IELTS Writing Task 2 – In the past, lectures were the traditional method of teaching large numbers of students in a classroom. Nowadays new technology is increasingly being used to teach students.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of this new approach in teaching?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.

Knowledge can be transmitted in many ways, but orally and writenly are the most common forms. Both continue being used nowadays and they tend to go on for a long time (maybe forever). The point is: will it keep flowing from one to many, as it is in schools and univertisties, or there will be drastic changes in this model? Keep with me until the end of this essay and we will find out together.

The other day I was talking to my wife about how education hasn’t changed much in years (or decades). That was totally clear to me when last year we took our 4 year old boy to a traditional school in our city: it’s basically the same model it used to be 30 years ago, when I was at school. I even enquired the principal about it saying “so, nothing has changed in 30 years?” and to my surprise he said “yes, we are a traditional school”. It was (and is) the good and old “one to many method”, which means primarely one teacher teaching many students at the same time.

As everybody knows, since last year we had this whole world misfortune called COVID-19 and that, besides other things, forced teachers and educational instutions to try new technological approaches. One of them is remote classes via video conferences. Some good points about it to learners and educators are that you can stay at home, no need to comute to another place and no need brush your teeth since you are not going to meet anyone face to face (just kidding).

On the other side it’s easy to say that for small children (just like my son Theo) they seem to lose more than they could win. Children at his age do need to have contact with other kids because that is also another way of learning. Also, in most cases, it’s much more difficult for these kids to adapt to having classes using a computer, tablet or smartphone since it’s harder to keep them concentrated and looking at a screen for hours. This remote learning system, which could be more individualized than the regular path, also puts more responsability on parents, since they have to be with their young ones the whole time during the classes.

Einstein said once that “madness is doing the same thing and hoping for different results”. If by one hand it’s good to see things in education are changing on the other one it’s easy to notice that’s still far from a perfect system. Things will need to be adapted and will vary from teacher to teacher and student to student. In other words what may work for one, may not work to another. The final situation is that we are trying differents things and for sure we will get to different, and probably better, results we have today,