Teacher Bytes

Trying to predict the future can be tricky thing to do, even Jedi Master Yoda had trouble when he tried. Yet, there are times when you have take a guess at what will happen, especially when you work with education technology. The other day after finishing my class on wikis, one of the participants asked me where all this technology was going. It lead to an interesting discussion in which nobody left.

I told the group that, in my opinion, one direction technology is taking us is our classes will be radically different. Teachers in the future will not have all of their students in one physical location all of the time. My statement led one teacher to ask, “Will technology eventually replace teachers?” “No,” I replied, “It will help ease an anticipated teacher shortage but there will always be a need for teachers.” The United States Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics says that educational services jobs will grow by 10.7%  and add 1.4 million new jobs through the year 2016. According to a Yahoo website, education followed only healthcare and information technology as top career prospects in the future. I think there will be plenty of work for everyone.

One of the trends that leads me to make my claim about the future of teaching is the growth of online education. Insight School of South Carolina will be starting operations next year. This venture is an accredited public high school where students can earn a diploma, all online. Any South Carolina student who is accepted into the program are allowed to participate tuition free as well. This is not the first time high school students could earn high school credit online. Bluffton High School in Bluffton, South Carolina had offered a few courses in cooperation with the South Carolina Department of Education. Online summer school classes are becoming more popular each year.

Another trend might be an indirect consequence of the No Child Left Behind law. Our district uses NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests during the year to help teachers prepare students for state-mandated tests. The great thing about MAP tests is they pinpoint students’ strengths and weaknesses. With this data, teachers know how to prepare lessons for individual students to help them achieve higher scores on the important year-end tests. However, these tests could also pinpoint teachers’s strengths and weaknesses. On the surface this may sound like a bad thing for teachers but we must realize we cannot be perfect in everything (even if parents, principals, superintendents, and school boards expect it). The answer here is that students and their weaknesses could be matched up with teachers whose strengths could help. If they are in the same building, great. Thanks to technology and distance learning, students and teachers could be in different buildings if that is the match-up that best helps the student. At different times of day or week, students will head to computers in the room to work with their teachers while the classroom teacher is at their interactive whiteboard working with students from other schools.

In either case, teachers will be needed to provide the human interaction needed in education whether it is a few feet or thousands of miles that separates them from their students. I did tell the group that teachers who are comfortable with technology will be the ones who will succeed in the future. At least this is my vision of the future of education. Please share your ideas of where the technology will take education in the future.

We have robots that clean houses (Roomba). We have robots that play with children, although the Panda looks suspicious  (WowWee). We have robots that look for bad guys around the corner. We have robots that carry out military missions that save soldier’s lives. In the future we will even have robots that become self-aware and try to eliminate mankind (The Terminator and Battlestar Galatica). In the latest of robotic adventures a robot designed by Bluffton High robotics students won the South Carolina FIRST Tech Challenge Championship Tournament at South Carolina State University on February 8th. These students were advised by my good friend Kevin Sandusky, a science and robotics teacher at Bluffton High.

The winning robot design had a tank tread system for movement. It also had an alignment bar which could extend to move objects around the playing field. The objective was for robots to place rings on a series of goals and to move the goals around the playing field. The robot was chosen to be part of a three-team alliance  which won this competition. The Bluffton High robot also won the AMAZE award for the most unusual and innovative design.

Kevin assured me there was no prize category for the robot to be most likely to become self-aware and try to wipe out humanity. However, with tank treads and extending alignment bars should this robot become self-aware and determined  to destroy humanity, it could become potent weapons platform that can traverse almost every type of terrain. I just hope future Bluffton High robots are programed with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics outlined in I, Robot. All kidding aside, congratulations to Kevin Sandusky and his students on their achievement. Good luck at the national competition.