HAILEY - Today's educators are often still using chalkboards to educate students living in an iPhone world.

While white chalk on a blackboard still works to present information, the lessons on those boards may not be reaching as many students as they once did, according to Jim Warford, an education expert who spoke to Blaine County School District teachers last Friday.

"Today's students are flat-out wired differently than we are," Warford said. "They're used to having information flying at them and, as a result, 10-year-olds have larger brains than we did at their age. That's why your students are so bored when we use old teaching methods."

Warford, former chancellor of public schools in Florida, is a senior consultant at the International Center for Leadership in Education, which analyzes the best schools in the nation to find out what works.

The world is changing faster than schools are, he said, noting the economy of the future is going to be controlled by those in biotechnology and genetic engineering.

"In the future we'll be able to regrow teeth, arms and other limbs. "That's the world your students will live in. Are we even talking about that in our public schools?"

And while President Obama recently called for a longer school year and more hours in school for U.S. children, Warford said the answer to helping the nation's underperforming students won't come by piling up homework or extending school hours.

What's important, he said, is that teachers move away from drills that rely on memorization and focus on creative problem solving.

"My son always told me, 'Dad, don't use my brain as a hard drive,'" Warford said. "We need to stretch our students."

Schools of tomorrow will look different thanks, in part, to the rise of online curriculum. Online curriculum will grow to 8.2 million courses from 1 million in 2007, according to Harvard business theorist Clayton Christensen.

"Given that, some legislators are already trying to figure out how they can remove teachers from the equation," Warford said.

High school science teacher Larry Barnes said he is trying to keep his students abreast of current developments in biotechnology.

"I tell my students that biotechnology will be to the 21st century what physics was to the 20th," he said. "It's interesting, however to contemplate the number of online classes that will be offered in the school of tomorrow."

Hailey engineer David Wray said it's important that today's students realize they'll compete on a global level for tomorrow's jobs.

"We're 26th or 27th in math and science," he said. "If we don't change the way we teach, we're going to become a third-world country."

Karen Bossick may be reached at kbossick@cox-internet.com.