Will the classroom catch up soon?

TO me one of the biggest problems with centring classrooms around ICT is that the curriculum is not designed to allow it.  I was reminded of this when reading an article on The Age website earlier this week titled “Let’s think beyond ink in exam room: principal”. It was about an eastern suburbs school leader advocating for the use of computers for VCE exams. “'I think it's ridiculous that in 2011 we are still doing pen and paper testing … It's holding the learning back at a time when we're actually saying there are a whole lot of skills they need for university and the workforce, which involve the use of technology,'' Ringwood Secondary College principal Michael Phillips said.

It is a statement I agree with, and not just because I had to mark literally more than 200 pages of student handwriting last week. There have been more than a few times during this year where a guest lecturer or allocated reading has suggested something ground breaking and worthwhile, and the thought in my head has been: “this would be a great thing to do, except I’m not sure how it is going to help students get a high ATAR.” To me it seems that the VCE curriculum and assessment structure is holding back a lot of exciting initiatives with those related to ICT among them.

Another concern of mine is that knowledge and remembering still seem to have too much emphasis in some VCE subjects. For example in recent weeks I have sat in VCE English, English Language and History classes where the main aim appeared to be to help students know and remember as much content as possible for upcoming SACs. While thousands of 18-year-olds are cramming themselves with quotes and theories of speaking and communist Russia dates, in the real world people use google when they want to know something and therefore the focus is on knowledge use rather than knowledge discovery. I would argue in a world where there is so much knowledge the aim should not be to make adolescents ‘know things,’ but to guide them to make better use of all the things they can know at the click of a mouse or the slide of a finger across a touchscreen. This is how ICT has changed the world, but obviously not our classrooms or VCE curriculums.