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Monday, June 3, 2013

Missouri Education Watchdog: Welcome to the Classroom of 2021

Missouri Education Watchdog: Welcome to the Classroom of 2021:

Welcome to the Classroom of 2021


After reading this article about tablets in school I couldn’t help but picture the classroom of the future and wonder whether teachers have tried this exercise for themselves.

Welcome to the classroom of 2021

The teacher has loaded the common cartridge for the morning.  All the students are sitting at their desks where the new pressure sensitive chairs read how they are sitting and adjust the digital material on the white board to try to keep their attention as long as possible.  The camera at the front of the room observes that a student in the back row has stopped watching the white board and is looking at something outside the window. Noting that her student file says her hobby is dancing, the cartridge selects a video from the massive support database that includes some children dancing to continue the lesson. The change is registered as effective as the student is now back to looking towards the front of the classroom.

By 8:45 the class has moved on to reading. Student 165789-F3 is working on her reading assignment on her school assigned tablet. The rest of the students are reading a paragraph about William Jefferson Clinton to fulfill their non-fiction reading requirement. The paragraph talks about how proud he is of his daughter who has just been elected state representative. The passages the software has chosen for 165789-F3 do not include any references to a father as she has never known her father and is unlikely to be able to answer a prompt about one.

In the seat next to her, student 178946-W2 has automatically been added to the school dinner program because the system has noted that his mother lost her job ten weeks ago and has not found new employment. His name