The future of interactions in classrooms

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Written by Olivier Adam (United Kingdom); Edited by Rejean Bourgault (Canada), Co-founders of 5Deka Inc. – All Rights Reserved

eBooks have been around for quite some time. Since the first Kindle from Amazon came out on the market, which spurred an interest in this type of devices, a few products have followed, each improving on the previous one. The market still remains quite small though. Indeed, the few number of players with an actual product available (Amazon, Sony, iriver, Barnes & Noble, etc.) combined with some technical flaws and the lack of usability features makes it still a niche product at best. A few new major players have recently announced their intent of releasing an eBook soon. Of these new eBooks, we hope they will address some of the flaws that make current eBooks unwelcome in the classroom. Indeed, even though it seems that classrooms would be the first to benefit from such a technology, products haven’t really been developed with this utilization in mind so far. Let’s see what’s in store for the future of eBooks in the classroom.

Classrooms of the past 10 years

10 years ago, 1999, cell phones were not widespread amongst students in schools and laptops were even rarer. A few schools had laptops program for their students, most of the time at a significant cost with very little flexibility. In addition, those schools usually could barely implement the laptops properly in the curriculum (resulting in students buying an overpriced computer on which they would do their homework on at night, saving the school the expense of putting together computer labs, but with little added benefits otherwise for the learning process). The improvement in the quality of education didn’t improve and, in most cases, it even became worse as students would get online and start chatting, looking at pictures or even playing games during classes. This trend has been going on for the past 10 years and even though Generation Y and Cyber are known to be very strong at multi-tasking, there is a limit to how little attention you can give to your class. In some situations, schools have decided to block the access to the Internet while in class (which is becoming harder to achieve nowadays with ubiquitous wireless coverage), or to block the usage of the computer (which brought up complaints from students who wants typed notes). This created the classrooms we know today; dozens of students behind their laptop screen or playing on their smart phone; chatting, checking updates on Facebook and Twitter and, sometimes, listening to the teacher. In parallel, these same students have been buying every years hundred of dollars of textbook, which they will partially use and which they will try to resell the year after only to realize a new edition came out and their edition is not used in classes anymore.

Also, think about this irony; we encourage the usage of computer so the students can type their homework. But what do they do to hand it in? They have to print it to give a paper copy to the teacher. In few cases, the teacher will accept an electronic version. And when he does? He will print it as he is going to do the correction on paper with a red marker. So we encourage students to type (a skill they already have perfected) while they lose the ability to properly handwrite anything. And when they get their paper back with the correction, as they already carry their textbooks and laptops, the corrected paper will find itself in the closest trashcan available (hopefully it ’s a recycle bin at least).