Almudena’s class, a teacher at a Secondary Education Institute, has been transformed into a chicken coop. “Jo, teacher, weren’t we going to do a WebQuest?” Protests one of the teenagers. She turns on the digital board and answers: “César, sit down. I already said open your laptops and connect to the internet: pop quiz.”
The order seems incongruous. How are you going to evaluate your students’ knowledge with the whole network before your eyes! Well, it is feasible. This method has already been tested in schools in Denmark and, if approved, students will be able to take their exams there online as of 2011. It is about finding the necessary information with which to develop an original work. To prevent them from copying, educators will do checks on the pages visited.
And now, there are those who allow chat, such as Enrique Dans, professor of Information Systems at IE Business School in Madrid. “My students take their exam on the laptop and send it to an email account. Before I let them use everything except the chat. Now I don’t care, because a third person is another resource.”
Let’s accept it:the way of learning has changed. Today we could not ensure the success of a television program likeThe time is goldfrom the late 80s and early 90s, in which a contestant suffered between encyclopedic volumes until he found an enigmatic piece of information. “Google it!” Any teenager would say. A digital divide separates young people from the generations that precede them, and in the classroom this gap becomes especially steep. Many teachers are digital immigrants in front of their students, natives of the cyberworld. Teachers have seen sophisticated gadgets invade their schools, and a profound transformation is expected in the way of generating and transmitting knowledge. Indeed, the explosion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education is yet to come.
Juan Manuel Núñez, director of corporate ICT for Grupo SM in Madrid, his eyes shine when he imagines what remains to be invented. “I don’t believe in a futuristic classroom, but in anew teaching supported by powerful technologies. There will be more confluence between formal and non-formal education – that which takes place outside of school -, the sources of knowledge will multiply, the teacher will go from being a transmitter to a learning regulator, there will be new devices from which to navigate, write and read. And the student will not be the same either. “
Chalk says goodbye with the advent of superscreens
The transition has begun. There is no longer any need to get chalk stained since the brand new interactive digital displays (POIs) preside over the classes. A video projector connected to a computer focuses images on the POI, which is controlled from a laptop, a tablet PC or directly on the screen. Its possibilities only depend on the creativity of the teacher.
It allows you to view graphics and videos, establish links, write, export files, send them by email, etc. Various studies, such as those of the British Julie Cogill, PhD in Education, show thatyoung people, familiar with hypertext and interaction, become more involved in classes with IDPs. In addition, it enhances collaboration and social skills, and motivates teachers.
The classic school print with pencils and books on the desk disappears at times. The student works with his laptop or histablet and the teacher controls the screens from his computer. There are even centers with a computer loan and repair shop. In addition to highly mobile devices and blackboards, the most varied applications have been adapted to the educational world, such as video games, virtual environments, social networks, blogs, forums … But there is bad news for techno-optimists: technologies will not contribute anything revolutionary as long as the usual didactic methods are still used.
The next step is to integrate all the technological paraphernalia. “If you can think of how to integrate the mobile in the classroom, we will become golden,” Núñez jokes. And he adds: “Free SMS challenges could be posed to students. The podcast should also be exploited. We know that kids enjoy mobile phones, MP3s and video games. In Japan, for example, a novel by SMS has had a tremendous success with young people. Why not incorporate what they like into the classroom? If you can get them hooked, you can get them interested in literature, physics or whatever. “
As for the educational team of the future,visionaries dream of a multipurpose device that brings together all imaginable functions – games, computer, telephone, document reader, internet television – and that is compatible with systems to work in groups. It must also be taken into account that technology must adapt to the space and time of a class. This lasts 50 minutes, and of them today the teacher loses five in placing the projector, as many in which the students start their computers, and even more in disassembling everything. “Nobody asks if the textbook will fail or if the key to the class will open the door. When technology works like this, in a transparent way, it will be part of the classroom in a natural way”, warns Núñez.
