Likewise, "blended learning"—in which students take at least part of a class online while supervised by adults—is now offered by about 70 percent of K-12 public-school districts. According the Clayton Christensen Institute—a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that touts "disruptive innovation"—the number of K-12 students who took an online course increased from roughly 45,000 in 2000, to more than 3 million in 2009. The institute also projects that half of all high-school classes will be delivered online by 2019.

I asked a longtime friend of mine—a high-school principal in northern California—to tell me candidly what he thought about blended learning. He said, "we’re at the point where the Internet pretty much supplies everything we need. We don’t really need teachers in the same way anymore. I mean, sure, my daughter gets some help from her teachers, but basically everything she learns—from math to band—she can get from her computer better than her teachers."

At a seminar about project-based learning, I told the presenter with an increasing sense of desperation, "You know, some of us English teachers still believe that teaching literature is still our primary job." He smirked and put his pointer finger near his thumb and said, "A very little part of your job." And I recently watched the TedTalk that won the $1 million prize at Ted2013, the one in which Sugata Mitra stated that "schools as we know them are obsolete" because the country no longer needs teachers. Here's how he envisions the classroom:

Sugata Mitra

In the original idea of the "flipped classroom," it seems that the teacher was responsible for recording the lecture and posting the video online, but it’s now becoming more efficient to link to a professional video. And there are now thousands of videos from which to choose. The Kahn Academy—a nonprofit that claims to provide "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere"—features more than 6,500 free videos and advertises over 100,000 interactive lessons on various subjects. According to Forbes, more than 500,000 teachers worldwide use these videos, which also have over 500 million views on YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube’s own education channel ("Where anyone, anywhere can learn or teach anything") has 1 million-plus subscribers. And about 2,000 TED talks are available to view for free online and have been seen more than 1 billion times total. The list goes on.

I recently spoke with Monica Brady-Myerov, the CEO and founder of Listen Current, a website that curates the best of public radio, including current events, and offers the three- to five-minute clips alongside a full set of lesson plans and worksheets. When I asked her about the recent boom in lesson-plan production, she said, "It’s like the wild west right now, both in terms of online resources and educational technology. It’s why I quit my job [as a veteran award-winning public radio journalist], so I could ride out west." Here's what Listen Current looks like:

Listen Current

I found brief solace in the idea that I could still be the professional teacher that compiles all these resources—and then I found Edmodo. Branding itself as the "Facebook for schools," Edmodo started in just 2008 and now has more than 48 million members. I signed up just to see what it was all about. Within five minutes, I found a great lesson on Romeo and Juliet by John Green (a favorite author among teens, and on the list of Time’s "100 most influential people"), a Kahn Academy video, immediate access to 100 famous speeches, and a somewhat fun interactive game based on Lord of the Flies. According to EdSurge, the Edmodo CEO earlier this month said, "We want to do for teacher resources what Netflix does for movies."