Field Trip to The martin Luther Schule - Somewhere in the Middle

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of media equipment in schools is a dusty very warm room on the top floor of my old school stuffed with computers that even we as pupils felt were outdated. At that time, which is about six to eight years ago, you would find maybe one teacher who took care of the administration and offered some extracurricular activity on computer language.

But with the new media taking over literally every bit of life we must have come far from there one would expect. A lot of all the inventions that have been made since then should have found their way into everyday school life – at least almost all young people now know how to handle a computer or a mobile phone.

Indeed things in the Martin Luther Schule are different. One thing that has changed a great deal is the basic media equipment. There are for example no more projectors that play films from reels but there is something that you could call a media cabinet, including a flat screen TV in every classroom. In the teachers’ lounge there is an equipment store where teachers can borrow modern video projectors and laptops. For doing research in class there is a cart that holds fourteen portable computers.

Another extraordinary thing is that the new media has influenced how the school is organized. There is a centralized booking system, from which teachers can book a certain room in which they want to work and where they can register if they want to take a test with their class. The system also provides information to the pupils what teachers are missing and if there is going to be a substitute. Also parts of it can be accessed via the internet by the students and their parents.

When taking a look into the computer rooms of the school however, the feeling from my old school comes back. The equipment is definitely more up to date than it has been back in my time, but it is very striking that for a class of thirty there is only one computer for two pupils. At the same time there is only one computer room for about 1300 students.

A lot of money seems to have been invested in surveillance software enabling teachers to follow every move a student makes, to block his screen and make changes to what he/she has been working on. From my work as a new media educator I know that a lot of experts in the department tend to the opinion that there should be an emphasis in educating pupils in autonomous media work and to keep this kind of spying to a minimum. But this seems to be quite typical of school today.

One problem that the Martin Luther Schule faces is that their budget for these matters is very tight. Thus they cannot afford to have more than two white boards in their school and can only offer four computer working spots in their library which are open for pupils for independent research.

A more serious problem however seem to be that there is a certain unwillingness on the part of the teachers to educate themselves into using the new media although there are a lot of education offers. It is mainly the young teachers who tend to work in this field and make use of the new possibilities.

Both factors the mediocre commitment from teachers and the lack of enough money explain why it is very hard for a school like the Martin Luther Schule to keep up with the possibilities that the new media offers.  With expenses for education decreasing over the last couple of years this problem is not likely to be fixed in the near future.

This is definitely a problem for young teachers who are fresh out of university. They are used to having access to good media equipment for the work in their seminars and are mostly willing to keep on using this equipment. Only it has to be provided by the school.

All in all things have not changed that tremendously since my time in school as one could expect. What we learned from the visit at the Martin Luther Schule is that they are a least trying their best to offer a proper new media education to their pupils despite all the obstacles in the way. That at least is a positive sign and makes room for hope that those who are in charge of budgets for schools will someday catch up with this commitment.