In Ten Years

My 4 year old daughter just had her Preschool graduation today.  In 14 short years she will be graduating from high school.  I wonder what the world will be like then.  This got me thinking, in 10 years she will be starting the chapter in life that we call, high school.  What will it be like?  Will the chalk/ dry-erase boards be huge touch screen iPads?  Will there be books in the classroom or will they all be on tablets?  Will mystery meat still be served in the lunchroom?  Thinking about all of these things reminded me of an article I read entitled, “15Current Technologies a Child Born Today Will Never Use” by Avram Piltch.   I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the 15 technologies Piltch listed and see if she would know what they were or if I thought they would fade away without her ever remembering them.

1.  Wired Home Internet - This is one I'm pretty sure she will never know. Hot spots and cellular technologies are already spreading at a rapid pace.

2.  Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders - She knows what these are and so will her baby brother.

3.  Landline Phone - She will know what that is because older generations like her grandparents will never get rid of it. And since her mother insists on having one so she can call her cell when she misplaces it, so will we.

4.  Slow Booting Computer - This is one I don't think she will ever know unless she comes up to my classroom at school.

5.  Windowed operating system - This is one I think she will know only because we aren't away from it yet, and we may just end up with modified versions that will increase productivity with each new release.

6.  Hard Drives - I think the move to Solid State Drives will be so quick that she probably won't know. She is also already asking about pictures being saved “in the clouds”, and with the increase in cloud servers we move farther from hard drives.

7.  Movie Theaters - She will definitely know what this is and so will everyone else for generations to come. Where else would people have awkward first dates? The technologies in the theaters however will go through many changes and advancements, like we have seen with 3D, IMAX, etc.

8.  The Mouse - I think she will know since they teach this in preschool computer classes, but I'm not sure that her younger brother will have to use this method over straight touch-screen.

9.  3D Glasses - She will know, they still have 3D rides at Disney. And that is the most magical place on earth.

10.  Remote Controls - She will and does know what this is, however she will forget where she put it…and I will spend countless more hours trying to figure out where she could have placed it.

11.  Phone numbers - She does know what phone numbers are, and I don’t foresee other identifiers being used completely in the near future for her to not remember.

12.  Prime time television - She probably won't know what this is, we DVR everything.

13.  Fax Machine - She probably won't know what this is, we are already going to scanner based faxes in large corporations over the standard free standing fax machine.

14.  Desktops - She probably will but I'm not sure about her baby brother, the four year age span may be too much for this advancement.

15.  Optical disc - She loves her DVDs to watch her movies, she does grasp that Blu Rays cannot work in standard DVD players. VHS and cassette tapes will have the view of 8-tracks for me.

So some yes, some no, what do you think?