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Technology Is Changing the Way Kids Learn
… And the Classrooms in Which They Do It.

Advertising supplement provided by Paxton / Patterson
By Stephen H. Daniels

New Learning Methods Demand
New Classroom Concepts

“Young people in a modular learning environment work on projects together,” says a supplier. “They look at problems from every angle. They brainstorm possible solutions. They come up with a plan, test a model, keep the parts of that model that work and eventually write a narrative about their experience. They learn how the physical world really works in an environment that closely resembles the real working world.” And they do it, increasingly, in classrooms without desks.

Educators are still grappling with the notion of technology education and how best to achieve “technological literacy” in the U.S., and designers are attempting to provide answers to high-profile problems to school boards which sometimes don’t even know the questions.

Digital content and networked applications are transforming education, say Department of Education officials. That transformation is increasing the private sector stake in public education. Increasingly, not only the tools of the technological transformation—computers and LANs and WANs (local and wide-area networks), but the curriculum itself, come from outside the traditional educational community.

The tech lab affords the architect and the school board a unique opportunity to design a space that ensures a “powerful” learning experience, says a technology supplier. But what does that space look like?

“When it comes to specifying classroom equipment, most architects know what goes in a biology lab, but most have never been in a tech lab, and they need to know more about it. That’s where we come in.”

One technology education supplier operates four regional learning centers where both teachers and designers engage in seminars to understand the new technology and its accompanying curriculum. Between five and 10 percent of that audience is architects. “For most, it is an epiphany,” says a spokesperson. “They tell us, ‘I had no idea that was going on.’”

At the 4,000-student Manual Arts High School in downtown Los Angeles, the third-oldest school in the city, once 90 percent African-American, now 80 percent Hispanic (more than half Manual Arts student body lists Spanish as its first language), 11th-grader Ernesto Smith was quietly busy with two other students—both female—at a workstation in a corner of a converted metal shop.

The students were constructing a working model of a mag-lev train, the first real-world version of which is to be unveiled by the Chinese this spring—a $1.1 billion, 36-mile system connecting Shanghai and Pudong. Incredibly, Smith and his classmates, understand the principle involved in the construction of a noiseless, frictionless rail project. Smith says of the process by which he gained that understanding “this is fun!”

 

Rosemon Middle Schoo, Glendale, CA

Girls in industrial arts class? Education is undergoing a revolution, so is classroom design. As the goals of education change to reflect the new educational needs of our society, so, say both educators and designers, do the strategies for technology integration. The new credo of federal educators is that it is essential to prepare students with critical thinking skills—to give them problem-solving strategies more in tune with a complex world.