School Tech and the Classroom of the Future

says who exactly hit a wall with that one. All right, so we're going to talk today about technology used in the classroom and what the school classroom of the future could look like. Uh. Technology in classrooms is kind of

a big deal. I mean, we've we've heard about a lot of different initiatives to try and bring more technology into the classroom, and about how the emphasis on the importance of technology and daily life dictates that we have to introduce students to technology earlier and uh and more effectively.

The more effectively, as it turns out, is the really tricky part, because it's not to not to diminish how difficult it is to raise the money and purchase the the the materials and the equipment necessary to to allow students to have access to technology, but it's way easier to throw tools at someone than it is to teach them how to use them. But we're really not focusing

on that in this episode. This is going to be one of actually a series where we thought we'd do it like an educational series of episodes, similar to our movie making series. So in this one, let's just talk about some of the tech you find in classrooms today and what we might see I don't know, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future. It's really hard to protect that kind of thing because technology is notoriously difficult to you, you know, be clairvoyant and sit there and say this

is exactly what's going to happen in ten years. Not to mention the fact that UM budgeting being what it is right now in the current economic downturn, that's that's slowing down some things like R and D plus you know, the ability to add new technology to the classroom. UM

now the schools are strapped for cash to pay teachers with. Yeah, we really we're gonna try and focus on what the ideal situation would be, you know, like, let's let's assume that the schools have the funding necessary to implement the technology, what would a classroom in the future look like. Um, but yes, uh, you make a really good point. The the classroom of the future relies just as much or even more so upon political and economic uh factors than

technological factors. But let's we're gonna try and take a shiny happy look and assue whom that that the schools get the support system they need in order to implement the classroom of the future. Well, there are all kinds of things that that people can do, and they're already Uh, there's already been a lot of development along those lines with the technology in the classroom, things that that are already in place today, um, that I think will be

refined in the next generation of technology and classrooms. Now I'm coming at this at at a real disadvantage actually, And the reason why I say that is because when I attended school back in elementary school and high school and even college, uh, technology was pretty much the same as it had been from all the way back to

the fifties. I mean, you're talking about the fact that the most technologically advanced thing that we had access to in a general class was usually a television and VCR, which, of course does you know that is after nineteen fifty obviously the VCR, But but that was about as far

as we got as far as advanced technolog was. We did have computer classes where we had access to computers, but that was not one of the tools that was used throughout the school like that wasn't every classroom did not even have a single computer, much less multiple computers for students to use. And of course when Paulette went to school, they had just recently discovered fire, so he also is coming at this from a different Please put

down the hammer. Yeah, you'll get what's coming to you. Actually, we we we do have, uh to give you all the listeners perspective. We do have quite a few younger listeners who are in school. UM. So you may laugh at this, but you think about this, Um, Jonathan and I are both in our thirties. Um, and it really, you know, if you think about it, that's a really short time for the advances in technology to have come

as far as they have. I mean before, you know, when we were in grade school, we had you know, film projectors in the classrooms. Still you know, I we bird projectors, overhead projectors, you know, with the transparencies. Uh, TVs in some cases VCRs. Um, you know, now everything is completely different. There were there might have been a computer or two in the media center, but I mean just a few years before, you know, in in the nineteen sixties and early seventies, that was that was really rare.

We didn't have electronic calculators in the classroom until probably second or third grade for me. And you know, we weren't really allowed to use them as part of our studies until high school when we got into things like chemistry and physics where you actually needed to do pretty

complex calculations quickly. So you know, now in in most modern classrooms, I think, uh, at least in in schools that are that can afford them, there are you know, PCs pretty much you know, in most classrooms, I think, and at least in the United States. Um. Of course, it varies from school to school, school district, school district money has a whole lot to do with that. Um. But computers are pretty affordable now, so it's not nearly as unusual to see them as it would have been

just a few years ago. Yeah, I mean, even even some things that are are incredibly simple from a technological point of view have made a big impact in the

way that uh that teachers teach and students learn. For example, again, when I attended school, um, the chalkboard was still very much the most common form of of display that you would see in a classroom, and white boards really weren't around at all until I think, I think when I got to maybe my junior or senior year in high school, our school started to switch over from chalkboards to white boards, which, you know, of course, we're just easier to maintain and

much easier to write on. And you also didn't have to worry about someone going crazy and doing the fingernails down the white board thing because it just didn't didn't have the same effect as the bone chilling sound you would get from the chalkboard. Please, whoever is doing the sound effects for this podcast, please do not include that, because I personally can't stand it and I definitely don't

