Referenced Article: Jessica Campbell, “Students Unveil Fanciful Design for Classroom of the Future”, Gotham Schools, October 12, 2011. Accessed November 13, 2011.
My last blog post looked at the physical structure of classrooms and how they will potentially change in the future with new architectural technology suited to sustainability and community needs. I decided to continue with the idea of classroom design this week, but I have changed the perspective by looking at the opinions of children with respect to classroom technology. What do children think could help them learn in the future? What effect does new technology have on student thinking and learning in the classroom? These are two questions that are addressed in Jessica Campbell’s article, referenced above, as she remarks on a study at Queens’ P.S. 144, an elementary school that let its students think about technology in the classroom in 2050. Although their ideas may not have been the most logical or realistic, their work provides significant insight on technology and its role in students’ lives in the classroom even today.
Campbell’s article opens with the futuristic suggestion by a fifth-grade student that in 2050, students will have the “Notebook 5X, which includes a fingerprint-activated lock, an optional keyboard, and wings for when students’ backpacks just can’t fit another thing.” This student, along with her classmates, participated in a one-week seminar in which they thought about what the next generations of students could use to facilitate their learning. The program included two designers, “Hsing Wei, of Pixelated Learning, and Katie Koch, of Project: Interaction,” who worked with the students to help them focus their ideas into ideas for innovation. The students also came up with a “Superdesk” that can be condensed to textbook size, listen to “voice command,” and have compartments that keep pencils and stationary from sliding around. They also suggested “mini-boards,” chalkboards that showed the teacher’s work to each student individually at their desk. Students even suggested virtual reality for assessments and/or lectures.
This information about children’s perspective on technology in future classrooms provides insight into what kinds of technologies should be considered in classroom design in the future. More organized desks, condensed materials, and alternate methods of learning and studying are common and practical desires of the students. Instead of looking to find more complex technology such as computer programs for future classrooms, perhaps a better approach is seeking more efficient tools to facilitate learning for students in simpler, less drastic forms. Students want more personalized learning and tools that are less cumbersome so that they can focus more on the material at hand.
Furthermore, the opinions of the students show how technology has affected creative and critical thinking even at a young age. The students are innovating at an elementary school level with considerable, pragmatic ideas that would not have even been fathomable several generations ago. The students take for granted more traditional classroom tools because they have been given more technology than students before them, but in return students are thinking like innovators and becoming more proactive about creating technology simply in the way that they think. Can these elementary school insights alone predict the increased role of technology in the future careers of today’s students? Only time will tell- I personally feel that hearing these ideas from students is a definite sign that we will become more and more technology-dependent both in the classroom and the working world in the very near future.
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