In 2007 our then Prime Minister pushed forwards towards a new mission.
The Education Revolution.
What was the revolution supposed to deliver, and what was so different about the plan that "revolutionised" the classroom.
Well, probably the most immediately noticeable difference would be the school issued laptops. Students who regardless of how much their family income was were able to all interact in the class room using technology to enhance their learning by being interactive. Also potentially allowing students work to be of a higher quality simply due to the ability to copy data in a lesson in varied ways, increasing their resources for study and personal learning.
A bold idea, a brilliant scheme, executed so inadequately that the only impact it had was to thrust laptops into the hands of children while not giving enough teachers the resources needed to know how to properly integrate them into their lessons. Rather than having tools at the ready to create collaborative learning, teachers primary instruction was to use the laptops as electrified binary type writers. The monotonous nature of this interaction in the classroom of course leading to increased Facebook time, or watching of movies during lessons.
Not to mention the quality of the laptops and the software supposedly expected to run on it. I remember back in 2011 I was loaned a "net-book" by a school I was at during university. The software suite included Adobe Creative Suite, on a laptop with the processing power of a IBM 386/25 (from 1995, or at least it felt my old 386 was quicker)... In no way would I have ever have been able to set any tasks for students that required more processing power than a word document, let alone have a projector in the classroom so that I could teach, model and scaffold computer based learning for them. Needless to say my own four year old laptop ($700 in 2007) was far superior to the budget laptop in every way. But that's beside the point. If I, as a student teacher, were unable to develop lessons and use the loan laptop as a tool for my classroom, how on earth were the students supposed to be able to use them for any more than a lag ridden type writer?
Well... It's 2014 and it's fair to say that there have been children left behind for a long time now. The current scheme for keeping technology in schools is that of BYO device. Which perhaps in some schools would work very well, but it isn't really feasible at many schools, where for families to spend $300 on a Chromebook would be an impossible amount of money to outlay.
But still, seven years on and many class rooms don't have digital projectors. So I suppose the students having a laptop wouldn't really be of any more use now than it would have been seven years ago.
We've come full circle on the revolution. Children had laptops and all seemed to be going nicely. But now schools are at times thrust back to over head projectors, CRT televisions and work relying solely on photocopies and what is written on the board.
The revolution that was, feels like it never really happened. Everything I was made to be excited by at university - all the possibilities and the dreams that were built up by my lecturers in regards to implementing technology in the classroom seems like lies.
On the surface things appeared to change... for a while. But now I have a generation of kids slipping through my fingers, thinking that no one cares about them any more because the revolution they were promised has fallen by the wayside and lives only in memory, and all they have now is a broken promise on the back of the failed revolution.
