Technology reshapes education, 'making thinking visible'

Jeanette Jones sat in on a class as part of her job as a college administrator and saw an example of how technology is reshaping education.

She said a student at the for-profit American InterContinental University in Schaumburg asked the instructor a question she couldn’t answer. But the instructor immediately posed the question to her Twitter followers and in seconds received responses from several experts in the field.

That’s an example of how technology is changing education forever. Other examples include increased use of iPads and management software in the classroom and programs that include 3D printers and other 3D technology.

The Chicago startup community has responded with education-technology ventures including Youtopia, Infiniteach,  Classkick and ThinkCerca. And Chicago’s 1871 tech hub last year launched an edtech incubator through a partnership with DeVry Education Group.

Online classes took education to a new and different level, said Jones, the AIU dean of education. Now, she says, “technology in the classroom has shifted (education) to the ‘sage on the side’ approach. The reality is that this age of information and information literacy inundates teachers and students with mass amounts of content, but much comes without context.”

Technology, she says, makes learning more “robust” and individualized, allows students to embrace creativity and offers new learning strategies.

This is not some Orwellian vision of a future. Human teachers will always be needed to guide the prudent use of technology in the classroom. But it could be a revolution, or an evolution. Either way, it’s growing, particularly in grade school.

Agnieszka Pietrzak, a teacher at St. Ferdinand Catholic School in Chicago, recently gave EdSurge, a California-based information-resource company for people involved in education technology, an example of how schools can use technology.

She said she uses Youtopia, which embeds learning into video games. Youtopia aims to promote positive behavior and help students develop social skills. Students who pass the skills course earn a badge.

“It is a powerful tool to take the skills that are intangible and make them tangible,” Pietrzak told EdSurge.

A book published in April, “The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter,” serves as a primer for teachers and others interested in tapping the intuitive skills that make kids good digital-game players.

The book’s author, Greg Toppo, a former teacher who’s now education writer for USA Today, said Stanford math professor Keith Devlin told him that if video games had been around in 350 B.C., Euclid would have made one.

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