Tech & Learning - June 2008 - (Page 32)

FEATURESTORY FUTURE CLASSROOM Excerpted from: Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen (Author), Curtis W. Johnson (Author), Michael B. Horn (Author) Copyright 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. What might the classroom of the future look like? Students filter into their room. Chemistry workbenches, complete with such things as test tubes, reagents, pH meters, and a bomb calorimeter greet them. The students conduct experiments in which they measure the effect of changes in the pressure, volume, and temperature of gases. They record their experiments in their lab workbook, and the teacher grades them and returns it to the students. This might not sound too different from the everyday happenings many of us recall from chemistry class, but there is a big difference. This all takes place in the Virtual ChemLab. The classroom of the future is, in this case, present and accounted for. Begun by a chemistry professor at Brigham Young University, the Virtual ChemLab serves some 150,000 students seated at computer terminals across the country. The professor took 2,500 photographs and 220 videos, and, along with some video-game designers, created a simulated laboratory to allow students to do all the above and more. While it is not as good, perhaps, as doing the experiments hands-on (some have pointed out that these students could enter college science courses without having used a real Bunsen burner), the virtual lab allows students to try experiments that would be too costly or dangerous to do at their local high schools. What is more, it is infinitely better than many students’ alternatives—nothing at all. For resourceconstrained schools in isolated rural areas or impoverished urban ones, this is a big improvement. And as technology improves over time, who knows how good the virtual re-creation of a lab might become? Maybe one day the students will be able to feel the heat from the Bunsen burner and smell the chemical reaction. In another classroom, students are learning Mandarin grammar. The students are wearing noise-canceling headphones and working on laptop computers. The teacher is kneeling beside a particular student. The students direct the work of a brick mason on his computer screen by having him assemble a sentence in the same way that he would construct a 32 | TECH & LEARNING

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Technology & Learning - June 2008 Contents Editor's Desk News & Trends They Said It: What Tech&Learning Insiders Are Writing Online Junket Justifiers Back Office Business Students of the World Unite! Get Small for Fall Summer Reading for School Leaders They Can Hear You Now What's New - NECC Highlights and More Leader of the Year Profile

Technology & Learning - June 2008

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