3/7/2024 - technology-and-innovation

"Classrooms of the Future: Innovation Beyond Whiteboards and Desks."

By Ariel Vazquez

"Classrooms of the Future: Innovation Beyond Whiteboards and Desks."

Today's school and university classrooms are spaces with chairs and tables that all face the same place where there is a blackboard and a desk with a single chair. I challenge you with the following question: Have you ever seen a different classroom in your life? Why hasn't it changed yet?

We went through kindergarten, elementary, middle school, high school, university and we hardly felt the architectural difference of the space. The aesthetics are getting duller and duller, but the architecture is still intact.

If we see an image of the classrooms of the universities of the Middle Ages, we will surely be surprised: they are not so different from what we know today. However, at least 500 years have passed.

Technology has arrived in the classroom: we have replaced chalk with electronic whiteboards, books with ebooks, notebooks with tablets and notebooks, but we are still looking ahead.

The skills needed for this new working world, such as creativity, flexibility, teamwork and public speaking, are very difficult to achieve with a teaching-learning model focused on an active role of the teacher and a passive role of the student.

Undoubtedly, what is important is what and how teaching and learning take place. Currently, there is great agreement in designing student-centered learning models, where the student learns through experience and is the protagonist of his or her learning.

However, classroom design is closely linked to the relationships generated in that space and to what we want to happen in it.

What would happen if we had different spaces in a classroom space? Can armchairs, work tables, technological equipment and a stage coexist? In 2018 a movement driven by HP and Intel promoted the RTCI Classrooms. "Reinvent by Classroom International". These classrooms feature 4 spaces with distinct pedagogical objectives: Discover, Design, Create and Present. For this purpose, they have architectural design and furnishings that support these objectives.

These classrooms have armchairs and blackboards for Thinking, work tables and tools for Designing and Creating collaboratively, and a stage for Presenting. Students go through the four instances, they move and no longer all look forward. There is no longer a protagonist, now the protagonist is everyone and the best thing is that it is alternating.

What would happen if university classrooms were transformed into a fusion between a living room, a coworking room, a laboratory and a theater? How good it would be if tomorrow we would not realize that we are inside a classroom.

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Ariel Vazquez

Ariel Vazquez

With more than 20 years of experience in academia and business, I am a passionate leader in the management and development of people, projects and educational programs. Currently, I serve as Coordinator of the Academic Departments of the School of Economics at UADE, where I work together with the directors of the areas of Quantitative Methods, Economics and Finance, Marketing and Foreign Trade, Accounting and Taxes, and Administration and Human Resources to articulate the operation and strategies of the School.

In addition, I am the Director of the Bachelor's Degree in Human Resources and of the Department of Business and Technology at UADE, where I manage more than 120 classes and coordinate a team of 60 professors. The Department brings together all the subjects that have a technological component of the Faculty, and the Career has more than 1000 students. My mission is to provide an education of excellence, innovative and relevant to the demands of the labor market and society.
I write about education, the future of work and new applied technologies.


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