İ love getting inspired!

Most recent events that got me daydreaming professionally were (in order of appearance) Rob’s workshop on mobile learning, arrival of brand new smart boards to my school (finally compact enough so that they can actually fit into small language classrooms) and news about the future of iTextbooks designed by (of course!) Apple.

Honestly, İ am not only quite a lousy follower of gadget market, İ am also not a huge fan of all that digital learning hysteria and particularly such tool in efl industry as skype teaching and online courses (but to be fair I tried neither yet). Still İ am fascinated by the visions of what my classroom might look like in the near future with the help of smart technology. Let me share some of my reflections.

İ picked 3 trends about learning and added some visioning for the future of my classroom )

1.       1. Game-based learning

It’s certainly nothing new in methodology, but technology helps you easily incorporate games into your practice not as a bonus at the end of a class, but as a key method.  

Imagine how exciting and motivating it would be to simply use 3D sets for role plays, Wii-tools for in TPR activities, interactive competition-based quizzes with a possibility to play against not only your classmates but against almost any school round the globe. It gets even better, when it comes to cross-disciplinary areas: lessons at world-known museums, a possibility of creating volumetric grammar structure (as opposed to regular 2D time-line models), floating in the air words to play with sentence-building (instead of finger methods)...

And this is not to mention further development and spreading of game-based textbooks with inbuilt social media tools (as in Bitesize bbc project www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ or Khan Academy www.khanacademy.org/).

And speaking of textbooks.

2.      2.  Teacher-free learning tools that encourage natural curiosity

Games are also effective as we focus on independent learning skills when kids are encouraged to work on their own (or in teams) discovering and exploring. When teacher is more of a moderator rather than a knowledge provider. Have a look at the new generation of Apple iTextbooks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6HeyTldraw). İ would move further and assume that tablet is about to turn into a universal learning tool and personalized student portfolio at the same time. You keep your books there (not sure if ‘book’ is a right word in the age of internet and cross-curriculum integration), educational software, projects works, assessment records, schedules etc.  Keeping it all well-organized and logically systematized requires strong skills in working with information, effectively arranging it and all that comes along: critical thinking, priorities setting and a new thing: visualizing and constantly developing your own educational space/network. So my third trend slash challenge is

3.       3. Skills in organizing, connecting and sharing information and ideas The new era of information both fascinates and scares me - İ am myself not that good when dealing with information flow. And it's even more challenging when it comes to non-linear ways of organization - like Prezi instead of PowerPoint or iCload instead of folders - easy to lose track and end up in a total mess.

İ really wonder how a school of the future would look like (even though it seems that a typical school on planet Earth in 21st century still looks a lot like the one in 19th).

But İ still love visioning )