School - Should I bring a stylus and tablet, or pencil and paper?

School Supplies - Pencil or Stylus?

When I was born,eight  track tapes were played in my mother’s car and phonograph records at home.  As I grew a little bit older, we purchased cassette tapes.  They got tangled up a few times, but that was the latest in music technology.  Then, near my teens, Compact Discs came out.  I remember the conversations about whether the sound was actually any better, was this a new thing or a fad? Would the discs lose quality over time?  During my middle adulthood MP3 players came out, as well as Napster and its cousins.  Electronic storage of music began.  A little later in my life, the large-sized iPod held thousands of CDs worth of music at your fingertips.  Today, my phone doubles as a streaming music source.  At the tap of the screen, I can listen to any music I want with my Google Music subscription, or Amazon Prime.  

Today’s classrooms are in need of change.  Just as the face of music has undergone at least 5 dramatic changes within 4 decades, our workplaces have changed.  The skills needed to make a living have changed.  And the way we acquire and process information has changed. I can still recall reciting lists of President’s names, or states and capitols, and memorizing dates in history.  Researching a report meant getting mom to drive me to the library, so I could go through the card catalogue and copy out facts from books.

Our children today face a far different society.  There is no need to memorize long lists of facts.  Libraries for research, card catalogues and microfilm are a thing of the past.  If a fact is needed, talk to your smartphone, literally.  It will return the answer.  If you need to research, the internet is at your fingertips.  The big skill of today is knowing when a fact is true or false.  Critical thinking skills, how to judge information’s value and its connection to the big picture are needed in the workplace of today and tomorrow.  

Workplaces have evolved from cube farms where everyone shows up to work, does whatever work is needed, attends a couple meetings, and then goes home, to today’s “Workplace 20/20” where we no longer have cubes or even desks.  Rather, wide open spaces with beanbag chairs, couches, cafes and long open tables are the thing of today.  Collaboration and communication is the key.  Your workplace might be your own home, where you Skype with other business people around the world and collaborate on a single project.  Methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, and ITIL are the words of today.  It is no longer enough for our students to come out of school knowing how to read, write, and figure.  Today, they need to leave high school with project management skills, leadership skills, and skills in managing cross-cultural interpersonal relationships.

There are concerns when it comes to collaboration.  Even in the workplace, there are always one or two members who are quite content to skate in on the coattails of their team.  In the classroom, without the appropriate management, there may be one student who does all the work on a project while their team shares the credit.  When it comes to test-taking and evaluation, should we also allow group work?  Many in the education field call that cheating.  Each student must know the entire course content on their own.  But is each student best fitted for knowing every aspect of each course?  

In my field of experience (computer engineering and support), the biggest single skill needed to succeed is not knowing everything, but knowing how to find everything.  It’s not what you know, but who you know.  If I have a project that needs detailed process written, I know that this is not my strong point, but James down the hall is very very good at that, so I will call on his assistance for that aspect.  If there is an emergency need for troubleshooting and detective work, my team knows to call on me.  The next skill lies in motivating people to provide work, and then in evaluating all of the parts in order to place it into a cohesive and well thought out whole.  

A second con for the entirely collaborative classroom is that there are times when your work environment will not have a good balance of skills.  Students / employees less suited to reactionary work must be able to learn and adjust on the fly.  However, as students collaborate together, they have a chance to observe people who are skilled at other things and pick up points.

I see the classrooms of my future learning very different skills and curriculum than that of my parents or even myself.  I see teams, perhaps even classes with students located around the world, working on a single project or learning experience.  I see each student emerging as a skilled communicator, team player, knowing their personal contribution value to the whole, and understanding project management..

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