Technology is an environmental disaster in education, but good for turtles.

I am a technophobe.

So much that is vaunted as huge technological advance is just an excuse for us all having to buy and use yet more machines.

This is especially the case in education.

A simple class quiz on the whiteboard, or even blackboard, that children needed a pen and paper to take part in, now requires every child to have a smart phone or tablet, the teacher to be able to project the quiz onto a very expensive smart board and the results to be generated and stored on an electricity guzzling cloud .

We are told this is environmentally better because no paper is used and we are supposed to be stupid enough not to recognise the enormous environmental impact of requiring every child/teacher/classroom to have a computer and to be using google or any of the thousands of other platforms/ browsers that store and send information, at real cost from cloud to heat belching super computer, across the whole globe.

This does not make children smarter or happier. It just makes money for the technology giants and we have all been suckered in. It is the ultimate emperor’s new clothes and teachers have been too afraid to point out the pitiful nakedness of the emperor for fear of being called old fashioned and ultimately of losing their jobs.

I am soon to leave the teaching profession after a very long time teaching English literature and language and there is nothing at all that electronic technology has added to the teaching of my subject.

It is however useful for protecting turtle eggs on tropical beaches.

I watched huge leatherback turtles deposit tiny translucent ping pong ball eggs in the sand in the wonderful dark of a Costa Rican beach years ago and I was delighted to read that technology is helping track those who steal and eat the eggs today.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/05/decoy-turtle-eggs-put-in-nests-to-track-trade-in-costa-rica

We may have been colossally duped into swelling the coffers of computer companies on a global scale, but at least a few more turtles might make it to the sea.

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