The challenge is to create products designed for the school rather than forcibly integrating technologies from other disciplines. “Looking to the future, I am not thinking of a classroom full of computers, but one in which the walls are touch screens for access to knowledge. Or a music class that, instead of a monitor with a staff, has a grand piano on it. floor. Or perhaps a teachers’ room with multiband videoconference connected to another center. And these are technologies that we do not have today, “says Núñez. Multi-touch tables have already appeared in which several children can draw at the same time with their hands, order the periodic table or solve mathematical operations. It is a technology created for training. “The PDI works. Why? Núñez wonders. Because it is nothing more than a classic blackboard to which we have incorporated technology.Electronic books are not yet successful because there is no interface that supplants the properties of a book, which does not break when falling, smells, allows aiming … “.
The e-book is breaking discussion records among tech experts, publishers, and readers. As early as 1913, Edison proclaimed that “books will soon become obsolete in schools. It is possible to teach any branch of knowledge with films. Will our school system change completely in the next ten years? He was wrong. According to Augusto Ibáñez, who was coordinator of New Technologies applied to SM Education and today is its editorial director,“the disappearance of the textbook is a technophile myth”. The emotional experience of reading on paper is richer than in an e-book, and students still prefer printed material over digital. Still, its introduction to education is imminent. Amazon has launched a pilot program with US universities to test its ebook readerKindle, and initiatives such asCourseSmart, a consortium of publishers that will offer their digital books at half the price of printed books. Several student associations have created the campaignMake Textbooks Affordable which proposes, among other things, agreements between educational centers and publishers to use e-books through special licenses.
Textbook specialists are committed to making them adaptable. “For example, if in my digital book there is a video about bees, and my students have made another one at the school farm, I will be able to change it for this one,” explains Núñez. But will teachers be willing to get into this mess? “The school is refractory to change”, Ibáñez points out, and gives the example of Extremadura:? It is one of the most computerized regions of Europe, with 2.9 students per computer -the European average is nine-, but teachers hardly they use them. Has a tremendous investment been made in technology before changing the mindset of the teacher?In 2006, a report by the European Commission revealed that our teachers are the most techno-skeptical in Europe: 52.3% do not find benefits in the use of computers in the classroom. The curious thing is that in Finland, leader of the international evaluation programs, 26.9% do not see advantages either.
No studies have shown that technologies improve academic outcomes, but they dothe use of innovative strategies increases motivation and integration. “A problem in the class is to attend to the diversity of the students – explains Ibáñez -. The computer offers opportunities to enhance the capacity of each one. While those who have difficulties review with exercises or interactive adventures, advanced students can doWebQuests-guided investigations on the net-. And the teacher addresses the rest. It’s a flexible system that goes beyond the lecture. “
Podcast lessons that can be listened to on the iPod
Thenon-face-to-face educationhas excelled with online communication. Distances have shortened since the universeSecond Life it was filled with virtual university campuses where students and professors interact in real time. For Dans the web is an essential tool. “I evaluate my students for their contributions, but in class there is little time to intervene. However, if a student asks me a question via the web, I return it to the forum to build a thread, I include articles, illustrations, etc. It is an interaction superior to that of the classroom, which should be reserved for activities in which attendance has an added value “.
The teacher as the central focus of information has its days numbered, say the gurus of the new education.The new teacher will be a supernode in a learning network. Dans explains that in his adult classes “there are people who have had experiences that I do not have, or who go online and find information that I have not read. We will move from the current unidirectional model to a system in which the teacher absorbs what others contribute and help to discern the relevant information. “
Others, more radical, predict the end of the classroom.David Wiley, who is Professor of Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University,stood a few months ago in front of a lot of university authorities and sentenced: “Their institutions will be irrelevant in 2020”. Wiley is committed to universal access to education, with cyber-lessons that can be downloaded for free from the web. According to him, before the educational centers offered exclusive access to knowledge, but now this is increasingly free. And if they don’t adapt, they will die. In the heat of the technological boiling, educators, publishers, hardware and software companies, gurus and politicians have their own proposals. Nobody can be sure what the repercussions of the technologies will be in the classroom, but what is clear is that they will be there.
