Your Assignment in 2004

By Rebecca Winters

A sixth-grader settles down to tackle her homework on a weekday afternoon in 2004. Instead of hunching over the kitchen table with a three-ring binder, she's sitting on the bus with her laptop. She logs on to the Internet to take a math-skills test on the school home page and get her own personalized assignment, downloads the software she'll need, seeks help from an online school librarian and e-mails the finished work to her teacher. Mom and Dad check in from their office computers, comparing her scores with the class and state averages.

Homework in the future may not be any less laborious, but it will certainly be more wired. And as more children gain access to computers and the Net--75% of teens and 47% of kids ages 2 to 12 are expected to be online by 2002--schools and technology companies are responding with unique assignments and high-tech homework help for parents and kids. On the menu:

TAILOR-MADE ASSIGNMENTS. The most profound way homework will change is that instead of everybody heading home with the same lesson, each student will sit down to an individual assignment, says Kevin O'Leary, president of educational-software giant the Learning Co. "If you thought of it conceptually as every child having a personal tutor, that's what we're aiming for." The school's server, or central computer, will maintain information on each student's progress and dole out the appropriate work when the child checks the Web page. At Pine Hill School in Sherborn, Mass., some teachers already give different assignments to students in the same classroom. "Most kids may be tested on 20 spelling words, while a couple in the class may be studying only 10," says principal David Nihill.

KEEPING IN TOUCH. For students like high school junior Samantha Symonds of Pottstown, Pa., the simple ease of getting assignments online and turning them in via e-mail is reason enough to take homework digital. Samantha, a competitive fencer, travels far from her school for tournaments and boots up to stay on top of her classwork. Logging on in hotel rooms and airports, she gets copies of course lectures and lab assignments, e-mails her teacher when she's stumped and even takes tests online. "You can actually focus on what you need to know rather than tracking down someone to answer your questions," Samantha says.

UNLIMITED RESEARCH. Kids are rapidly becoming experts at searching websites and CD-ROMs for research projects, and wowing teachers with what they find. "Even at the best schools, you used to be limited by how much you could pack into one little library," says Judy Breck, an educator for 20 years and now the content master at Homework Central, a commercial homework-help website. "Now if you have Web access, you're only limited by what's known."

And what's allowed. Exciting as the research potential is, it's also a major plagiarism temptation. Schools in the future may follow the lead of St. Stephens and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Va., which emphasizes the "ethical use of technology resources" in its student handbook and in computer classes.

WIRING THE HAVE-NOTS. As computers become the homework tool of choice, educators worry about children who don't have access to the technology. "The kids who don't have computers at home will be at such a fundamental disadvantage. It will be as if they don't have a pen or paper," says Elliot Soloway, a professor at the University of Michigan. He just finished a study in which Internet TVs were placed in the homes of a class of Detroit public-school students, and found it not only benefited the kids but boosted parental involvement as well.

Yet winning kids over to become fans of homework may take more than high-tech help. Annette Bitter's seventh-graders love doing research on the laptops they got through a Microsoft study. "But of course there are always excuses," says Bitter, who keeps hearing a modern tale of woe: "The computer ate my homework."

--By Rebecca Winters