Imagine 25 pairs of eyes in a K-12 classroom all staring at you. Only it's not really you. Rather, it's a digital version of you, offering up a brief lecture or directions for an upcoming activity. Sound crazy? New York University educators don't think so.
Katie Ash, who blogs at EducationWeek.org, reports that videos of NYU teacher lectures might replace the live version of the teacher -- even if only for a short time.
In her post, Video Lectures in Higher Ed, Ash says that:
"Professors at the university will be creating free, online videos of their lectures, and for NYU students, they will add supplemental materials to the videos, such as links to the sources they mention in lectures, as well as pop-up definitions and quizzes."
The question is, can this sort of activity work in the K-12 world?
This is not to suggest that teachers would never be in the classroom. In fact, if a teacher coached her classes properly, she could have the digital version of herself -- a webcam video, perhaps -- offering direct instruction to the majority of students, while she worked with one or more individuals in the back of the room. Any digital instruction could be uploaded to a classroom blog for future reference.
You have to admit it's a novel idea, as long as students would cooperate.
So, can a digital teacher really be effective?
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