In August, Andrea Lawless (CCA) told me that a friend of hers named Kerri Ranney was working for an architecture firm in Texas on a project called the "Classroom of the Future". When I contacted Kerri, she told me about how they had been working with a class of students who had been designing the classroom. They were going to enter an international competition at a conference in San Antonio and wanted to present to people from our district as the "customers". We set up a video conference for this afternoon; I got teachers, administrators, and students from all over the district to participate. We just finished, and I had some thoughts.
First, the students on both ends did a great job. I was impressed with how their students had based their classroom design on current educational theory. The classroom they designed was more like an office workspace than an old-school classroom. There were stations for different types of work; mobile furniture allowed for students to work in groups of any size; plentiful whiteboard space made brainstorming possible anywhere; and the whole thing was designed for student-centered learning. Our students asked some insightful and intelligent questions; one thing I noticed, though, was that many of their questions were based on a "stand-and-deliver" model of teaching: Where would the teacher stand? Would all the noise be distracting? I found it interesting, and realized that an important part of the work I want to do as an instructional leader involves educating not only teachers but also students about the benefits of alternative instructional models.
Second, it was a useful exercise for me to set up a video conference. The TV commercials where the teacher says, "OK, now we're going to talk to our friends in Japan" and then pushes a button and the class appears... well, TV commercials may not always tell the truth. We had a few technical difficulties, but part of that was due to the particular circumstances on the other end (working from a convention hall), and part of it was due to the novelty of the experience on our end. There are a lot of tools for video conferencing and/or webinars (WebEx, GoToMeeting, AnyMeeting, Cisco Telepresence, Google+ Hangouts, Skype), and they all have positives and negatives. As we make video conferencing more routine in our district, we'll settle on the most useful tool and have that set up on district computers, making the technical issues moot. (For what it's worth, AnyMeeting seems to be the most promising program I've seen so far.)
I'd really like to encourage more of this kind of activity in classrooms throughout the district. The more our students can interact with students around the country and around the globe, the more prepared they are for life in the 21st century.
