Visit to the Classroom of the Future (COTF)

The Classroom of the Future at NIE was very impressive. There was so much high-tech gadgetry in there that I kept wanting to stop listening to our guide so that I could gawk at and play with all the gadgets. But I didn't, because I'm an adult, you see.

On the surface, the COTF looked nothing like a regular classroom today.

Instead of a white board, the teacher wrote in his tablet PC which was then transmitted live to the screen. Instead of paper notebooks, each student had a Samsung Q1 UMPC where they could do their assignments. Instead of rolling balls down planks to learn about velocity, they bombed their friend's tanks in an interactive game projected on the wall. (And instead of chatting to their friend sitting beside them, they could chat and play tic-tac-toe with anyone in the classroom via instant messaging.)

It was an impressive set-up, but I suspect that the COTF and our current classrooms aren't as different as they look. They just use different tools to achieve the same goals — ultimately, teachers are still facilitating learning through interaction with peers, research, scaffolding, homework and games — although, it may be said that in some instances, high-tech tools do the work better than low-tech ones.

For example, high-tech tools work better than low-tech tools because they tend to be more interactive. Click something and you get a response straight away. You can talk to a professor in London in real time, do online research, and drive a tank even. It is hard to get bored with so much interactivity, but who knows, students have a remarkable capacity to be bored...

Another way high-tech tools encourage student learning is by its ability to simulate real life. In current learning environments, students read about problems and think about solutions. In the COTF, students observe problems and work at solutions. Students get an email from a student in France with a question and they can immediately analyse skin samples, talk to real-life experts, and create graphs. It is a more productive and relevant way to learn.

A lot of the learning in the COTF was student-driven. The teacher never came right out to give the formula for velocity and speed, preferring to let the student discover it on his own through the interactive game. I think it would be a bit uncomfortable for me to leave so much learning to the initiative of the students, but that is one of the things that teachers must learn in the classroom of the future: to let go.

Is such a classroom of the future viable? Why not? But we mustn't get so caught up with our new-fangled tools that we forget the purpose of the tools. I still like paper and pen, whiteboard and marker, real faces and real smiles, and I wouldn't give any of that up for all the high-tech gadgets in the world.