning savers”. Indeed, for most dyslexic children, reading is and will always be a hard task and will never be automated! Fortunately, computers can today be equipped with automatic readers softwares such as Natural Reader. Students can therefore access the meaning of an instruction without struggling hours.

For dyspraxic children (writing disabilities), it is much easier to handle a keyboard than to write, which requires fine motor skills. Like for dyslexic children, computer can in that way relieve them from hard difficulties which handicap them.

I can talk much more about the benefits of computers but I think society is already doing a great job in promoting it. I just wanted to highlight some benefits for disabled children that we often don’t think of.

Thus, even though computers brings a lot of new technological problems, it is often worth to pay the price because great benefits awaits us, and particularly for disabled children.

A last word … when we say education technologies, we say education transformation. And when we say education transformation, we must not forget to say new training. Teachers are not robots : they were once educated in a certain way. If we change it, we must train them again!