Hello, I hope you enjoyed the blog last week about ITS and the Knewton adaptive learning model. 
This week I thought I would talk about teachers, do we all share the same enthusiasm for online education?
I have previously said that I trust technology and its place in my job, it helps with resources, the number of students and content. However, some teachers fear that technology is going to totally replace them.
Robots seem to have also been in education, for example, bee-bots and pro-bots helped children with mathematics.
Bee-bots: https://youtu.be/wcAHpLO0BWA
Pro-bots: https://youtu.be/CpmgXAGXECo
Edwards & Cheok (2018) suggested that robots seem more appealing to teach compared to teachers as teachers created an economic implication and with the creation of Artificial intelligence robots could easily replace teachers.
Crompton, Gregory & Burke (2018) did a study with these robots and their results showed that children were more caring with them and treated them as a peer. Which led the researchers to think this might be how children would value a robot if it was there teacher. Edwards et al. (2016) also created an investigation into teachers and robots, using telepresence as one method of the teacher being a robot. Their results also reported that students preferred a robot as a teacher or at least a different presence from the teacher. 
Why might this be?
Taylor (2018) argued that teachers take too much time explaining topics, setting up classrooms and dealing with behaviour, which I do agree with. Also, it has become clear that robots can hold more information and acquire information a lot faster than teachers, their maintenance cost is a lot lower than a teacher salary and these could be some of the reasons why robots did seem to be more interesting than regular class teachers (Edwards & Choek 2018).
So can robots take over teaching career?
I am aware of some children who do learn from robots and don’t attend an alt school or an online school. However, there are too many people who are enrolled in online courses and a lot of teachers who use the flipped classroom approach and Knewton adaptive learning sites. Not to mention the amount of Alt-schools that are being taught in. So, on a personal level, I don’t think robots are going to take over all the teachers in the world.
Thats it for this week and sadly the end of the blog! However, I may start a new blog on my house robot and whether it is effective or not so keep checking in!
I hope you found what I had to say, as well as key individuals interesting and it made you more insightful on education and being a teacher today.
Any questions leave them down below!
cya,
thefutureofeducation.