The Future - TT#12

What does the future hold for education in terms of technology? What a great question and the trends are leading to something very exciting! My imagination runs wild here as I envision students in classrooms out of some sci-fi movie! So much technology!!! I was reading through the NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016: K-12 Edition and there seems to be some interesting developments as can be seen in the following infographic pulled from the report itself.

First of all, most of the developments are showing up in schools already it seems. There is a large makespace movement, online learning is in from Youtube channels to government supplied resources, virtual reality expeditions are popular with cheap viewers, and the rest I have not seen but I'm sure they are emerging. (I'm still a pre-service teacher so my experience is limited of course). The future is now and I am ready and willing to adopt whatever tech I can introduce into my classrooms, given it is enhancing the learning process. Our youth are growing up in a high-tech world so to deny experiences to learn this tech, I feel would hinder their future. Of course, traditional learning is still important and should not be pushed to the wayside; technology is just there the enhance the experience.

One aspect of the report that instantly caught my attention is the short-term trend of coding as a literacy. Students are learning to code and I agree with this. It's a new language that I think students should have a working knowledge of for sure. I've been saying that since I entered into education. There is even suggestions out there that states the new blue collar job is coding! (The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding) Those old typing classes that I went through should be replaced by coding now I feel. Wow technology moves fast!

One major challenge in the future is the need to personalize learning to cater to individual student needs. Students are so diverse that they learn in so many different ways. The Horizon Report states that "students’ unique needs is driving the development of new technologies that provide more learner choice and allow for differentiated content delivery". In my last post, one of our class presenters Mr.Ridgen addressed this challenged directly within his class it seems. He advocates for the TECH acronym of classroom integrate technology and at the top level, HANDOFF, directly applies to this challenge. Students are capable of learning their own way through the many opportunites that technology supplies and same for learning demonstration. I see plenty rubrics in the future. I'd like to see how student centered approaches work in the higher level math classrooms though.....