Cihanyesilmen’s Weblog

Find out about today’s use of computers in your old grammar school. Try to find information in the “Schulprogramm” or on the website, remember if and how your teachers included the New Media in the classroom. Describe your findings and your opinion about it.

Reading the blog task for this week’s session the first thing which came to my mind was ….”New Media at my old grammar school…did we even have computers???”

My own experiences:

But later on when I did some research and I visited the website of my old school I did remember some scenes in which I was sitting in front of a computer doing some research for my language subjects. As far as I remember I’ve never sat in front of a PC before 10th grade. And even then it was just in really rare cases. We had one computer lab in whichthe subject informatik was held, and one small PC-room which was only used by the older students. I can remember when I had to do some research for my Spanish class and also for French and English we sometimes visited the computer lab. In addition to that I also remember how many times after having the chance to work with the PC finally , we had to disrupt the work because our internet connection was lacking, or the PCs did not work, or our teachers where not able to cope with problems which came up etc. This also shows how uneducated our teachers were at that time. The more I think about the use of new media in my old school, the more I come to the fact that we didn’t really have teachers which included media in their lessons. Thinking back now I come to the point that it would have been much easier for me, if I had learned about PowerPoint and other medial things already at school and not only at university.

Current status of including new media at Cusanus-Gymnasium:

Unfortunately the website  does not give any information about the use of new media at school.

Here is a link: http://www.cusanusgymnasium.de/index.php?page=home

So I had to ask a friend’s sister which is now in 11th grade at this school. I was surprised that it has changed a lot indeed. The Cusanus Gymnasium offers now two computer labs and one additional which is just intended for the “Oberstufe”. What was also striking to me is, that now the use of new media in class seem to be more extended. I ascribe this to the fact that my former school now has a lot of more younger teachers than to the time when I was at this school.

All in all I can say, that there is no escape from the more and more getting “Media World” to which we have to adapt to, especially we as a future teacher who want to prepare our students better in these technical things, than our own teachers did.