Classroom Cool Tech Gets Small

While most classroom technology is assumed to be large-scale - laptop and desktop computers, interactive whiteboards, projectors, etc. - it's sometimes the small stuff that's the coolest.

Google recently hosted the Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum, intended to shake up and reform teaching and learning. I'll be taking a little more time to look at the blog created for the forum, as I wasn't able to attend nor watch the webcasts. (Unfortunately, I haven't found that they've archived any video footage yet.)

As I browsed their website, I stumbled across one of the exhibitors in the Tech Playground, Siftables. Their website was pretty spartan, but included an 8-minute clip hosted on TED that left me saying, "Cool!"




Considering how much phones, music players, GPS units, PDAs, and other smaller technology has advanced in the past several years, more powerful computing power will be placed in smaller devices - perhaps to the point that classroom desktop computers become themselves obsolete. Imagine a classroom which wasn't crowded with bulky desktops, but rather a class set of PDAs with subject-specific software and hardware interfaces; netbooks that can turn a traditional classroom into a computer lab; or, like Siftables, manipulatives that are "smart" in the context of how they're being used.

Posted in: hardware, pedagogy