Playing Catchup with Technology

It's amazing that every time we catch up with technology our needs and technology itself grows more complicated.

This is my second year at a Mac school. Some of the resources we have are impressive: MacBooks for every teacher, Smartboards in every classroom, a classroom set of MacBook carts for each floor in the main building, video cameras, microphones, point and shoot cameras, plus four DSLR cameras, and a computer lab with 24 iMacs.

But we also have to deal with limited bandwidth here in Lagos, and only one computer lab for a school with 750 students due to lack of classrooms and space in the campus, and not enough laptops for classroom teachers when computer classes are in session. At least the library also has a mini computer lab, and the annex building has a laptop lab.

On the bright side construction of the high school campus will soon be completed, and this will free some classrooms and allow us to add computer labs. a friend who works with Siemens also told us they're installing fiber optics.

It won't solve all our problems, and sometimes we even create or get new ones. It seems as we keep increasing our bandwidth each year, so does our demand. I long for the days when most web sites were regular HTML pages, because now Flash-driven sites like MSN, Yahoo, Turnitin, and Ning don't load properly when traffic is congested. Then when the school doubled the bandwidth I tried to get my students on Google Earth, and then we ran into bandwidth problems again.