want to listener mail about it. Yeah. No, brief brief aside. Yeah, I had one my pre calculus teacher would be covered from tip of finger to elbow in chalk dust. I mean, the chalk dust in that room was pervasive. It was it was very, very bad. I'm kind of glad to see the chalkboard go away. Definitely, on the downside, you can't You can no longer punish students by making the bad ones go out and bang the erasers together to get all the chalk dust out. We can make them

bang the eracers together. There's just not gonna get any chalk dust test the racist racers together for no reason. But there are classrooms today that have gone beyond even the white whiteboards where you can have projectors and either project against the screen or a wall or whatever UM

and use that as a display. And I've even seen a few now granted this isn't a very few select schools because it's clearly an expensive um UH investment, but I've seen some some using UH flat panel displays or or even multi touch sort of surfaces to UH to display lessons and and show concepts and UH that's something that I would expect to see more in the future

as a combination of factors converge. One, assuming that that we get our our priority straight and we invest in education to the extent that that's really necessary to that that the prices continue to drop on the technology, so things like multi touch UM displays end up going down in price because right now, like let's say you wanted to get a Microsoft Surface, which would be a useful educational tool at least potentially could be Um, that's around

ten grand. You know, that's that's a pretty expensive interracy. Yeah, and and of course technology does break down over time, so your make an investment that you know is not a one time investment. It's going to be a continuing investment. You're gonna have to maintain that upgrade and things of that nature. So um, but let's assuming we get there, that kind of of display would be something I would

expect to see in the classroom of the future. And I can think of a dozen different ways to use that technology to to help expand a lesson so that it goes beyond the simple here's a fact and uh and even here's the context of that fact. Um. You know, the whole skill and drill approach to teaching would not necessarily even come into play, which is great because skill

and drill is really not that effective. I mean, it can, it can teach you a very basic approach to do something, but it's it's not the kind of thing that usually lasts in a in a student's mind. Right. Well, you know, it's pretty well established that people learn by doing, which is one of the things that I think makes touch screens such a good The fact that they are becoming more affordable. It makes it such a good thing because it will allow you know, assuming that people are you know,

have the opportunity to purchase this for their schools. It's going to give students the opportunity to get their hands on the project and actually dig in a little bit. Um. And the more pervasive technology gets in the classroom, uh, you know, that's that's gonna be a good thing too, to have computers on desktops and things like that. Um. Of course, those things can be distractions just as just

as easily, um, you know, speaking as uh. Well, actually, by the time you're listening to this, I will no longer be a college student and only a recent graduate. But time of recording this, I have a couple of days left. Um. Yeah, I mean people, I've heard stories

from professors. UM. Now this is primarily higher education, but people bring their laptops to class and theoretically you could be taking notes, you could be recording the lecture for a later Um, you could be playing mind sweeper when the when the professor is not looking, and I have ends a lot. Yeah, if you're in you're in congress. Solitaire is the game to play. Really you didn't hear that story? No I didn't. Yeah, yeah, let's not go

into it. It's depressing. But yeah, I mean person having personal technology on the desk UM can be a boon and in a hindrance to the teacher as well. You know, we have to be have to be careful about it with regard to that as well. So really, the technology I mainly focus on for things like that's currently in schools and stuff that needs to be more pervasive, especially once we're looking at things like the classroom of the future. UM. Internet connectivity is definitely way up there. And uh and

ideally you should have both wired and wireless connectivity. Uh. And either you're using you know, however you're getting the Internet access, whether it's satellite or through cable or whatever. UM, it needs to be reliable and fast so that you can actually the access the tools that you're using to to teach, or if you're a student, so that you can access the tools you need to learn. Um. And

uh so that's that's pretty much a given. So we need to make sure that that we have broadband connectivity to the school systems so that they can take advantage of the tools. I mean, when you think about it, once you get past that initial investment, that's something that that pays for itself very quickly. Because now when again, when I went to school, my resources were limited to

whatever was in the school building. You know, I didn't there was no internet for me to connect to if I were to, if I needed to, They just not for me to connect to. Right, Um, there was an Internet that I could not connect to, or at least there was a network at the time when I first going started going to school, there was Urbanette. But at any rate, the the idea here being that that you were limited to whatever it was in the school library

and your textbooks, that kind of thing. So if you were doing a project, you might make a trip all the way out to the nearest public library, which would expand your your resources a little bit. Or if you're lucky to live near a college, you might go to the college library, which expanded it extensively, but it still was you were still limited geographically by you know, how much information you could access. Now with the Internet, that's

no longer an issue. A lot of schools have agreements or even a database where students can use it to research scholarly articles and uh and journals and things of that nature that you physically could not store within the school's building. So uh so, obviously internet connectivity is of vital importance if if a student is to have the

