Technology and the Transformation of Education by Greg Limperis

Technology has the power to transform the way we teach if done correctly. With the advent of things such as interactive white boards, document cameras, student response systems, laptops, tablets, webcams, video recorders, digital cameras, cellphones, cloud based software, the Internet and much more proliferating our classrooms, has technology transformed education as we know it?

According to Google, transform can be defined as to make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of. If we were to look back in teaching thousands of years ago till

Female students sitting in desks in a classroom at Lane Technical High School circa 1928

today teaching has always been a group of students led and instructed by a sage in the front of the classroom. During this time, the elder who had lived life long enough to gain knowledge, experience and education themselves often would sit with students, usually in rows and impart on them this knowledge gained. This classroom usually has had very little interaction with others outside of the four classroom walls and has gained all of it knowledge from oral and written sources provided by other sages in textbooks or passed down written material. Guest brought in to speak often would impart their knowledge on students and answer questions from them but that guest was often someone who lived close enough to them and gave them little experience of the world they were growing up in but instead gave them a more local view.

Fast forward to today into the world of technology. With the advent of lesser expensive ubiquitous Internet connected devices it is easier to think technology has transformed the way or teachers teach and our students learn, but has it transformed education yet or simply changed it. Walking through schools within my school district, I often hear from my teachers that the interactive white boards, document cameras and student response systems we have provided them have transformed the way they teach. They give me hugs when I show up to fix technology that is not working correctly for them and tell me they do not know how they taught before without it. As I look around my schools though I still see a classroom similar to the ones described to me in my searches over the Internet on the history of teaching. In many of the classrooms I have seen, the teacher is still the sage at the front of the classroom and students are still sitting in rows, but today the change is starting to happen. Transformation of teaching is coming.

In the advent of Web 2.0, sages are no longer the only proliferators of educational content. These days, everyone, everywhere as long as they have a connection to the Internet is able to be a creator of content. With access to things such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more, it no long only is the adult, sage, or elder sharing content. Today our youth are collaborating together. With the advent of cell phones allowing us to constantly be connected together, curating of content is instant and the sharing just as quick. Through text messaging, streaming video, live audio and visual conversation, and much more our students are starting to need to no longer sit in rows.

Modern day classroom of students collaborating together.

Students are starting to collaborate together to curate, create and share content. They are sitting more in groups as opposed to rows. Yes they are still learning from a sage in the front of the classroom, but more and more they are learning from each other. They are posing questions of each other and the world around them and they are starting to connect with people outside of their classroom walls and engage with that world and learn from it in real time. The barriers of time and distance are becoming smaller. Through an ability to quickly connect with people over great distances, learning no longer happens within the four walls of our classroom during the days and hours of education. Learning is happening twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days per year. If a student wants to learn something new, a teacher is helpful but not essential. The world is becoming our teacher. Today, it is not unheard of that if you want to learn about something the easiest way to get the answer is to “Google It”.

Our students these days have begun to ask questions not only of their teacher of each other and of the world around them. Access to a world of knowledge is becoming expected and learning from a textbook is becoming history. The day of one person conveying knowledge to a classroom of many is becoming a thing of the past. Today education has begun that transformation. Thanks to technology, students are starting to seek the answers to questions themselves more. Look at the study done by Sigatra Mitra on The Child Driven Education presented at TED where children were left alone with a computer an Internet connection an nothing else. There was no teacher involved yet they were still able to teach themselves something. How many times have you heard a child say they learned something through YouTube? Today you no longer have to go to a University to get a world class education. The world of the MOOC or Massively Open Online Course is allowing education to happen anywhere and any time and for students to not only learn from the experts but also from each other.

Today, the educators are moving from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. Through the use of collaboration brought about by technology, students are starting to pose questions of each other and the world around them and they are no long turning to the mentor in the front of the classroom for answers but instead to each other. They are connecting in ways never before possible. The transformation of education has begun and it will be interesting what the classroom of the future will look like.