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If you have too much excitement in your life, and need to get bored in a hurry, I can thoroughly recommend that you head for the nearest educational technology lesson. I have been to quite a few, as an observer, and I have to tell you that most of the ones I've seen have been excruciatingly boring. Deadly dull, in fact.
Now, it seems to me that to be able to take an exciting area like technology, and make it boring, really does take a special kind of skill. How come we have teacher awards for all kinds of achievement, but not one for that? There are many reasons that ed tech lessons are often as flat as a pancake, but I've boiled them down to ten. In fact, I wrote a book about it called "Go On, Bore 'Em!: How to Make ICT Lessons Excruciatingly Dull". ("ICT" stands for Information and Communications Technology, which is what we Brits call ed tech.) The basic issues I identified in the book are as follows: - The start of the lesson is terrible. How about this: I observed one lesson in which it took 8 minutes for the class to enter the room. That is quite long in itself, but what made matters worse is that the teacher gave the first entrants nothing to do, except wait for the others to amble in. As you can imagine, by that time the first arrivals were talking to their friends, playing computer games, or doing their English homework. There were 28 kids in the class, and at no point were all of them silent at the same time. The lesson, if I can dignify it with such a name, consisted mainly of the teacher shouting at students and giving them work designed to keep them quiet, which of course it didn't. If you really want a quiet life, set them something exciting to do.
- The students are in charge. Call me old-fashioned, but I think all the talk about the teacher being a guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage is a load of rubbish. Students don't know what they don't know, and they not only need to be guided by someone who knows what they're doing, they want to be. You may say that they are more technically savvy than you are, but even if that were always true, which it isn't, you're not being paid for your technical skills, but your teaching skills. So I say, start earning your money by teaching, challenging, assessing, and don't leave it to your students to set the pace and the content of the lesson.
- The activities and the teacher are not challenging. Lessons should always move the students out of their comfort zone. The students should leave your lesson exhausted from being challenged unremittingly for the past hour.
- TOO much of a challenge. Sometimes, mind you, the teacher gauges it wrongly and makes the activity too challenging. When that happens, many students will often lose interest.
- Talk, talk, talk. British Telecom used to have an advertising slogan that ran, "It's good to talk!" Unfortunately, some teachers have taken that to heart and never seem to stop. If you're paid as a college lecturer, that's fine, but talking at school students for an hour is really not the best way to keep them keen.
- Yawn!Sometimes, despite the pace of the lesson and the charisma of the teacher, the lesson is boring because the activities are intrinsically boring. As one highly intelligent girl said to me (I know she was highly intelligent because she was on the school's Gifted and Talented list), "If I really wanted to know what the average number of basketball goals were scored in each match last year, I'd look it up on the internet. I wouldn't type tons of data into a spreadsheet." Sensible girl: technology is supposed to save you work, not make it.
- Homework is not set, or is unimaginative. Homework represents a great opportunity to make sure the students come to the next lesson prepared for the class activity, or to reflect on the lesson's activity. I regard the non-setting of homework as bordering on criminal negligence.
- Plenaries? What's a plenary? Every lesson should end with summarizing, reflecting, discussion. It should not end with the teacher shouting, over the din of the bell, "Print out and log off". That's what I call the POLO model, and it's dreadful. A good lesson with have a good plenary at the end of the lesson, and possibly several throughout the lesson as activities come to an end.
- Finally, some teachers seem to have plenty of data but no information. When the school office gives each teacher a pack of their students' mid-term examination scores, full of standard deviations and correlation coefficients, are you that surprised when the teachers have not a clue what it all means? Without a thorough knowledge of what each student knows, understands and can do you cannot possibly hope to deliver lessons that address every student's needs, and keeps them interested.
I would suggest that you have a look at my list, and think about it. Perhaps you think I have overstated the case? You may even think that I've been conservative in my list of reasons, and that there are many more than ten, in which case I'd love to hear what you think I've missed out. But don't just stop there. Try to identify which of these is prevalent in your school, and address them. The bottom line for me is that if students are bored in ed tech lessons, there is something wrong. It is not because they all have MP3 players, cell phones and Facebook, and spend all night on the internet and all day programming robots. If they are bored, it is because of what their teacher is, or is not, doing. And what if you co-ordinate the use of the ed tech facilities, and teachers in your school do not teach ed tech as such, but make use of it in their lessons? Does that mean that they are excused from my wagging finger? Of course not! If an English teacher is encouraging her class to see the computers as merely typewriters -- ie the students polish their work on paper, and then type it up in the computer lab -- she needs to be shown how to get more out of the facilities and then, if she won't change her approach, banned from using them. If a math teacher is getting the class to work out stuff on a calculator, and then type the results into a spreadsheet, the same applies.
In this day and age, it is unthinkable that even one student be bored stiff in a lesson that makes use of, or is about, educational technology.
 Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms
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Perhaps a group of you could suggest project work ideas to your teachers, who may well be as bored as you are!
Also, it depends on local situations, and I don't know where you live. In England, for example, it is possible for parents to trigger a school inspection if enough of them feel that the school isn't doing a good enough job. That's a bit of an extreme action to take though.
An alternative (again, in the UK) would be to try and encourage the school, perhaps via your parents, to go for a quality assurance award called the ICT Mark. That bwould raise their game.
But it's an interesting question, and one I'd like to explore further.
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