Every year, the New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking publish the Horizon Report for both K-12 education and higher education. In this report, which is heavily based on research that the two groups have conducted, tries to identify the upcoming trends in educational technology. While this is more of an idea than what will actually come, it is fun to examine and see what some of the trends and ideas are. If you are interested, you can get the full report here.
Executive Summary Trends
- Advancing progressive learning approaches require cultural transformations. In order to be a school of the future, schools must be looking to freshen up the way that students and teachers communicate and share their knowledge. They must be prepared for this regardless of changes in staffing, leadership, etc.
- Learners are creators. If you have followed the session topics from MACUL and other edtech conferences, you have seen a push towards makerspaces and how they enable learning. The Horizon Report expects that this trend will continue to grow. Providing students with the opportunities to create, learn from, recreate, and continuously test is key. Think like Edison and the lightbulb. He kept going back until he learned from the supposed 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.
- Inter- and multidisciplinary learning break down silos. For many years, math has been seen as something that students do in the math room and social studies is for the social studies room. Or for the social studies block. The idea coming from this, if we are truly preparing students for the real-world, will their job have these neat barriers to cross-over knowledge. We need to break them down and show how they interconnect in our students' worlds.
- Widespread use of technology does not translate into equal learner achievement. Technology will help to close that gaps, but we cannot rely on technology to do it all. Especially for students that have been traditionally marginalized.
- Continuously measuring learning is essential to better understanding learners' needs. Frequent and deep checks for understanding are essential to ensure that students have the opportunity to grow and be successful. Think of it this way. If you were building IKEA furniture, do you check after each completed piece or once the whole thing is done? I think you check each time.
- Fluency in the digital realm is more than just understanding how to use technology. