The Future of Education

See a more in-depth video on Apple's Education page

Heading into higher education right now is so exciting! 

Technology is rapidly changing to make information more readily accessible and more interesting to learn. Watching this video about the Essa Academy in the UK literally gave me chills- it's so awesome to see success at such a high level with just a few tweaks. Like the flipped classroom idea, bringing extensive technology to education can drastically increase the success rates of students all over the world! 

Seriously, the ability for a teacher to set up a book of lessons and change it as your focus of study changes is incredible! Even more, the teacher can create their own "textbook" that follows the basic agenda and include multimedia such as movies in it. Talk about lightening a load- an iPad and MacBook and you're good to go? Sign me up!

I am hesitant to move to virtual textbooks, though. My class was part of an experiment freshman year where we all had netbooks and used them in our classes. They weren't Apple and the classroom didn't fit together as seamlessly as they would have had all of the technology been made to work together. With that fact out of the way, I hated and I do mean HATED the textbooks online. They were so hard to use as a reference tool because you couldn't just flip through the pages quickly to find an image or reference an idea. In college where you purchase your textbook, a virtual one keeps you from being able to hilight and make notes in the margins. So... I'm still not sure how I feel about virtual books, although I said the same thing about my good ole Kindle and now I'm in love.

Regardless of any bit of hesitance right now, I think that technology is progressing in a great way all over the world. Human culture no longer has to evolve physically; we evolve technologically. We're at a point now where new technology is available at rapid rates and will continue for the whole spectrum, from education to economics to health care. 

I'm so excited to see where we will be in the next 5-10 years.

also, congrats to the Essa Academy! So great to see such progression in a short amount of time.