While the start of a new school year is always exciting, this year was even more so for some elementary school students in Auckland, New Zealand. They became the world’s first kids to be “taught” by a digital teacher, Will. Before you start imagining a human-like robot walking around the classroom, Will is just an avatar(化身) that turns up on the students’ desktop, tablet, or smartphone screen when called.

Thanks to a digital camera and microphone, the avatar not only responds to questions the kids may have ,but also picks up non-verbal signals. For example, if a student smiles at Will, he responds by smiling back. This two-way communication not only helps draw the students’ attention, but also allows the program’s developers to monitor their involvement(参与) and make changes if needed.

Vector’s Chief Digital Officer, Nikhil Ravishankar, believes that Will-like avatars could be a novel way to attract the attention of the next generation. He says, “Using a digital human is a very popular method to deliver new information to people, and I have a lot of hope in this technology as a means to deliver rich and educational experience in the future.” Greg Cross, the Chief Business Officer for Soul Machines, states that kids who have grown up in this digital time adapt(适应) to new technology quickly, and he hopes to develop the idea of digital humans in the area of educate further.

The program, in place since August 2018, has been a great success so far. However, no matter how popular it becomes, Will is unlikely to replace human edueators any time soon. For one, the avatar’s knowledge base is severely limited. But more importantly, even the smartest digital avatars could never predict and react to all the unexpected situations that educators have to deal with on a daily basis. However, it could come in handy as a “personal teacher”, providing kids with one-on-one help on the subjects or even topics.

When students got their textbooks at the beginning of the year at San Mateo High School, they also received the Yondr pouch Youdr (口袋), a locking device for their phones. The phone slides into it and gets locked through a magnetic (磁力的) device. It’s not unlocked again until the final bell rings. The procedure will repeat every day for the rest of the school year.

Adam Gelb, the vice-president, ran a pilot project last year with 20 students and decided to do a school-wide, bell to bell program for this school year. The Yondr pouch is a start-up in San Francisco with a mission to create phone-free spaces, something that is the very thought with Gelb.

“I really think it’s about being present and engaging in the adult that’s trying to teach you, and your peers that might be in your small group. That’s part of the main philosophy that we're trying to spread,” he said.

Brad Friedman, another teacher at the school, said he was becoming concerned with overuse of phones at school. He said he often saw students completely lost on their phones, some not socializing at all with other students.

This week, he’s already seeing the difference. “Everyone else was socializing and eating lunch together. That’s what I wasn’t seeing enough of when phone usage is at its worst,” he said.

A senior at San Mateo High School Djelani Phillips-Diop said he definitely panicked at first when he heard he had to lock his phone. “I panicked, I guess. Last year when we had phones, I was using it every day,” he said.

In case of emergency, every classroom has the unlocking device. Teachers still have access to their own cellphones and desk phones. “We’ve gotten all 1,700 students unlocked with a matter of minutes,” said Gelb.

We spoke to four students who, despite their initial panic, agreed that a phone-free school experience has its benefits.

Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan declared a war on paper textbooks. “Over the next few years,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club, “textbooks should be abandoned.” In their place would come a variety of digital-learning technologies, like e-readers and multi-media websites.

Such technologies certainly have their place. But Secretary Duncan is threatening to light a fire to a tried-and-true technology—good old paper—that has been the foundation for one of the great educational systems on the planet. And while e-readers and multi-media may seem appealing, the idea of replacing an effective learning platform with a widely hyped (炒作) but still unproven one is extremely dangerous.

An expert on reading, Maryanne Wolf, has recently begun studying the effects of digital reading on learning, and so far the results are mixed. She worries that Internet reading, in particular, could be such a source of distractions(分散注意力) for the student that they may cancel out most other potential benefits of a web-linked, e-learning environment, and while it’s true that the high-tech industry has sponsored substantial amounts of research on the potential benefits of Web-based learning, not enough time has passed for longitudinal（纵向的） studies to demonstrate the full effects.

In addition, digital-reading advocates claim that lightweight e-books benefit students’ backs and save schools money. But the rolling backpack seems to have solved the weight problem, and the astounding costs to outfit every student with an e-reader, provide technical support and pay for regular software updates promise to make the e-textbook a very pricey choice.

As both a teacher who uses paper textbooks and a student of urban history, I can’t help but wonder what parallels exist between my own field and this sudden, wholesale abandonment of the technology of paper.