Look at the screen

I have had a projector in my classroom for the first time since the beginning of term. I hesitate to call it by its familiar name - beamer – as when I said I had a beamer my grown up children thought I had bought a BMW (beamer in London speak). So a data projector or device that throws a large image onto a screen, or a blank wall in my case. I do not have a Smartboard which is an interactive screen you tough instead of pointing a mouse. You quickly learn not to emphasise a point by tapping the board smartly; if you do you risk losing the whole page and then have to rummage around getting it back. What difference does this make to my teaching? In fact quite a lot. We have the Cambridge Latin Course DVDs for Books 1 and 2 on the school network (yearly licence fee paid up, of course) so I am able to use the readings, dramatisations, and civilisation videos regularly. Much better to show a short 3 or 4 minute film, than to devote a whole lesson to catching up on the ones available once a week, as I was doing before. Perhaps the most irritating part of it all though is how quickly the pupils get used to this and accept it as normal, although I still think it is an amazing piece of new technology. In other classes it is also extremely useful. With an internet connection you can very quickly and easily find an image to illustrate a piece. I was going over an unseen translation from Cicero, one of the Catilines where he tells how all the senators deserted the benches when Catiline entered the senate-house. I had not thought of it before the lesson, but I remembered the painting of just this scene and within seconds was able to find it by Googling Cicero and Catiline and switching to images.

Mythological references and illustrations are now all within easy reach, and each teacher can quickly build up their own data base. Also available are resource banks, like the Oxbox for upper school Latin from Oxford University Press. This full of exercises, unseen translations, texts for practice, presentations and other activities including the latest thing: translation into Latin. (More about this later.) So no more chalk, no more squeaky markers on the white board and now nothing but PowerPoint. Perhaps, however, we should stop going on about this new technology and like the kids in the class just take it for granted and get on with the job of teaching using what kit is available to us. The lesson is still the same, the class have to pay attention to the material in the same way and they still have to work at it. New technology doesn’t make it easier, but it does broaden the range of possible material for any particular class. So it may be the case that we are not “dumbing down” but making more demands of our students after all. So everyone, pay attention to the screen.