What’s next? Robots in the classroom?

Maybe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has more money than it knows how to spend. Or, maybe classroom technology skipped a few generations while I was on vacation. But here is a report, linked below, that the Gates Foundation is spending $1.4 million on the development of a bracelet to measure students’ emotional responses to instruction.

The socalled “engagement pedometer” supposedly would gauge how students are responding to instruction by sending small electric currents across the skin to measure how the kids’ nervous systems are responding to stimuli. There obviously are some “bugs” (an old fashioned term) to be worked out yet, if ever. But, according to this report, the Gates Foundation also suggests these devices could be used in teacher evaluations.

Now, who is evaluating the Gates Foundation?

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2012/06/the_student_engagement_bracelet.html?cmp=ENLEUNEWS2