The "next big thing" in education is technology in the classroom. Now, technology has been in the classroom for a long time - after all, most of my fellow baby-boomers grew up in schools with filmstrip projectors. Remember those? The record playing with narration, then the *BEEP* to tell you to move to the next slide - and the students begging to be the one to advance the projector. Then we had movie projectors, overhead projectors, VCRs, DVD players, and finally (for the really advanced schools) computer labs.
But none of those really changed how teaching was done in the classroom. Think about it - a teacher showing a documentary to the class from a DVD is no different educationally than if she just presented the same content in a lecture and held up pictures to illustrate the content. The DVD might be better presented, the images might be easier to see, there could be live action rather than pictures, but it's still basically the teacher presenting a body of content to the whole class. The students might or might not be paying attention, they might or might not be comprehending the material, they might or might not want to explore something in more depth - but it doesn't matter.
And think about the direction of the learning: it is always going from the teacher to the student. The teacher might be using various forms of media - lecture, pictures, videos, textbooks - but she is the one presenting the content, and the students are passive receptors of it.
But I want you to think back to your own days in school. Which things really stuck with you, or at least stuck with you past the date of the test? If you had a really captivating teacher, you might remember some of the lecture content. But generally what you remember most are those things which you actively pursued. For myself, in music history the teacher introduced me to the neo-classical style of Paul Hindemith. I went and purchased his organ sonatas and read up on Hindemith so I could play his music well. Maybe a teacher assigned you to do a science project, and you learned how to make weapons-grade plutonium from common household items. Or perhaps your high school history teacher loved talking about Robert E. Lee, so you ended up majoring in history and doing doctoral research on Lee. For the most part, those things you have really learned well are those things you actively pursued and studied. It was probably a result of a teacher introducing you to something, but still you learned the most from what you dug into for yourself.
Now think about technology, particularly computers. When the personal computer first became popular in the 1980s, the typical price point for a well-equipped (not top-of-the-line, but not bargain-basement) model was around $2,000. Over the years, the power of the personal computer increased (more RAM, faster processors, color monitors, more disk storage, etc.), but the price stayed the same - about $2,000. So a school could possibly afford to put one in each classroom, or maybe equip a lab with 10-20 computers, but that was about it. If a family had a computer, there was one for the whole family, and it sat at home. Those computers also were not connected to the outside world, except for the rare geeks (like me) who used dial-up modems to connect to online bulletin boards.
Fast forward to today. The typical price point for well-equipped computers is less than $1,000, with vastly more computing power than ever before. And those computers are portable - laptops. Then we have the tablets (iPad, Surface, etc.) which run $600 or less, and smartphones (iPhone, various Androids, etc.) which serve as computers themselves. And all these devices are connected to the world through the internet with high-speed connections which make finding and downloading information almost instantaneous.
So now, instead of having one computer in a classroom or a computer lab down the hall, almost all our students have their own computers. They might be smartphones, tablets, or laptops (or all three), but the point is that our students have ready access to computers and to the world through the internet. The ready availability of computer technology to students can be a game-changer.
What does that do to the educational model? Does instruction have to proceed in one direction, almost exclusively from teacher to student? Should it continue to follow that model? How does the availability of technology influence that discussion? I want to follow up on that in the next article.
But none of those really changed how teaching was done in the classroom. Think about it - a teacher showing a documentary to the class from a DVD is no different educationally than if she just presented the same content in a lecture and held up pictures to illustrate the content. The DVD might be better presented, the images might be easier to see, there could be live action rather than pictures, but it's still basically the teacher presenting a body of content to the whole class. The students might or might not be paying attention, they might or might not be comprehending the material, they might or might not want to explore something in more depth - but it doesn't matter.
And think about the direction of the learning: it is always going from the teacher to the student. The teacher might be using various forms of media - lecture, pictures, videos, textbooks - but she is the one presenting the content, and the students are passive receptors of it.
But I want you to think back to your own days in school. Which things really stuck with you, or at least stuck with you past the date of the test? If you had a really captivating teacher, you might remember some of the lecture content. But generally what you remember most are those things which you actively pursued. For myself, in music history the teacher introduced me to the neo-classical style of Paul Hindemith. I went and purchased his organ sonatas and read up on Hindemith so I could play his music well. Maybe a teacher assigned you to do a science project, and you learned how to make weapons-grade plutonium from common household items. Or perhaps your high school history teacher loved talking about Robert E. Lee, so you ended up majoring in history and doing doctoral research on Lee. For the most part, those things you have really learned well are those things you actively pursued and studied. It was probably a result of a teacher introducing you to something, but still you learned the most from what you dug into for yourself.
Now think about technology, particularly computers. When the personal computer first became popular in the 1980s, the typical price point for a well-equipped (not top-of-the-line, but not bargain-basement) model was around $2,000. Over the years, the power of the personal computer increased (more RAM, faster processors, color monitors, more disk storage, etc.), but the price stayed the same - about $2,000. So a school could possibly afford to put one in each classroom, or maybe equip a lab with 10-20 computers, but that was about it. If a family had a computer, there was one for the whole family, and it sat at home. Those computers also were not connected to the outside world, except for the rare geeks (like me) who used dial-up modems to connect to online bulletin boards.
Fast forward to today. The typical price point for well-equipped computers is less than $1,000, with vastly more computing power than ever before. And those computers are portable - laptops. Then we have the tablets (iPad, Surface, etc.) which run $600 or less, and smartphones (iPhone, various Androids, etc.) which serve as computers themselves. And all these devices are connected to the world through the internet with high-speed connections which make finding and downloading information almost instantaneous.
So now, instead of having one computer in a classroom or a computer lab down the hall, almost all our students have their own computers. They might be smartphones, tablets, or laptops (or all three), but the point is that our students have ready access to computers and to the world through the internet. The ready availability of computer technology to students can be a game-changer.
What does that do to the educational model? Does instruction have to proceed in one direction, almost exclusively from teacher to student? Should it continue to follow that model? How does the availability of technology influence that discussion? I want to follow up on that in the next article.