Friday, October 22, 2010

What Do Schools Of The Future Look Like?


Schools of the future look much different than the schools we have today. Think about a Starbucks, comfortable, collaborative and engaging. Technology becomes the enabler of personalized, paced and student centric learning. This is not the school we attended.

The needs of students have changed, and so have the tools we now have to engage them. We know that students learn in many different ways - and the current 1 on 30 model of educational delivery with one teacher, 30 textbooks does not enable a personalized learning experience.


So, imagine this learning environment - laptops, online curriculum and assessment, a real time online student tutor AND teacher in the classroom (oh and the classroom is comfortable and collaborative). As curriculum and assessment shift to online delivery for standards based content, teachers become relieved of manually "inventing lesson plans and correcting homework" - so they have more time. Students become enabled to move at their own pace to master content - not forced to follow the one size fits all the pace of the class. Students, parents and teachers have real time assessments - to track progress and implement remediation. So think of the student centric learning environment as "personalized, paced, relevant and adaptive".

Web based curriculum 2.0 is coming - and it will be rich, relevant, real time and engaging - not to mention multi lingual and have a smartness to remediation. Learning environments of the future will give teachers more time with students - so the new ratio becomes "time per student" not "teacher per student".

To learn more, see: Schools of the Future, watch Sir Ken Robinson RSA Animation, Listen to Harvard Professor Clayton Christiansen and read his book Disrupting Class.

Listen to Dr. David Thornburg, Making The Shift From Teaching To Learning

View Engaging, Empowering, and Educating All Students For the 21st Century!

What do you think?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This sounds great! I would love to be able to send my child to a school where its more like starbucks than an education center, although I'm wondering where the funding for this is going to be coming from. Also, the post says that there would be an online tutor as well as an in class teacher. If right now each of our schools is looking at cutting 4 teachers, from where are we going to get these 1:1 online tutors from and how are we going to pay for them. Laptops, are these going to be provided via parents or is the school going to provide them; which again begs the question of where is the money going to come from.

I would love to see thse changes made because I agree no two children learn the same, but these are some amazing expensive proposals with no answer as to the source of funding.

Please elaborate.

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