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Barbolini Massimo

Digitalization of School in Luxembourg

Digitalization of Luxembourg education system: risks and opportunities

An essay by Massimo Barbolini S3 EN 1 LLIS

 

The digitalization of schooling was and still is a huge innovation for the education systems.

For students, instead of having to bring 12 books to school on their shoulders, they can only bring their iPad. Also, the teacher can see learners’ work in real time on specific apps; on the other hand, iPads have also been found to be one of the biggest distractions in the classroom. How easy is it to waste a lot of time on YouTube or some online games, while the teacher is explaining on and on important topics which, however, are not a learning priority to some of the pupils? Well, students have found out that it is entertaining and fun to use iPads for their personal interests and not for what they were intended for! So why listen to a teacher when they could be watching a comical or ludicrous video? This has been one of the worst problems connected to the use of these electronic devices: some teachers simply can't control what their students do on these electronic devices.

Fortunately, solutions by which both the teacher and the pupil benefits from have been created: programmers have introduced monitoring apps which allow a teacher to check what their students are doing on their iPads in real time. This is also a very important solution for these teachers and the students, since it allows students to work without too many distractions. Unfortunately for the teachers, students are from a new generation so they are constantly surrounded by technology, and they were able to find a countermeasure against these monitoring apps: they just turn off their Wi-Fi connection and their data will not be transmitted to the teachers’ laptop. I see that this tactic is used by my classmates often and fortunately teachers were somehow able to detect it; iPads sometimes interfere with learning, but at the same time, they are very useful for students since everything can be found on one specific place, meaning that students find it very comfortable and straightforward to use it for their learning, homework, research, etc.

However, due to the misuses I spoke above, and due to the fact that it can negatively interfere with learning, some teachers have decided to stop using iPads at all in the classroom.

On one hand, there is a very logical reason for this decision but, on the other hand, I find it a bit unfair if all students have to pay the price for the actions of just a few of them.

It is also unfair because some students use the iPad in the way that it was meant to be used, so they use it for learning, instead of wasting time with it.

Another reason for iPads’ introduction in the education system was sustainability: the production of an iPad was supposed to be less harmful to the environment compared to the quantity of trees needed to create paper and books.

I personally believe that this isn’t fully correct, as these iPads have to be charged every single day to be the following day on full charge, and the electricity consumed is still at least 50% coming from non-green sources. Furthermore, the production and the disposal of the iPads’ batteries are a very harmful process for the environment. I, however, am not saying that books are perfect, since you do have to cut down trees to be able to create them, but they do seem to be the better option since they don't create any distractions to students and the only potentially controversial process is disposing of them once used.

I believe that humanity should invest some efforts to find a new solution to reduce all excessive deforestation and, at the same time, making the population aware of the environmental impact of billions of electronic devices like tablets and smartphones.

I would like to emphasise again that it is very important that we strike a good balance between the 2 extremes: completely quitting to use paper books, and only using electronic devices.

While I think it is too late to fix climate change and other disasters created by humanity, we can still help our world to heal its scars, and deliver it in better shape to future generations, starting with paying attention and evaluating the impact of our day to day actions.


 




Envoyé: 21:18 Mon, 25 March 2024 par: Barbolini Massimo age: 14