Using our resources

It’s the holidays: most of us are off having fun, trying to unwind after a tough year at school. None of us are really thinking about school work, textbooks, or assignments.
Most of us wait to do our holiday assignments the week before school reopens anyway.
Some of us may have already received our reports from last year while the rest of us are still waiting for ours. CSEC and CAPE students are expecting their results early next month.

Based on our results we’ll either be allowed to move forward on our chosen career paths or we’ll have to find some alternative plan. But we’ve done all we can, we just have to see in August whether it was enough.
But not all students are at this stage of finality in their school lives, many of them are heading back to school at the end of the holidays. So I would like to encourage them to use their resources effectively.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Internet is a powerful tool. I’m a fan of the Khan Academy website, but there are so many other sites and videos and resources up on Using our resources – Theodore Roosevelt the Internet to help students.
YouTube was a tremendous help for me, especially in Sixth Form. There were so many helpful tutorials, practice questions and detailed explanations to choose from. Students should use their initiative and use the Internet to help them understand even the most difficult topics they’re covering in school. Eventually students mightn’t need to go to extra lessons at all: I never did. Why go to lessons at six in the morning when you could learn the same thing at your own pace in the comfort of your own home (bed?!)? The video tutorials can be fast-forwarded, paused, or repeated over and over so the student can learn at whatever pace is comfortable for them.
Of course learning things on the Internet shouldn’t replace going to school – after all, we’re social beings and we need to interact and negotiate amiable relations with our friends. But in time, it probably could – and should – replace the lessons syndrome.
Currently, most of the resources I’ve found useful are UK A-level sites, or first-year college resources like MIT Physics intro. But of course those aren’t tailored perfectly to the CAPE syllabus.
So some of my time was wasted trying to find sites and to compile videos that were applicable to the work I needed to cover.
But with time, as CAPE becomes more established on the Internet, and as more Caribbean people create sites specifically for CSEC and CAPE students, it will be much easier to use the Internet to better explain what we’re learning in schools, than to learn those things at lessons.
Already CXC has put up their Notesmaster website which offers syllabi for all of the subjects for free. In addition to the syllabi, they accompany each objective in the syllabus with links to notes, videos, or other helpful resources. Additionally, countries like Jamaica already have websites (especially for English Literature) that help to explain concepts and coach their students for their exams.
It’s a new type of learning environment. Students are no longer completely at the mercy of their school or lessons teachers, they can now learn extra, at their own pace. In some schools in Silicon Valley students do lessons at home on the Internet and “homework” at school with teachers.
The Internet and communication technology are giving us the chance to have more resources at our finger tips than our parents ever had the chance to have access to. So let’s take this opportunity we’ve been given and use our resources wisely.