same advantages in one district as a student and another. Now, um, we are our headquarters are in Atlanta, so we've got kind of accustomed to the whole city life lifestyle, right, so we have we're used to having lots of resources at our disposal. Now, I grew up in a more much more rural part of Georgia where those resources were not as close at hand. So it's also important to make sure that the connectivity extends out to the school districts that aren't in cities that you know. Those are

just as important. You never know where the next you know, brilliant mind's gonna come from. It's not necessarily going to be the heart of the metropolis. It may come out of the middle of nowhere. But unless you give that person access to the right tools, he or she may not be able to reach full potential. So Internet connectivity. We're talking, so we need devices for students to to

access the Internet. We need the Internet connect connectivity or else the devices are pretty much, you know, just a dead weight. Um. Theoretically, you can then move to a paperless school classroom, although we've seen how difficult it's been to do that in business. But you know, you could, in theory move to an environment where you no longer needed to turn in paper assignments or hand out paper tests. Everything could be done over a computer. UM, I know that. There.

I'm sorry. I was going to say that that that might raise questions in some people's minds about cheating, which granted, happens whether you're using a hard copy or soft copy of anything. Uh. My argument is that I think I think a lot of kids know how to use technology and very specific niche ways, without really understanding how it

works and how to take advantage of it. No, that doesn't mean they can't learn it, but uh, there seems to be this perception, at least among adults, that kids are technology iCal whizzes, and because they've grown up in the era of the Internet, they are Internet savvy and capable of navigating it in ways that we can't imagine, right, right,

I'm not convinced that's reality. Well no, um, I think what Jonathan is speaking of is I sent him an article that was in dirsh Bagel, the German news magazine, about in which they had done a study on on German kids, and they said, oh, well, you know, these German kids, they've grown up with the Internet. They're familiar with it, they know how to find the best information,

they know how their way around. As it turns out, they pretty much chat and watch video and listen to music and really other than that, they really aren't all that interested in it, nor are they comfortable, you know, digging around for information. They don't they can't maximize the Internet. They just sort of use it for recreational use and only when it's convenient for them. So it's not the indispensable tool for uh that it is for people who

are you know, thirties, forties. You know, we are all going, wow, this is really neat, and the kids are like, yeah, so it's been around, Yeah, it's it was here when I got here, So therefore it's just normal that to us, it's still new to them, it's what has always been there because their their age so, so part of the classroom of the future isn't just that you know, you have all these technological advances. It's also adjusting your your teaching methods so that you take full advantage of them.

But uh, let's let's talk a little bit more about some of the other elements we might see in the classroom of the future. Okay. Um. One of the things that that I was going to mention just a minute ago was, um, the virtual classroom tools that I've been personally that I've been using over the past two years, UM and pursuing my master's degree. And uh, you know those are tools like uh, those of you are college students probably may WinCE when I say the following word

blackboard or web ct Uh. Those two merged actually a few years ago. UM. There's an open source competitor, which I understand is really excellent called moodle. UM. Even those those have been used in higher education for several years now. Basically, for those of you who have been out of academia for a while or aren't an academia nut Okay, maybe not, um, you you may not necessarily be familiar with this. Um damn man nut. Um. Basically, what what this is is.

It gives UH people an opportunity to pursue distance education. It doesn't even necessarily have to be at a distance, but it does give you an opportunity to. It's sort of like an intra net for students because you can gather together participate in a lecture where the the professor or teacher can put up slides like a PowerPoint presentation for example. UM, he or she can show you the desktop on the computer so they can walk you through

what it is that they're doing. UM. You can share assignments, post discussion board postings, and basically start an online discussion. UM. You can see your grades. UH should the teacher UM be willing to post them? But you know it's it's kind of UM. I used to lose my assignment book all the time when I was a kid. And tools like this, you know, everything's posted on there. You don't have an excuse if you're out sick. You know what the day's assignment is, you know where you're supposed to be.

