Earlier this month, The Education Project had its second annual global summit in Bahrain. The summit brings together top education policymakers and professors, teachers and administrators, innovators and 'edu-preneurs', to discuss key issues and developments in education. The Kelly Yang Project was invited to attend (the only organisation from Asia nominated for a prize) and my colleague and I flew to Bahrain prepared to be blown away and inspired.
The central theme of the conference was the increasing role of technology in the classroom. Various panels and workshops were devoted to this. They all stemmed from the assumption that kids learn better when they are having fun. Gadgets are fun. Therefore, kids learn better when they have more gadgets.
As an educator and as a parent, I disagree. The idea that we need to make everything into a game for our children to learn is wrong. Yes, children love games. Children love gadgets. But they also love a pencil and paper - if they know what to do with it. That's what a good teacher can do. A good teacher can inspire them to read and write using little more than their imagination. A bad teacher can rely on gadgets to impress but, at the end of the day, all the children will have learned is how to use a gadget.
Call me old-fashioned, but learning maths shouldn't be a video game. Writing a good essay should not be like playing FarmVille on Facebook. And I'm sorry, but I don't really want to see my young son social networking and tweeting. I'd rather see him interacting live with his classmates.
But what if I'm wrong? What if the classroom of the future is one in which everything is a game? At the conference, expert educators proudly displayed the new whiteboard - an interactive smart board which looks very much like a giant iPad. The children could interact because they would all have remotes. Instead of raising their hand to answer the teacher's question, they could just press a button on their remote. Inclusive and democratic, right?
As everyone else in the room admired this new board, I couldn't help but feel alarmed. Could this be the end of putting your hand up in a class to speak? I remember being a 10-year-old in a classroom. I hated having to put my hand up to talk. Yet, on the rare occasions when I thought I truly had something interesting to say or an important question to ask, I did it. And in the process, I got over my fear of public speaking. By installing these smart boards, are we inadvertently hindering an important process of learning?
