On the Way to Electronic Classrooms
German schools are now almost a hundred percent online, but first the teachers have to be trained in how to use this new medium. It comes down to individual commitment.
Once a week the grade 10 class at the Hardenberg school in Velbert in the Rhineland really enjoys their English lesson. That’s because once a week they communicate with their Greek counterparts at the Avgoulea high school in Athens via the Internet: they see each other on their computer screens via webcams and hear and talk to each other at the same time using headsets. "In comparison, chatting by text is too troublesome and a real pain because the English spelling is so difficult", says Eva-Maria. That’s all very well, but transmitting images and sound in real time to and from fourteen school work stations in both locations – a present from "M(icro)S(oft)N(etwork)-Messenger" for a school pilot project – is technically very complex. But the teachers are also delighted, as Karsten Schillies confirms, "My foreign language students are much more motivated during these live lessons at the computer than in the normal lessons with textbooks". After the English class the students in Athens can use the "electronic classroom" for learning German with native speakers from Velbert. This online cooperation between Velbert and Athens was one of the main attractions at the 2006 Didacta, the world’s largest trade fair for learning aids, which this year welcomed more than 70,000 visitors to Hanover.
Schools go online!
These days 98 percent of all schools already have desk-mounted computers, on average one for every fifteen students or less. A good half million of these devices, i.e. more than two thirds of them, are connected to the Internet. More than half of the work stations can also be used for multimedia applications (like DVD); many have scanners as well, which can save and reproduce texts from books and magazines on the computer. Joint initiatives by the high-tech industry and the government such as "Schools go online" and "D 21" have now equipped schools across the country with the basic technology for teaching in the computer age.
Teacher training is a must
Today, particularly the Internet is being used in primary schools (grades 1- 4), especially in general subjects like geography. By the end of compulsory schooling at grade 10, each pupil has had "basic IT training" as an introduction to office skills. "We can link this training to the school students’ day-to-day experiences with computer games, the Internet cafe round the corner, and now with Internet-enabled mobile telephones", Mr Schillies says. In middle school, where there are higher learning expectations, the pupils can choose IT as an optional subject. Here they learn how to create their own website, for example. However, the procedures are not always necessarily the same in the sixteen German federal states, which all have educational sovereignty. In the upper level of grammar secondary schools for natural sciences, which prepare students for university studies, IT is usually a compulsory subject with several hours of lessons a week. Some teachers join the teaching profession from the world of business and are in great demand. Information technology has been on offer as a university degree programme for three decades now in Germany; the corresponding teaching methodology, i.e. teacher training, has been gradually integrated as a course into all faculties over the years.
Of course, IT has also revolutionised related subjects. For example, it found its way into mathematics via modern pocket calculators with built in computer algebra systems (CAS). As one maths teacher pointed out, "Maths lessons are about solving problems, so we and the students are asking ourselves if there’s anything they still have to learn without a calculator! We put this to the test in lessons". In other subjects that work with numbers to a much lesser extent, like languages or history, how much multimedia is introduced to the lesson greatly depends on the teacher’s own initiative and certainly requires more preparation time.
Educators also have to learn about areas that seem completely unrelated to the subject, like modern media law, for example. Teachers would risk breaching copyright law if they put a poem that is otherwise difficult for school students to find on their own homepage! That could be very costly. On top of everything else, educators are responsible for "parenting" the students when it comes to media conduct. For example, they have to make it clear to the students that chatting is not just about fun and games, but that it can reveal a dangerous amount of personal information to strangers, and that merely downloading things (like pornos, for example) can even be the first step towards prison. That’s why the federal state of Bavaria has issued a complete ban on mobile telephones in schools as a precaution. "Schools in the age of computers are like fields with both fertile soil and treacherous stumbling blocks", warns Gundel Schindler, a teacher at a grammar school. "We have to conquer it bit by bit, day by day".
The author is a lecturer at the Aachen University of Technology.
Translation: Marsalie Turner
Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion
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June 2006
