My memories of my school days is like watching a horror movie without any lights in the room, just for the fact that we used to carry heavy loads on our back and there was no fun in our school activities. I remember when I was a child I had to carry tons of books on my tiny thing back and go to school, we were creative in those days in finding ways and solutions to reduce the weight of the backpack and all attempts lead to one fact, that the backpack is still heavy to carry.
As we grew older our strength increased and we were able to carry heavy weights and switch it from one arm to another on our way to school, However some of my friends from my school days are having a back problems in our modern time, and it is not having an active life style but because the overweight they used to carry on their backs.
The UAE government has decided that they want to move away from the traditional way of knowledge transfer to modern way of information exchange, which resulted in have investing in information technology infrastructure, and making the technology devices such as Ipad’s Smart tablets as the main hub in exporting knowledge to the students and creating a strong interactive environment for the students and teachers to gain new knowledge and exchange information.
What a big shift for our children, they will be carrying less weight compare to us in our school days, I believe in my days having 6 to 9 books plus the note books for each subject my backpack might weight around 7 to 10 kilograms, today our children will be caring smart tablets in their backpack that weights around 2.5 kilograms in worst case scenario that hold more than 2 million of animated pages. That really a big change, do not you agree with me?
In my school days the only two sources of information one was from our teachers, and there was no room to challenge the information presented by them, since it was a taboo in those days to challenge your teachers knowledge and a believe that your teachers is the your information bank of knowledge, the second source of knowledge we had in my day was the school and the public libraries, however they were outdate in regards to new age information, for the fact that new books, publication or research papers took a long journey to reach to the library and in some cases you did not have the right source available to conduct your research, but we learned to utilize the information we had in our hands to our best ability.
This move to introduce new technologies in delivering knowledge will help the student to have a greater way to explore and pursue new knowledge to enhance they learning and skills, as a study from MIT state that in conventional way of teaching student have 20% of their time to interact with their teacher, and with the introduction of new age technology in the class room the students access to knowledge increases to 20 times, which means the role has change since teachers are not the only source of information the students has.
Indirectly new technologies are helping our students to have a stronger self-esteem to seeking new knowledge and information, with new knowledge they obtain gives them the ability to challenge their teacher’s knowledge, indirectly the introduction of new technologies are developing our children negotiation skills which could be handy for their future.
Part of UAE economy depends on research and development to create new stream of industries that can contribute to the economy to create new prosperity and higher levels of GDP. By introducing new technology in the classrooms we are teaching our children at early stage how to seek for information and conduct a proper research on subject matter issue, in my modest point of view introducing new technology in the classroom is important tool for preparing the future generation of workforce on how to develop their skills and giving the combative age over others workforce in the employment market and it is an very important tool that they could use for the rest of their life.
Changing the weight of the backpacks with new technologies in the classroom can be a tool to change the future of UAE economy, our children will not need to leave with back injuries any more, since they are equipped with new tools to seek knowledge.
3 thoughts on “Backpack injuries is Over in UAE”
Outstanding way of describing the shift in education trend ! Well done Mohamed !
Nice article. I agree with you and I personaly believe that Introducing technology to schools will add more excitement to the students while they are seekings for the knowledage. And gaining the knowledage through the visual methods are more likely to be memorized than the traditional methods.
Lucky them:) nice article bu Jassim:)