I have to be sincere and tell you that the first time I heard it I thought “that’s a joke and it can’t be true, how we can’t teach children how to write with pen and paper? Are the Finnish teachers crazy this morning?”.

Then I start thinking deeply about it and that it could be a reasonable option to change our methodology of learning how to write because we do almost everything with our “smart-devices”, so practically we don’t need to write in a paper. Also in schools, nowadays with the ICT in class we don’t need to spend lot of time making photocopies to class, we just find a webpage and the classroom projector do all the effort for us showing it to all the students, and to fill it, the students only have to stand up and touch with their finger the digital whiteboard and write the correct answer.

Finnish government said that they will make that change in September 2016 (for the 2016/2017 course). Maybe in Spain we need more time to apply it in a school. First of all, we need to apply at all the ICT in schools because not all the classes have one and not all the teachers know how to use it correctly, so first we need to improve this.

When we had done it, the next step could be the tablets for every child, so they can do their homework at home or in class in their tablet, so they don’t have to carry to class and go back home with a lot of books and notebooks, they only need their tablet!

Then, the third step could be the one the Finnish people will do in 2016: starting to teach children how to write in their tablets rather than in paper. Because they will use more those devices than paper at that year.

Apart from the children learning, we have to think that how much words do we write in a paper and how much do we write in our “smart-devices”. If you think on it, I’m sure that we spend more time writing in our smartphone or in our computer than writing in a paper. For example:

• We can write our grocery list in our Google Keep app rather than in a sticky note
• Create a mind map using the Evernote app rather than doing it a paper
• Talk to our cousin in France by the Skype app rather than sending him a letter
• Write a post to tell the world our thinking about something using a WordPress blog rather than publishing it in a newspaper

Do you imagine the next step of the education to implement the ICT in schools? Do you imagine a world without school bags? And without “physical” schools? We can imagine, but there is something that will never disappear: teachers.