Tuesday morning, one o’clock. The History teacher enters the second grade classroom and, addressing his students, says in a stern tone: “Kids, open an Office document.”
The traditional image of the classroom as most of us knew it and got to know it, tends to be replaced and readjusted according to new technological developments that of course could not leave the education sector unaffected.
Traveling mentally to Silicon Valley, there is Altschool, the only school that uses customized software for the education of each student. It is an idea that came from Max Ventila, a former Google executive, when he was looking for a suitable elementary school for his daughter.
The students have a “play list,” where they are assigned 25 tasks on a weekly basis. Using a Google Chromebook, the list includes a series of activities, called cards. The basic idea is that with the cards, the teacher helps the child develop and learn more, in a fun way.
For example, he can play an educational game on the iPad or watch a video. What also differs AltSchool from traditional schools is that it has mixed classes, with children of all ages.
Inside the school, there are many cameras that record a teaching day, which helps teachers monitor the interests of the children and examine their progress, as well as any bad behaviors during the day.
According to education expert Graham Brown Martin, in the future, the idea of the classroom will be completely obsolete. The education system and the way of teaching will change significantly. The advent of new technologies and the evolution of the teaching mission will completely reshape the school as we know it today.
In Greece, new technological developments, although at an early stage in terms of the educational system, are gaining more and more ground in school classrooms. Will new technologies succeed in finding the “ingredient” of successful education or will they become an even more advanced form of the existing one?