I think one of the biggest changes in school will be the way students read and the way schools distribute books. I can definitely see somewhere in the (not so) distant future, a time when students will all have some form of e-reader assigned to them at the beginning of their education, and each year that reader will be loaded with all the textbooks, novels and other pieces of reading they will need for that entire school year. Then the next year, the reader will be loaded with new materials for that year, and so on. As an English teacher, this type of technology will play a huge role in my classroom and it will be something I would have to know very well in order for it to be used productively by students and myself. I think this type of technology has huge advantages, like saving money and trees, and all students will have access to an "unabused" copy of the text they're reading. I recall some extremely battered textbooks and novels that we assigned to me during my years of school, and I do believe that can hinder a students ability to learn. If a textbook has been doodle in, dropped in mud or otherwise defaced, its going to negatively impact where a clean and legible book would positively impact. So this will definitely be a benefit to students, when this technology becomes more widely accessible.
Another technological advancement that will impact my classroom is the evolution of digital cameras and recorders, As I hope to incorporate journalism in my classroom, these types of technologies will certainly be present and my students will be using them frequently for assignments. Every year, it seems, cameras and recorders become capable of more and more things, and I'm sure this advancement has not reached its end. I believe we will be seeing more cameras like the Flip coming out, that allow easy shooting, easy downloading and easy editing. These types of cameras will be able to hold more video, and probably do more in the realm of video shooting, rather than just point, shoot, and zoom. This will certainly change the scope of what I can do with this technologies and how I will incorporate them in my room. My students will be able to create more complex looking videos, but the technologies to do so will be much simpler, I imagine. They will get professional quality videos out of a simple camera and editing system, which will allow them to really develop as a one-man band, as they call it in the journalism world. They will no longer have to rely on a crew of people to put together a news package, but will be able to do every aspect of the process themselves. Being able to teach my students to use this type of technology will be a huge job and a very crucial role.
When the television was being developed, and when recorder materials became available in classrooms, people foresaw a day when a living, breathing human presence would no longer be necessary in a classroom. Those days are well behind us, and teachers are still the vital asset to all classrooms. We have advanced so much further than VHS tapes since that time, and it is obvious that we are nowhere near done with this progress. So if we have not yet outgrown the need for teachers, I don't think such a day will every come. There will also be teachers in classrooms, teaching history and English and math, along with all the technologies that will come out along the way. But have that one-on-one, personal connection will be necessary. Even if we some day live in a world where all students do their learning in e-classrooms and no actual school buildings actually exist. Even then, there will be a person, a teacher, on the other side of that computer, facilitating the learning of each student.
