澳大利亚中小学校信息

There is a recent article about schools are banning wearable devices in one particular inner west school in Sydney. This is something bothering all parents and schools for the last decade or so. The situation got a lot tougher with all the new wearable devices in the last few years.

The primary school my children are attending ban the use of phones and also any wearable devices with an internet connection. On school trips, students can bring phones without sim card as a camera.

In the early days, smartphones are expensive and took a while before the hand me downs propagated from parents to the children. Girls seem to love social media and boys with games, availability of internet and devices means children are exposed to them at a very early age. I manage to talk the daughter into not sign up for any social media account until she turns 13, how I dread that day.

Most of the parents I know had struggles dealing with this issue. Particular as you cannot use a blanket bane on use of the device, as they need them to actually do their school works as well. With my daughter, I settled on the limit of half-hour a day and additional times as needed. Once they are in high school, they actually need a laptop for day to day work at school as well. I will just have adjust the policy as required.

I also had to set up sleep time on her tablet after I caught her using the tablet 2 am on the morning once. I highly recommend spend some time and set up proper parental supervision on your children’s device, saved me a whole bunch of headaches.

Thirty schools were evacuated on Tuesday and Wednesday, including students that were doing their HSC at the time. For people that are not familiar with the term, HSC is basically the university entrance exam in NSW, so it is a big deal.

Currently, it is confirmed that the emails came from Eastern Europe, so like many things internet, it will most likely be a black hole and we never found out who did it.

Now some personal experience, this happens frequently on both secondary school and university level. Most of the time around the end of the term examination period. I think this alone gives some hint on who benefits most from these type of incidents and the likely culprits.

I have never heard any of these turned into serious incidents. However, in the post 911 era, these tend to be taken very seriously all around the world.