Digital Classrooms: Is The Investment Paying Off?

Eric Savitz, Forbes Staff

Guest post written by Chuck Dietrich

Chuck Dietrich is CEO of SlideRocket.

Chuck Dietrich: Learning 2.0.

There is a raging debate about the effectiveness of the ‘digital classroom’ – with arguments solely focused on the $31.2 billion education technology market and whether the investment is delivering a return to cash-strapped school districts.

In the heated discussion over education technology, we are missing out on a crucial component of education – the ethos of how to work together. Collaborative technology is a valuable aid in teaching students to engage in meaningful discussion, take responsibility for their own learning and become critical thinkers in a rapidly-shifting world – skills necessary for success in the 21st century workforce.

The collaboration revolution has entered the workplace in full force, ushering in ‘a new way to work’ – and now it needs to head to the classroom. Studies have shown that students learn best when they’re actively involved in the process and engaged in interactive group work. Today’s student is gathering information from a variety of sources and their access to each other and to their instructors extends way beyond the classroom.  The development of tomorrow’s successful leaders requires cultivating skills that master how to work with people in a dynamic and effective fashion.

The national organization, The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) understands that it is time for “a new way to educate.” The organization advocates new ways of thinking in order to prepare students to compete in a global economy. The institution provides tools and resources to help the U.S. education system keep up with global competitors by combing the traditional 3Rs with the 4Cs (Critical thinking and problem solving, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity and innovation). P21 views all components as interconnected in the process of 21st century teaching and learning.

The 4Cs emphasized by P21 are the framework of the modern, global workplace. An educational system that emphasizes this framework prepares students for the world beyond the classroom while embracing an educational method that taps into a more natural method of learning.

The 4Cs are a cornerstone of the modern workforce revolutionized by cloud based technology. Cloud-based technology has facilitated dynamic interactive collaboration between location- dispersed teams. Ideas are created, shared and revised, emulating the collective learning common for the classroom. The standard model of education is a passive one, where success is measured by memorizing rote facts, and figures. Leveraging 21st century workplace skills cultivates a new way of educational thinking that makes learning both active and interactive, essential for life outside of the classroom.

In this new model of educational thinking, educators and students tap into the cloud to build, collaborate, share and manage media rich lessons and curriculum. In some classrooms this revolution is already underway. The Open High School of Utah (OHSU) is a fully online charter school that has traded chalk and blackboards for digital tools that foster collaboration and interactive education. The school has fully integrated Google Docs and uses open course management system Moodle. Students create more than 150 presentations per year using SlideRocket; often collaborating remotely in teams to share and organize data.

The OHSU model is an example of how to employ real world technologies which focus on collaboration. The return on investment is not a result of the technology, but how that technology is effectively implemented in education.

The real value of education is not really what we learn; it’s how we learn – which involves the effort and process that goes into the act of learning itself.   No matter how many new digital tools come out, the common denominator is still people.  And it will always be people.  The new collaboration revolution in education technology places people squarely at the center of the equation, making it easier to connect and produce solid results.

This article is available online at: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/01/02/digital-classroom...