We had our second computer practicals today and like before, the exam was really retarded.

First of all, the topics made no sense. One of the topics was Google Translate, and it is so easy to use. Forget about rocket scientist, you don't even have to be good with technology to be able to use it. Google has made it THAT easy.

The topics are written on a piece of paper and kept near the computer. So, the guy using the computer sees a piece of paper with "Google Translate" written on it and if he doesn't know how to begin, he's definitely going to google "Google Translate".


Voila! That's how easy Google has made it. The practical is redundant.

The second topic was using Google Earth, to locate your city. Again, if the person doesn't know how to use Google Earth, he'll just google it.


Click on it and you're half done.

Then you just have to do what any Indian is best at, choose the options that are free. And just enter the name of your city, anyone can figure it out. My classmates aren't geeks and even they could do this. (No screenshots because sadly, the web plugin for Google Earth doesn't work on Linux :( )

The third topic was using blogger and this one is, in my opinion, the second stupidest computer practical I have heard of.

Firstly, you have to log into blogger to start doing anything. Couple of reasons why that itself is a problem. We do it using the school's internet, which is being used by 10 other computers. So, out of around 15 people, only 10 can use the internet at once, that too very slowly.

Secondly, you have to log into google to use blogger. If you use your email-id, google asks you to verify your identity because it's a new login location. Of course, you can't verify because we're not allowed to carry our mobile phones with us. Or you could make a new google account, but wait, that requires you to verify using a mobile phone too. (Some accounts can log in without verification but those are accounts with low security and, uhm, not many know how to change the security.)

Thirdly, the practical itself is stupid. You're told to create a blog, and post something on it. Seriously, google has made blogger easy to understand, anyone can make a blog. But the posting part is what's stupid. It's a computer practical, not an English exam. The practical has almost nothing to do with blogs. A better practical would be to write an essay in Notepad.

And the last topic is, as far as I'm concerned, the stupidest. GeoGebra. We only have, like, 1 class of computer (practical) a month, which the teacher mostly uses for theory. All year, I think we've only had 3 or 4 practical classes. And, GeoGebra isn't something any average person can just figure out. So, most of us didn't know what to do. I just hovered over different tools and figured out their purpose and my practical was pretty easy, all things considered, but some people couldn't do it. It's not their fault, they simply didn't know how.

The teacher told us to study from the text book. For the practicals. Apparently, she doesn't know the difference between theory and practical. And since I didn't know much about GeoGebra, I had actually tried studying from the textbook. But here's the thing, the textbook English is really poor. It's really difficult to understand what you're supposed to, and there are no diagrams.

We also had to write the practicals. The board really doesn't know what practical means. I get it, you don't want to make things easy for the students, but, when have you ever been asked to write steps for using Google Translate? Or draw a diagram? A diagram, we had to draw a diagram for our computer practicals.

Not only are they teaching us stupid topics, they're asking us to present it in a retarded way.