Long gone are the days when it was frowned upon for students to pull out a phone or laptop in a classroom.
In the US alone, according to a survey conducted in the last two months from digital education company TES Global, 84% of teachers at the K-12 level are using some form of technology in their lesson plans. While 35% of teachers in last year’s inaugural survey said internet connectivity in the classroom was a distraction or barrier to successful teaching, only 16% felt that way this year.
It seems teachers have grown from “boring, chalk-dusted technophobes” to “tech-savvy pioneers,” TES Global CEO Rob Grimshaw tells Quartz.
Yet perhaps the most curious findings from TES’s report are that, when asked what technologies they’d like to see in the classroom in the near future:
We’re talking about, yes, these VR headsets. The ones being touted by VR-producing tech companies as the future of social media, film, entertainment—and very seldom education.
But thrilling possibilities do exist for VR and augmented-reality technology as it relates to teaching and learning. Google $GOOGL Cardboard’s inexpensive platform, for example, offers many compelling learning experiences; a Utah-based startup recently debuted an immersive augmented-reality machine that takes users through heart-pumping, larger-than-life adventures. VR experiences, as Quartz’s Anne Quito points out, may give kids the chance to do anything from “traveling” foreign lands to learning human biology lessons up close.
Those 10% of forward-thinking teachers may be onto something yet. Ample evidence exists, after all, to champion technology’s beneficial effects on earning. With VR, every day can be a field trip.
