Ever since science fiction first gained widespread popularity in the middle of the 20th century, there have been numerous fantasies about what the classroom “of the future” would look like. While we are not all wearing rings around our entire bodies, while out seats and desks do not levitate, and while our instructors do not hale from distant planets across the cosmos, we do have a lot of great technologies which are only now beginning to be implemented. While the future never comes in one sense, we are definitely there in another sense of the term. And the future is looking very bright for the use of positive technologies.
For one thing, there is no longer any excuse for any student to not know the most important things about the class. All classroom information can now easily be posted to services such as blackboard (when it actually functions), or to the instructor’s own website. And news is not all that can be shared. Assignments no longer need to be “handed out” so much as they need to be “posted” to such sites. Even tests and quizzes can be put up in a sense that our grandparents never would have dreamed of having access to.
And even if you are not online, you can still receive messages in a more constructive sense than ever before. While the rule about cell phones in class has always existed (and has always been ignored) since the technology became widespread, the up side to having so many cells in class is that a mass text can be seen by everyone in the class immediately after it has been sent. So if an instructor wants to remind their students of some important tidbit (such as to read a particular chapter on their ereader tonight), they now have absolutely no trouble with doing so. We have reached tomorrow, and it is good.