Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are bringing in students from different countries together, and you have some sort of a social media element to your platform. You have teachers and experts from different domains on that platform who can operate across the school boundaries.

Warren Barkley: It’s not quite like that. Basically, as a teacher, I have a class. I have this big virtual space. I can split it up in a lot of different ways. I can posit questions into it. It does have a social media piece to it. I wouldn’t say it’s a rendezvous to Discovery Point. It would be two teachers who knew each other on Twitter saying, “Let’s get our classes to work together on this stuff.” It’s not just a group of two or three kids in my location. I want two kids from the UK and two kids from Maryland to work in the same space. It’s more like that. There’s also the case where a teacher from the US says, “I’m working on this. Is there someone out there who wants to work on that for me.” These are pre-existing relationships generally.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Are there any other trends that you want to discuss?

Warren Barkley: I’m not sure if it’s a trend or an issue. One of the things that I do see quite a bit is that common core in the US is pushing quite heavily. I think that the original thoughts around common core around critical thinking and problem solving were excellent, but it has become this standardized testing. It’s given a reason to put devices in classrooms and upgrade the Wi-Fi, which are all good things. I’ll tell you this one story I’ve seen a couple of different times in a couple of different places. I went into a class in the US. Every kid had an iPad. The teacher had them doing assignments on the iPad. The kids handed the iPad back to the teacher so that she had 23 iPads on her desk and physically mark each. That’s an extreme example.

I don’t see the professional development being done around some of this technology that common core is pushing into the classroom—ways that you can move the pedagogy along. I think that’s a shame. We’re so focused on the capital expense of getting these things in that we’re not doing the harder work of getting the teachers to a place where they’re using these technology in effective ways. It could be a real problem. It’s a wasted opportunity.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies
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