Gadgets to Change Classrooms
Classrooms are moving beyond a one-size-fits-all mentality, fueled by technology and the demand to raise educational results — leading to changes may appear as early as the first day of school this fall.
Students are used to blackboards, desks and piles of books in the classroom, and while kids will always need a place to sit, other elements of the traditional school setting could be changing in the future. School-aged children begin consuming content on smartphones tablets and e-readers at ever younger ages, make the transition from books to tablets in the schools a natural progression, and educators, politicians and companies are pushing initiatives to bring tablets and e-books to the classroom in order to keep the U.S. competitive in the future.
And for parents just getting comfortable with interactive white boards, which began popping up in classrooms during the mid-2000s to let teachers edit papers projected onto a large screen with stylus-like pens — hold on, because those could be changing, too.
Yale students recently used free “Smoothboard” software, an infrared pen, and a Wii remote to transform a standard projector into the equivalent of a $1,000-5,000 SMART board for about $100. The innovation could have a big effect on public school classrooms in the future.
Many parents and kids might be surprised at the growing number of tablets, whiteboards and maybe even “Wiimote Whiteboards” appearing in their classrooms this year, but those are just the first innovations arriving in classrooms, as tech continues to transform the educational setting.
Moving Away From a One-Size-Fits-All Mentality
It’s not just bells and whistles that are changing — the classroom, beyond becoming increasingly wired, could also be more customized for students. This spring educators from across the country participated in seminars to grapple with the emerging hot topic in education: how technology can personalize learning in a classroom full of diverse students with varying interests, skills and learning styles to move beyond the current one-size-fits-all mentality.
The idea of personalized learning focuses on the concepts of adjusting the pace and approach as well as leveraging students’ individual interests and motivations in the learning process. For example, students can learn a history lesson on tablets, which can offer interactive quizzes for those learners who need more reinforcement to keep pace, as well as sidebar material on a specific battle or information on societal trends occurring at the same time to spark broader interest.
Also, by using the devices’ connectivity, the instructor can collaboratively engage students with quick, interactive surveys and debates, culling the students’ votes and opinions in an electronic forum for the group to digest and share.
Still, even if there is agreement on this main value of customization, other questions — like those about which systems empower and support that model — need to be sorted out. But developers and educators are likely to hit a number of roadblocks as they navigate the quagmire that is the typical bureaucracy of a U.S. school district.
To Buy or To Build, That is the Question
Rather than waiting for committees to deliberate and state officials to fund more classroom technology, many educators and administrators, like the students at Yale, are using the Web to build their own applications and software for individualized learning. This decision has potential to spark innovation, which can be stifled in school systems where the buying and distribution of technology, textbooks and supplemental material favors larger, more established vendors and is a long process.
By developing everything in-house, educational systems have the control to tweak the software based on teachers’ needs, providing immediacy, flexibility and also saving money, but these programs have their own challenges.
One difficulty schools face in moving forward with their own programs is that most spending power comes from state politicians with their own policy objectives. For example, as part of a $15 million effort to make collection of student data more uniform throughout Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker mandated all school districts use the same student-information system, which would be provided by one vendor and has the potential to snarl some school districts’ plans to develop their own software.
Also, to share data for interactive discussions, these systems often require cloud-based services, which many states prohibit out of security concerns over remotely storing digital data. Similarly, social media technology, which can be a platform for student collaboration, is raising concerns about securing data as well as ensuring the network of communication supports education, not socializing.
Debate Over Customization
An in-house approach is often faster, easier to repair and fosters open communication between developers and teachers, but it can lack sophistication and scope of products designed on a bigger scale. For these reasons, others advocate for a privately developed customized education software, since these developers work across multiple customers and can apply what works in one place to another, adding heightened expertise to the product.
Also, while initial development costs are likely lower on in-house innovations, one of their biggest drawbacks is that too much of the maintenance and institutional knowledge lies with too few people.
And, even if state budgets revive enough to consider attracting a private-sector developer to work with the schools, the sticker shock of the salary such a person can command is daunting. Some talented people could be willing to eschew the big bucks of the private sector to take a cut in pay to toil away in an often bureaucratic educational setting, but the pickings are slim.
However, the education market for technology is huge, and if developers are willing to grapple with the ins and outs of school systems, there is great potential. Code for America executive director Jennifer Pahlka points out the huge scale government operates on in her keynote address, “Coding the Next Chapter of American History,” at March’s Southwest Conference in Austin. According to Pahlka, local, state and federal government spends a total of $140 billion on technology per year, compared with the $2 billion a profitable company like Apple pays its apps developers to make products to run on its devices.
Those figures underscore how in the corporate world, a very small team of talented people can deliver something very valuable in a short amount of time since they are nimble and not subject to the same funding and organizational challenges that school systems face. While this could be a drawback to in-house programs, it may hint at a bigger solution.
Public-Private Partnerships?
Public-private partnerships such as the one created to give $35 tablets for students in India represent one possible solution. A tablet-subsidy partnership between a technology company such as Apple, Microsoft or an Android tablet maker and the U.S. government could speed adoption of, for example, a digital textbooks program, where schools could subscribe to automatic digital updates instead of paying for shipments of brand-new, paper textbooks every few years.
India’s decision is echoed here at home by news that iPad manufacturer Apple is developing a program to reinvent easily worn, heavy textbooks by replacing them with digital versions that feature interactive, multi-touch capabilities like videos, graphics, and built-in quizzes to engage students and reviews and instant feedback to make lessons come alive in a way particularly suited to a generation that grew up using digital media.
These developments show it is possible for an institution like the nation’s educational system to use its in-house know-how and still partner with the private sector in developing a uniform program to expand teachers’ ability to deliver greater individualized instruction.
After all, a recent Pew Internet/Elon University of 1,021 Internet experts revealed 60 percent agreed that by 2020, “there will be mass adoption of teleconference and distance learning to leverage expert resources…a transition to ‘hybrid’ classes that combine online learning components will less frequent on-campus, in-person class meetings.”
If “hybrid” classrooms — and hybrid jobs — are the future, we need to get busy remodeling today’s classroom so our children are ready to meet, or maybe even exceed, those expectations.