You can see what other people are doing that the teacher can track your progress through the course. I mean, these kinds of tools there, I would I would say they're probably still in their first maybe second generation, but I think in the future there'll be a lot more refined. There. The reason I said people might WinCE when they hear blackboard is um. As good as blackboard is, a lot of people complain about its stability and reliability. Um. And I think as as time goes on, it's like any

technology product, it's going to get more refined. It's going to get more sophisticated, and there will be more technology that you can more things that you can do with it, video chat and other functions. Yeah, that's that was the word I is looking for and trying not to look like I was looking for a ward um. But you know, the moodle thing actually brings up a good point because I think open source technology is going to make a big difference because open source, you know, may offer more

cost effective alternatives and get technology into classrooms. Right. Yeah. Some of the things that that I looked into when I was really looking at the classroom of the future have very little to do with technology directly, um, and more to do with adjusting the the whole paradigm, if you if you will, Yeah, the paradigm of how we go about educating students. So again, when I mentioned that

you know, the technology hadn't really changed much. If you look at the method of teaching, the just the average method of teaching in schools across the world really um, I think more often than not, you're going to find the classic teacher behind a big desk, maybe there's a whiteboard or chalkboard or something behind him or her, and then the students are seated at desks that are in rows that go to the back of the room, and so you have the teacher as a lecturer in front

of everybody presenting information. This is not necessarily the most conducive environment if you're especially if you're trying to incorporate things like technology, especially and particularly if you want to try and foster a sense of collaboration among students. I mean,

collaborative software is becoming more and more important. Things like you know, you just to throw out an example, Google Docs, you know, having a program like Google Docs where you can or service I should say, a service like Google Docs where you can go and collaborate with other authors and create a document. Um. That's becoming more and more important. So clearly that's something that needs to be taught as well in school. So you have to you have to

teach how to collaborate. Well, that traditional teacher the front students in rows is not really conducive to that. So a lot of the sources I was looking at focused not on on, you know, what technological advances should be there, although that was did play a part. It focused on things like breaking that up a bit and changing that. So it's no longer what we think of when you think of classroom, you don't think big teacher's desk at

the front and students in rows. So one of the suggestions was that you create little workstations, um where you see maybe four students at a station together, and those four become a work group, and you do you could have a docking station for each whatever device you want to use, whether it's a tablet kind of device or a laptop, something like that, UM, and that these workstations would be scattered throughout the room, uh, preferably using furniture that's easy enough to to move if you want to

change the setup, and the teacher, instead of being behind a big desk, would have a mobile workstation, so the workstation itself would be easy enough to move throughout the room, and the teacher would be more more like someone who would walk through the classroom and help guide discussions and answer questions and lend assistance and and uh would wouldn't be so much standing in the front of the room

and reciting facts and figures. Uh personally, Now, when I think about how that would have affected me back when I was a kid, uh, I think that maybe I'd be a multimillionaire by now because I'd be way smarter. Okay, I'm smart despite the way. I had great teachers, but these were teachers who were all following the very traditional method of teaching, standing up at the front and giving out lessons. Some of them were really good at engaging

students despite that. But um that yeah, that definitely does put up a wall. So a lot of the focus on the classroom of the future, or isn't necessarily you know, what kind of cool gadgets should students be using? Should we be giving them all? You know, MP three players and laptops? It was more about how can we create an environment that both supports that technology but also makes it an effective teaching tool? Right right? Well, I mean that that is the the procedure that some of them are,

some of the higher education UM organizations. I should say are are approaching because um, a lot of them have been giving out an MP three player to their students,

to incoming freshmen for years or sorry, first year students. UM, but uh, you know in other cases, you know, and UM, I read of one university that's giving out iPads, And I do think tablets might have an effect, assuming that there are more people going to adopt the tablet metaphor um, you know or yeah, so there are there other options.

I think that you could use UM to do that, but I think that having a device of that size gives you a different set of options because it's not just listening to and watching podcasts, although you know many universities are offering that to their students now. UM. There are also there's also the ability to use electronic books UM in that form factor, which would save a lot of wear and tear on the spine when you're trying to carry all that stuff around, especially again when when

you have big, thick, heavy textbooks in high school and college. Yeah, we did point out one distinct disadvantage to the electronic book format, which is you cannot sell your book back to these bookstore at the end of whatever class you've taken. That's true, and considering that electronic books, especially textbooks, tend to be the same cost or sometimes even more expensive

than the physical books. UM, that is a bummer. You know, if you're one of those college students who you know, you're really you're really stretching it to be able to pay for your education. First of all, my hats off to you, keep up the good work. You know we need you. But second of all, it is it's it's one of those things that really you have to take into consideration. Assuming that the school does not issue you the device upon which you will read e books, you

have to invest in that. You have to invest in the device, um, and then you have to purchase the electronic books knowing that you will not get any of that money back at the end of the term. I should also go ahead and add for those of you who are not familiar, for those of you in middle school or high school or even younger, um, in college, when you do purchase a book, it is really really expensive and when you sell it back, you get a fraction of what you paid, like a sometimes like one

