Learning doesn't only take place in the classroom 

Most of us are familiar, and may have only experienced the conventional way of learning, where we drag ourselves to class at 8am, put all cell phones away (they are not allowed to be used), sit in the same place and listen to the same old stuff that we never find relevant or interesting. We just had to sit there and absorb all this information; we never had a chance to teach ourselves, it was frowned upon. Teachers thought that if they let us self-study that we never would, that we would just mess around all day, they never trusted us.

Technology was very limited in the school I attended, no phones, no tablets, no laptops in class and social media sites such as Facebook was not even accessible on school grounds. The teachers think they know everything, well mine did, and they were highly against any form of change even if it made the lesson more fun or even more understandable.

The only way students will learn is if they are interested, this can be done on their own or in the classroom, but if you are boring and they are never paying attention, then you might as well let them study and learn things on their own. Schools are not allowing for independence and individuality and forcing students into these boxes where they may not even belong.

No student ever wants to do homework, if we have maths to do but we really want to make a movie, or do something practical, maths will always lose, unless you get the students excited and motivated enough to actually want to do the maths homework. Schools need to become places where we want to hang out and where we want to be every day, not count down the hours till the end of school and then start counting down the days till its Friday. I cannot even begin to explain how many times I, as a student in high school, complained when I had to get up in the morning or that it was only Wednesday.

Information and Communication Technology (ITC) is an important aspect of teaching, the use of ITC creates many possibilities across the globe for people to have access to an education. Teaching does not only have to take place in the classroom and it also doesn’t have to be one way (teachers talk and students are silent listening only). These ITC standards can be limiting, and can be problematic where there is no internet access and can be limiting to those that do not have the basic computer literacy skills that are needed to understand the basics of technology

Distance learning is an option and should really be considered especially when getting to school every day is difficult, either far away or traffic is very bad. I learn the best when it is something I am interested in and when it is easy to understand. I love YouTube videos, they make my life easy, they make learning easy, I used it so often with maths in first year as the lecturers style of teaching was not matching with my style of learning, this made maths difficult for me and I lost the confidence and relevance of doing maths. I then came across khan academy, these YouTube videos gave me the confidence that the lecturer couldn’t

Thus I don’t believe that if you allow students to teach themselves that they won’t, we need to trust students more and let them, if they are not learning in school, to find the best way for them to learn.