For parents right now, the classroom may already seem fairly alien. When an elementary school student shares their frustration with their Prezi presentation about apartheid, or laments the lameness of their PowerPoint animated transitions, parents know that the world has changed.
When a high school student makes a video accompanied by music and special effects, demonstrating how Ovid’s word choices reveal character, the change is undeniable. However, having computers in the classroom is just the beginning. The future school is likely to be almost unrecognizable, in both good ways, and in ways that will need careful management in order to be an unmixed blessing.
Computers in the classroom! It sounds new. It scares some teachers, delights some students, and baffles some parents. Bring Your Own Device, as a policy, can be intensely stressful when first implemented. It was so scary and anxiety producing this September that it caused a major domestic disturbance in this parent’s household.
In fact, however, that particular innovation has been under development since the 1970s. One person who undertook to figure out how to help teachers teach and students learn with technology, starting in the mid-70s was Dustin Heuston. His ideas seemed ‘out there’ back in the 70s and 80s, but now seem standard. He recognized that just putting a computer in a school would not make kids better learners.
To achieve his goal of providing a nearly one-to-one educational experience to each child, the whole approach to presenting information and helping students use it constructively would need adjustment. This, in turn, would largely re-define what teaching and learning mean.
The equipment that will be available to students may soon be nearly unrecognizable. While laptops and tablets are in some classrooms now, in the future, each child could well have a wrist-mounted computer.
More conveniently, students might have a computer chip implanted somewhere on their person that could communicate with whatever serves as the equivalent of the internet in their decade. In such an environment, teachers will need to figure out how to do more than merely direct students to websites for facts and then ask them to regurgitate them.
Teachers will need to be able to teach kids how to think critically and apply the information that is available to them in solving problems. With any luck, and the right preparation, the kids of the future will go on to solve world problems such as hunger, environmental degradation, and geopolitical conflict.
One immediate challenge, and one that teachers (and some committed, serious students) are trying to resolve right now, is the problem of distraction. For the teacher, having kids involved in multiple social interactions online while sitting at their seats may seem like a class control nightmare. For many students, the activities of their classmates may prove fatal to their focus on the task at hand and on the instructor.
There are, indeed, tools available at present, such as Insight by Faronics, to control and manage the problem of kids visiting websites off-topic, playing games, Facebooking, or simply continuing legitimate work but doing so when the teacher has called for attention. They are even beginning to seem less creepy and intrusive. Thank goodness, because in the future, the teacher may confront student web activity that may be nearly invisible to the eye.
The solution of some teachers at the moment, for example, some faculty at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, is to permit most online activity, but to offer no leniency if the student has missed a key instruction, or course content, and fails an assessment. Thus, in the words of one teacher, there may be a great deal of what looks like goofing off during class, but one can distinguish the kids who are fooling around on their devices too much by their grades.
The advantages may outweigh such problems. Imagine being able to teach several classrooms at once, in widely dispersed regions of the world. This is already happening to some extent via MOOC courses such as Coursera.
A webcam, a decent microphone system, and a solid internet connection are all that are needed to reach literally tens of thousands of students globally. At least one instructor, Al Filreis, at the University of Pennsylvania, reports that it was “a blast”. Of course, in the case of Coursera, there are plenty of teaching assistants and a good bit of peer reviewing by other students to help with the volume of work.
This model for making quality instruction available to the entire world is likely to expand, and the potential impact is hard to fathom. The limitations of affordability, cultural prohibitions (for example, against women in the classroom), and geography, will become simply irrelevant.
Imagine students being able to do collaborate in real time, with no barriers of messaging or signal loss. This is happening to some extent now using Skype or Facebook or one of the Google tools. However, there are sometimes delays in these otherwise rich media channels, due either to dropped signals, or slow internet connections.
A future of untrammeled, nearly effortless, and reliable communication will be accompanied by other challenges. How can teachers design assignments and assessments to require rather than punish the inevitable cooperation that will occur? This is going to require imagination and creativity, but good teachers are endowed with these anyway.
Many classrooms are already filled with equipment and software that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years back. Many students have access to a breadth of information that seems to rival Dr. Who. With any luck, these kids will go on to use all these resources to solve tough global problems like hunger, environmental degradation, and conflict.