I’m sitting in one of our school computer labs at the moment supervising students working on the computers. We open our labs for lunchtime a few days a week so the students can use the computers, presumably to catch up on “work”.
And what do these kids – our teenage digital natives – do when the get unrestricted free access to the school computers? Just looking around the room right now and seeing what they’re up to reveals the following… more than half of them are working on their Bebo pages, a few are looking through their MySpace accounts and a couple seem to be just browsing through websites for song lyrics and anime cartoons. There are two kids checking their email, using Yahoo!Mail and Hotmail, and one is browsing through a collection of digital photos she took at the school swimming carnival last Friday.
Oh, and one had a Publisher document open that looked vaguely like it could have been a school task, but I could be wrong. It may have been a party invitation.
Is it any wonder school seems so irrelevant?
The Real World by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.