Bevil Wood­ing

It's class time and a Math teacher con­nects her lap­top to a mul­ti­me­dia pro­jec­tor and be­gins stream­ing the day's les­son from the In­ter­net for her ea­ger stu­dents. When the les­son is fin­ished, she pro­vides in­struc­tions for her stu­dents to down­load the video from the In­ter­net along with the re­lat­ed les­son notes.

In the ad­ja­cent class, row­dy stu­dents are play­ing a game. The ring­leader is not a re­cal­ci­trant pupil, but the Bi­ol­o­gy teacher. And the game is be­ing played from a tablet as stu­dents sub­mit re­spons­es that ap­pear as video and text on screen.

Down the hall, the Dig­i­tal Me­dia class joins an on­line video con­fer­ence with oth­er stu­dents and ex­perts from Ja­maica, the Unit­ed States and Africa to col­lab­o­rate on dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and mo­bile app de­vel­op­ment projects.

In the staff room, teach­ers use a high-speed In­ter­net con­nec­tion to up­load the videos they have just cre­at­ed. They joke about their less than Hol­ly­wood-style per­for­mances while trad­ing ideas for im­prov­ing their work to in­crease stu­dent par­tic­i­pa­tion. Each video, along with sup­port­ing dig­i­tal text­books, read­ing re­sources and les­son-plans, forms part of a grow­ing on­line li­brary that can be ac­cessed by stu­dents and par­ents.

As the bell rings for the noon break, stu­dents whip out lap­tops, tablets and phones to surf the web over the school's wire­less net­work, as they eat lunch.

They aren't part of some imag­i­nary "smart school of the fu­ture" or a for­eign, de­vel­oped-coun­try, mod­el school. They are in North­Gate Col­lege, a sec­ondary school in St Au­gus­tine, Trinidad and To­ba­go. North­Gate, through a spe­cial Jump­start ini­tia­tive, is build­ing a prac­ti­cal, dig­i­tal path­way de­signed to de­liv­er to stu­dents the class of the fu­ture, to­day. And it hopes oth­ers will fol­low.

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