Beyond the Blackboard? by Francesco Levantini The rest will come from the imagination and the real needs of students and teachers. |
- I have no doubt! Says the physician. |
on the blackboard
a graphic or an image. The order is restored, the eyes of the students are
focused on the wall as it is done for the past thousands of years but...
the problems remain the same. The blind child still has the same
difficulties as always, the deaf child is still staring at the teacher's
shoulders instead of her lips. The teacher in a wheelchair can only use
the lower part of the digital blackboard as he was doing with the
traditional one. Be careful though, the disorder in bits is only
apparently limited in the old form of the "blackboard" and it is
imagination that can, and regarding technology it has always done so, free
it. The flexibility of bits opens the possibility of the technologically
illiterate. A bold teacher can realize that instead of the usual PDF, he
can connect to the blackboard the home Web camera and next to what he is
writing he can project the image of his own lips; a WiFi system can
transfer written material on the portable computer of the blind student
allowing him to read it with his own screen reader software. At the end of class, pressing on a key can transfer the written explanation in a document immediately passed on the school's social network portal. He can read over his own notes now in a digital format taken from the blackboard as documents that can be forwarded to colleagues inside or outside his educational institution and seeing his own productions gathered under the aegis of the Creative Commons group. Today, there is only the blackboard, but the rest will come from the imagination and the real needs of students and teachers for whom the disorder in bits is giving an incredible strength. Not only are the self-help communities for disabled people seriously thinking about innovations. You only need to go on a search engine with keywords like "smart wall" or "distributed blackboards" to realize that LIM's destiny is to yield the passage to Wii, to the distributed desktops and the increased reality of solutions in marvelous disorder and incredibly more functional and less costly. Unrecognizable? Maybe, but will school be more recognizable maybe with its old and friendly traditional blackboard on the wall on which an anonymous hand will have written with the definitely white chalk: "BTW 2nite pub meet x Rick's b-day. Dtls on bak. |
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ftbomh, Diana!" No teacher will erase this. She will use something else as a teaching method. Instead of books and notebooks, we will probably see PDAs and iPads. The status symbol will no longer be on Lady Gaga's bags but the latest metallic cover of the iPhone. The screeching sound of the chalk on the blackboard will be substituted by the soft drumming of the mouse, new and old, the old tool will remind us clearly that it is the place of the student spirit, of students and teachers who carry on the incredible journey of learning and growth, theirs, and those of our world who in that rituality find the certainty of the order that has them progress. I know what you are thinking about, but let me believe nevertheless in people, in kids, in educators and in the strength of their ideas. Otherwise, where would all this lead to? What our generation did invent and to which we should find a remedy: bullying, slashed tires, political interfering and the LIM. | ||