The classroom of the future

The Classroom of the Future was a much talked about theme at this years Frankfurt Book Fair. The Fair was open to the public on the last two days and youth, dressed up in their favourite literary or comic book characters flooded into the Fair. The classroom of the future was a key point of interest. The installation portrayed a vision of the future where small groups of children worked together on nine explorative tours in five different subject areas where they created machines out of LEGO, scanned seashells to be printed in 3D, and told their own stories using sound. The whole installation was led by a hybrid textbook of the future, and it is this small detail that is most exciting.

“Studies have shown that 70 per cent of schoolchildren prefer working with printed books. Nevertheless, the advantages of digital teaching materials should not be underestimated,” www.buchmesse.de.

For this reason the Classroom of the Future presented this crossbreed solution: A hybrid textbook. The book was much like a traditional textbook with text and pictures but also connected to a world of student, teacher, and publisher generated digital material through waving a smartphone over an invisible watermark. The hidden / digital content of the book was then accessed via the smartphone, thus combining print and digital in a most successful manner.

The concept, designed and created by Hewlett Packard, is interesting because it offers an option where the education sector can continue to work with print products and yet incorporate all the advantages of digital innovation. Hewlett Packard believes that the Hybrid textbook will help the students of today prepare for their own future in the knowledge economy, yet still operate in a controlled environment.

Four leaders from the world of educational technology spoke about their business models at a session at the Business Club at the Fair and their discussion echoed the sentiment that drove the concept of the hybrid book. Most education is still happening in print and though there are drivers of digital first, the penetration is sparse.

Worldwide, in all economies, there is much hype around digital in schools, however, the reality of low budgets, teachers that are unwilling to move across to new platforms and business models that seem to take more money than they make, means that the sector is really still in its infancy and print is still king.

“Todd Brekkus, President of myON, a division of Capstone, sees the Cloud as key to the wider adoption of digital in schools – and his platform is proof of that potential. A personalized literary platform for schools, myON has 6.2 million students online, primarily in the USA. The average student spends 22 minutes on the platform each day, with some even looking at 25 books on myON in a week. Its success has even led to the company moving to become a distributor of content on a revenue sharing basis,” reported Mike Piesing in a piece on Publishing Perspectives.

For Martin Fielko, International Business Manager of Cornelsen Schulverlage, their strategy is to penetrate the market and get the teachers used to digital by giving away the digital book for free when they sell a book.

“At the moment, we sell content and give services like training and technical support away for free. In the future, we may follow the ‘freemium’ model of giving the content away for free and then charging for services,” he said.

“When people ask me to give them examples of countries that are really driving digital education my response is always that it is patchy,” says David Langridge, Worldwide Education Senior Partner Development Director of Microsoft Education. “You have got some schools that are really driving it, but to say that it is widespread is really overstating it. We are a productivity and platform company, so our goal is to drive the use of Microsoft technology in schools. Having said that, we give Office away for free to schools, and they get 80 to 90% off commercial rates for our other products.”

“In the end, our goal is really to improve education, as we have been teaching the same way for over 100 years,” he says. “We are getting the same results, while tech companies like Microsoft can’t find graduates with the right skills to fill our vacancies.”

By using the latest technology in the Classroom of the Future, Frankfurt organisers hoped that teachers and publishers would be shifted from being providers of information to being supporters and prompters of the learning experience, reported Piesing.

“The goal is to show that education can be innovative and international, and publishers can find new ways of delivering material in the future. The first two years of the Classroom of the Future focused on the use of 3D technology in scientific education. This year, the classroom of the future demonstrates other aspects of innovative learning such as the hybrid textbook and how nicely designed spaces … can have a direct impact on how much time you want to spend in a room, how you learn — and even how you think,’ said Martina Wolff de Carrasco, Manager Vertrieb Bildung at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

“In the end,” Wolff de Carrasco says, “it is designed to provoke a discussion, as no one knows what the future of education will look like. So, we are completely free to do what we want with it – and they are free to say that they disagree.”