around there, of what you paid for it. So it might be an eighty dollar book when you bought it, and you might get eight dollars back when you sell it back, but that's eight dollars more than you would get if you've got the electronic version. Yeah, these books have a tendency, of course. You know, professors are encouraged to write new versions of their old books with updated

information in them. So invariably when I bought my textbooks, I would buy them used and by the time it was time to sell it back at the end of the semester, there was a brand new version which completely which meant that mine useless, meant that you couldn't sell your spec anyway because there was Yeah, um, yes, that is also a possibility. And it would have been worse if you had bought those books new, because you would

have spent even more money. Well, E book readers dedicatide book readers, of course, have come down in price considerably. There's been a price war recently that's driven the cost of nook or a kindle um. And there are schools that have toyed with the idea of of a special universities and colleges mainly, but I toyed with the idea of purchasing them and giving them to students and their affordable Yeah, I'm sorry, um, but they you know, they

live about you know, the dollar price point. Now, Um, tablets have an advantage though, because the e ink and those dedicated readers only shows you black and white. A tablet device, you know, assuming it's running Windows or Android or the iOS um, you'd be able to look at the book in color, so you can see charts and graphs, uh,

photos in full color movies. That's the neat thing about the electronic book format, as you could embed and some of them are already doing, is embedding rich media in their audio files, video files, um, you know, things that you can't do with a traditional textbook. So that's sort of the thing. You have the cost in the factor where you can't sell your books back versus you know, Well, this is a pretty neat and immersive experience, more so

than reading black and white words on a page. Well, we're coming up on the half hour mark here, so let's just kind of sum up what we think of as the classroom of the future. We think of it as having access to devices, computational devices, whether that's a computer or a tablet or some other form factor that we don't even we can't even conceive of right now. UM. We think of it as having internet connectivity being very important so that you can have access to the wealth

of information that's out there. Uh. We think of it as having some sort of large display, whether it's a projected display or a panel display, where a teacher can show lesson plans, can show videos to the class, uh, and demonstrate principles in a in a visual medium. And UH, really it's it. It comes down to building the techniques that make this technology effective. That's that's what really will have to focus on. Because the technology is going to

get there. I mean, there there are enough consumer demands and industrial demands for this technology for for it to exist. UM. The question is can can education leverage that and use it effectively to teach students right now? UM, just to uh,

just to sort of put that all together in one place. UM. One one effort I think that is going sort of in that direction, UM is the one Laptop per Child initiative, which is there to provide low cost laptops two kids in countries where you wouldn't necessarily be able to get this kind of technology because it's so you know, price, so far out of their reach. That they can't even have it. And these are you know, basically an inexpensive, low powered laptop that's very very rugged to withstand being

used outside. Many of those students in those conditions, their classroom isn't a room they go outside to to study. UM. But it's got Internet connectivity, it's got speakers, it's got a game controller so the kids can play on it, UM, and a camera and it runs on an open source operating system UM called the Sugar System. UM. I just mangled that, but I can't find it in my notes fast enough. UM. But yeah, it's uh, it's oh, the Sugar Learning Platform and it's basically the Fedora Lennox UM

it's a version of that. And the thing is, I mean, these are very very inexpensive. They're working on the one laptop per child. Initiative is also working on a fold out that's sort of like the Microsoft Carrier. The next version is going to open up so it has two

touch screens UM, sort of like a book. And then they're also working on tablet that's supposed to be out in UM, which has many of the same types of functionality, but it is supposed to be you know, lower cost of course that has to be subsidized by a lot of people, so they take donations and and uh you know, request help from other people to help bring this to other to some of these underdeveloped uh school systems in

in many countries. But it's kind of a neat idea and it and it does bring down the cost, which may you know, in turn help other people in other parts of the world where they do have a little bit more money if they can get the power in the hands of the kids. That actually brings up another concern of mine, which is the classroom of the future might have lots of logos in it. It is entirely possible. The cameras yeah, well yeah, the cameras are another issue.

But really the logos thing bothers me because it's the idea of making sure that whatever you're teaching the students isn't biased toward a particular sponsor. Um, that's we have to worry about. Well, we'll just have to wait and see what the classroom of the future looks like, I guess, because you know, again, it's always fun to try and be a prognosticator, but it we're almost always way wrong.

We'll see more about that when we do our wrap up of our two thousand ten predictions podcast later this year. Not looking forward to that. I already know at least two of mine that I got totally and completely wrong, and I will be eating a lot of crow during that episode. But I'll still get a check mark because I'm the one who does that. So you, guys, if you have any questions or comments or topic suggestions, you

can email us. Our address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text stuff hs WSR handle, and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech Stuff h s W for moral this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented

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