Flankee’s Blog

Today I stumbled across another article from SMH titled, ‘Phone a friend in exams’ by Education Editor Anna Patty. I thought this article is VERY relevant to our course E-learning in Primary Education, however this article was directed at high school. Even though it was an article that related to high school what Patty emphasises is that a Girl school in Croydon is one of the first schools to introduce phone a friend in an exam and have access to resources that would help students to answer exam type questions.

I believe this article does in fact prepare the students at PLC in Croydon for the world, which I can see does redefine the tradition attitudes towards the idea of ‘cheating. As long as this new system teaches students to reference then I think the idea of plagiarism should be extinct.    

The point that Ms Coleman makes about how their students will carry enormous amount of information in their heads in their working lives, the most important skill to have is to know how to access information from all their sources is quite vital. Non-the-less accessing sources quickly would also mean these students would have to learn how to check for reliability of the sources they have downloaded. It’s definitely a good skill to have and know how to use properly.

But coming from a more traditional background of learning I still believe exams should be in written form without the ‘phone a friend in exams’. Perhaps this idea of ‘phone a friend’ is more relevant in an E-learning based class. Otherwise I still believe that this tactic of learning should still be trailed out before the Board of Studies incorporates the use of computers in the exams.

Poice!

Frances Lee