How did you feel about beginning your Year 8 classes in the new Murtoa building? What did you like? What didn’t you like about it?
I felt nervous about starting year 8 because it was a new school and a new building so I was afraid that I would get lost or something like that. I started off the year in the worst possible way, I was late and that made me almost me miss my class but i got there just in time, but I soon got settled in and made some new friends. Some of my friends are actually old Mitcham students.
Now that you have been in Murtoa for almost three terms, has studying in the building been as good as you expected, better, worse, and why?
Studying in Murtoa has been excellent because of how open and spread out the whole building is and the teachers are great as well.
I thought that high school would be like in the movies where there are cliques and if you are late than you get a detention but it is nothing like that, the teachers are nice there aren't that many cliques, but there is the occasional one or two. The thing about Mitcham Primary was that there was one group of girls that thought that they ruled the school and it was so annoying.
What for you have been the best aspect of using laptops, Mac desktops and other ICT equipment like the interactive whiteboards? Why?
I think that using laptops, Mac desktops and the other ICT equipment was good because all our work was good because we wouldn't have to keep attack of random loose sheets because they would be either sent to use vier email or on the home website were we could access them from any computer.
What have been the worst aspects of the above? Why?
There were bad things as well like if the person that used the computer before you hadn't plugged the computer in to charge it the computer wouldn't let you log on and that would happen quite a lot because people couldn't be bothered to plug them in, that got very very very annoying.
Next year, in Year 9, you will have an individual laptop as your personal machine to use at school and to take home. How do you think that will help your learning next year?
This would help because you wouldn't have to have a USB to take all the work on the computer home and you wouldn't have to send it home you could just take the laptop home instead.
What problems can you see might or will arise next year when you have a laptop to use in your learning? A problem that could happen is someone could forget to charge the battery for their computer and then if they need it that day then they would get in trouble for not being responsible student and remembering to charge their laptop and another issue is that you might be in a rush to get to school so that you aren't late and forget to get your laptop of the charger and leave it at home which is at home so it wouldn't be that effective.
Overall, do you feel it is better to learn with ICTs like computers, IWBs, cameras etc, or better to use books and non electronic whiteboards? Why? i think that it is better to use a little bit of both because a smart board would be good because you can access the Internet and that means that you can get all the things that you need of the Internet instead of printing the sheets of the computer and then copping it onto the white board but to much screens would be really bad for younger peoples eye site so a bit of both would be a good combination.
