TQ #3 - School of the Future

Technology should serve to augment human relationships, and to a large extent it is beginning to do that. In my opinion, the Internet is not being used to anywhere hear its full potential. I see this as primarily the fault of our hunger for the sensationalism presented by our media, who would have us believe that a pedophile lurks behind every MySpace and Facebook profile on the web. As in the Union City Case study we read about in the Dede book, just getting kids communicating with each other in writing is an excellent way to boost their test scores. Couple that with the known fact that teaching someone else is the best way to organize and solidify information in your own mind, and the Internet becomes the ultimate tool. A "School of the Future" would make abundant use of the Internet as a means of connecting students with one another.

The biggest gap I see in transforming the school of the present into the school of the future (or more accurately, turning the antiquated schools of the past into schools of the present) is the level of professional development offered to teachers. Simply offering a class on using some piece of software, even if that software is miraculous in its ability to effectively improve the learning of students, will accomplish nothing if the training does not show teachers how to incorporate the software into their lessons. Even a tool as ubiquitous as the Internet won't necessarily have any obvious application to the classroom if it isn't considered creatively. It's entirely possible that we already have the tools we need to produce classrooms for the future, what we need is implementation in the present.

I once read that the study of economics is the study of incentives. As much as I'd like to view money as a mere tool for accomplishing a higher aim, it takes center stage in the eyes of the public and the politicians who use it as the fundamental metric for success in all endeavors. Of course personal development costs money, but so do textbooks and software and other things we can find as open source. Can we as tech planners, convince districts to save money by turning to open source tools, and use what's saved to train teachers to incorporate technology into classrooms? I certainly hope so, because I'm beginning to suspect the alternative is to mandate the learning of foreign languages so our kids will be able to communicate with their bosses in ten or fifteen years.

Dede, C., Honan, J. P., and Peters, L. C. (2005). Scaling Up Success : Lessons Learned from Technology-Based Educational Improvement. Jossey-Bass.