I think the Labor party said "every school child will have access to a computer" or words to that effect, so my question is how long will they be allowed to use the computer each day?

It's no good having 10 computers for a class of 30 and each kid only getting a few minutes hands on each day

I am a Queensland secondary state school teacher and I feel that my perspective may be of value. However please don´t take my comments to be representative of all teachers´ views or experiences on this subject and I apologise for what is a bit of a rant.

My school (1500) currently has a series (3) of computer classrooms with approximately 28 computers in each. Also around the school in particular buildings are pods of computers with 8-15 computers in each pod. It is impossible to book the computer rooms because subjects reliant on computers - like business, acounting, CADD, etc - have first preference. Booking a pod is a frustrating exercise and only for the quick at the start of each term.

So any influx of computers to be housed by the school is going to be very welcome but will also need some serious infrastructure support such as networking, cabling, maintenance, repairs from vandalism and general use, professional development, a major increase in bandwidth etc. The internet at my school moves at a crawl at the best of times. In one 70 minute lesson I was only able to open 8 webpages in total.

Then the nature of teenagers is going to be an issue. I have to prowl the computer room to keep students on task. Given any opportunity students will install dodgy programs, viruses, watch videos, play music, try to locate porn, and indulge in the main offender - games. Let me just say that flash games are a teacherś worst enemy in the computer rooms. It is all well and good for someone to say computers are necessary for a valuable education but most teenagers don´t care or realise the importance of their education. At least two computers are vandalised or have parts stolen from them every week. It is not a minority of students either that don´t value their education or access to computers. If I put kids in a pod I have to move from the classroom to the pod and back again endlessly. Every trip to the pod I catch or suspect a student has been playing a game. So many students know the keyboard commands to not only minimise the application but to exit completely. We teachers have come to know the vacant stare of a gamer well. This leads me to my next point. It is hard to keep up with these kids and their knowledge of technology.

Many of the teachers in my school use their notebooks to send and receive email and little more. Most don´t know how to do anything else, other than rudimentary word processing or spreadsheeting. What professional development is offered to advance ICT skills is provided by a few knowledgeable teachers on the fly. As a result teachers (other than those using specific software) use computer rooms for word processing and internet research and little else. Teachers would know little of ´search strings´, the pros and cons of wikipedia or how to download relevent utube videos. While many teachers are behind in the tech race against the kids, some of us are ahead.

My current thinking is that the use of technology or ICTs (Information Communication Technology) in school needs to be for more than basic skilling in wordprocessing, spreadsheeting etc. Those skills are important but the use of ICTs in classrooms need to be used to further learning rather than be the subject of learning. In other words the key is to integrate technology so that it aids learning rather than being the focus of learning. An example would be to use a digital camera to take photos of a seedling to document the stages of growth and blog the results, or define key terms on a wiki, or discuss the progress in a forum, on a school website.

Giving every kid access to a PC isn´t necessary for them to do the above activities. In fact, the way schools operate now, giving every kid áccess´ to a PC in school won´t help them at all.

Valuable contribution there Cal, most people would not consider things like the broadband speed and bandwidth, only being able to open 8 pages in 70 minutes seems to be a complete waste of time.

The other point of interest is the teenage mindset to try to bend the rules as much as possible. They often do not appreciate the fact that they have access to a computer and will vandal, install viruses or waste time on games. The recently implemented firewall released by the government proved little challenge to students with a little bit of computer smarts.

There are a number of side issues that need to be looked into here.