The future's bright and it's in 3D!

Every year, amidst the cacophonous hard sell and slick presentations, the BETT Show at Olympia offers a tantalising glimpse of the future. This year it came in the form of Texas Instruments' DLP 3D data projectors, a new technology that I am sure that we are going to see finding its way into our homes, if not our classrooms in the coming years. It's all based on a very slick interface between optical and digital technology.

The Thunderbirds Specs are still a requirement, but what will strike the viewer is the extraordinary picture definition and colour clarity - there is none of that red-green fuzziness that one usually associates with 3D. The demonstration video of a group sky diving has such depth [both out of the screen towards the view as well as into the screen] that you want to reach out and touch them.

This is clearly going to transform our cinema and home television experience in the near future. Indeed 3D TV is already available in the US.

According the Texas Instruments, the American online video company, SafariMontage.com, is planning to stream 3D video in the near future. Click here for more on how 3D TV works.

I'm not yet sure when this technology will find its way into the classroom, but I'm sure that it will in time. Like previous technical innovations, the hardware will be well ahead of the educational content. Entertainment [both at home and in the cinema] is a more lucrative market and profits will drive resources in that direction in the first instance. According to the guys on the Texas stand, a number of educational suppliers at BETT expressed an interest to supply 3D materials for the classroom.

There is considerable scope for raising the bar even higher here on the quality of teaching and learning resources for pupils pupils. 3D in combination with the high quality graphics software, with which we we are familiar from gaming and film animation, provides a quality of experience that is difficult to match. The demo video of a 3D heart that was showing on the stand at BETT has the potential to take Biology teaching into an even more stimulating area. This technology is capable of wowing the next generation of students, when the resources eventually become available. Not to mention that there is great potential here for the physics department to come up with some stunning lessons explaining how it all works!

In the meantime, the projectors are said to be approximately the same cost as the ones we are purchasing already. They will be dual use [normal projection and 3D], are produce better image quality and require less maintenance - so there are good reasons for schools to move to DLP technology projectors anyway. [For more see the DLP website], so it might be worth purchasing "3D ready" projectors when they are launched. The expensive piece of kit will be the glasses which are likely to come in at £50 per pair, so we won't be rushing at this one!

Is School IT coming of age? Some reflections on growing up.

Have you ever wondered where we would be without IT? Every year the vast majority of Independent Schools invest increasing sums of money into IT, yet what do we have to show for it? 2009 marks the eighteenth birthday of the World Wide Web, is this the year that School IT will come of age?

In the 1990s, most likely at the instigation of some forward-thinking enthusiast on the staff or Governing Body, Independent Schools were swept along on the wave of IT investment that dominated the business world. Schools dutifully found from within their ranks, or bought in from outside, network managers who commissioned school sites to be dug up and the cables went in. Governors, Headteachers and senior managers knew that IT was important, but few knew or understood why.

The same could be said of the Government and the Maintained Sector. The Government also considered IT important and consequently voted enormous sums to the enterprise. Its inclusion in the OFSTED and ISI Inspection criteria only served to highlight the necessity of IT investment. However, the essential ingredient that was lacking in both the Independent and Maintained Sectors was an educational vision for the use of IT. How was any of this investment going to improve what fundamentally goes on in classrooms around the country?

The vacuum was filled by the IT suppliers, who certainly had a vision for how rich they could become. To its great detriment, IT in schools in the early years was supply driven. The IT Industry persuaded the Government and the Governors that every pupil should have access to the internet at school and that there should be a computer and an Interactive Whiteboard in every classroom. Industry again stepped in to fill the void when it finally dawned that there was not sufficient quality content available, and, again, to train teachers to use the equipment. In those heady days, one only needed to spend a few minutes at BETT to see the saliva as the sales reps licked their lips at the prospect of devouring the next flock of unsuspecting innocents who have been packed off by their school, desperate to get a tick the IT box in their next inspection.

We, in schools, should not beat ourselves up too much about this – for business and industry made the same mistakes: Nicholas Carr incurred the wrath of the IT supplier establishment, when, in 2004, he argued that,

".... for most businesses it [IT] has been a source more of frustration and disappointment than of glory. It has allowed many companies to substantially cut their labor costs and working capital, but it has also let managers to plow cash into risky and misguided initiatives, sometimes with catastrophic results." [Does IT Matter? p. x]

In the Education sector, we haven't even seen the benefits of reduced staffing costs; on the contrary, we have seen them grow.

There are indications, however, that School IT is beginning to come of age. As the key components [finally] have come together to enable the effective use of IT in the classroom. Most schools now have a sufficiently robust network, adequate bandwidth to access the internet, suitably knowledgeable and skilled teachers, and effective on-line teaching resources.

Of course there have been some excellent classroom practitioners using IT effectively over the past eighteen years and a great debt is owed to these pioneers. However, in many cases IT has thus far been used to automate the educational process – the typical use of PowerPoint by teachers and pupils is a case in point. The challenge for teachers as School IT comes of age is to find an educational vision of how to use IT to innovate and transform what do in the classroom. Ultimately we need to use IT creatively in the classroom because we need to engage this generation of “digital natives” on their own territory if we are to educate them.

See previous post: The Challenge of Educating Digital Natives