The State Of Education

I had a chat with Astoria Schools Scott Holmsted today that was an eye opener about where things are going in the classroom. I thought I'd share it with you since many of us may not be as connected to the schools as we used to be.

As we have reported over the last couple of days, the high school will benefit from an upgrade in technology over the next few days and weeks as wireless Internet is installed on campus and through a pilot program the kids and teachers will have the use of new Google Chrome notebooks being supplied by that company.

The question is: what will they do with all this new stuff? Actually quite a lot.

For years now some have questioned why we need brick and mortar schools at all since so many distance learning options have become available. Others say nothing can really replace the experience of a physical classroom environment simply because 80% of human communication is non-verbal. That's why printed material like email alone are only useful to a limited extent as a communications tool.

How about a blending of both ideas into a physical/virtual educational environment where you still have the benefit of a teacher and class dealing with each other in a, at least potentially, full interaction and adding to that the best things that computing and networking offer?

One of the continuing issues this addresses is the expense of hard copy textbooks that are almost already out of date once they get into a student's hands. In the world of the virtual
classroom textbooks are on-line and can be updated easier. Instead of just a picture of an event that happened in history, now you can have video. Instead of the one size fits all approach now you can add localized, meaningful content to those on line textbooks. All that is accessed by the teachers and students.

Another example could come in quicker testing. By that I mean the ability for a teacher to prepare a on-line quiz covering in just a few questions the topic of that days class. The student logs on and takes the quiz and the teach knows immediately how effective the class was and which student might need further instruction. It's a game changer. It can affect everything from catching up on homework assignments to creating very professional looking presentations using readily available and free open source software. Google is a leader in what they call "cloud" computing where instead of loading expensive word processing software you simply access your account and use Google Docs. And that is just a quick example demonstrating the potential involved.

It does mean that teachers who want to get involved in this kind of thing will have to spend more time upfront updating, localizing and customizing on line materials. This is a stepped process and won't all happen next week but it does offer tremendous opportunities to significantly improve the entire educational experience.