What do our future schools look like?

At the annual SXSWEdu, several presenters shared four models of what the classroom of the future could look like. These models were shared in an article on HechingerReport.org.

According to the article, the first model is "a school with coding in every class."

"Last year, Beaver Country Day School, an independent school in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, introduced coding in a geometry class," the article said. "By the end of the year, all teachers in grades 6-12 were integrating coding into classes. That means students in English were writing code to create animation for a scene from Macbeth, while students in History were using coding to visualize data about colonial America."

According to the article, the goal, teachers said, "is to allow students to show their learning and knowledge in different ways. It is also a way to increase engagement, said teacher Rob MacDonald."

Instead of reading information from a textbook in a 'mundane way' in math classes, 'my kids were more engaged and took ownership of the material and also showed me later on that they had a good memory of it.' MacDonald said," the article said. "To roll out the new initiative, teachers relied on each other to learn how to code, and to learn how to teach coding. They also had to move beyond the idea that they would lose time to teach content by allowing kids to code.

"When you’re teaching coding you’re not sacrificing content,” MacDonald said in the article. “You’re just tackling it from a different perspective.”

Read the full story and comment below.

Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor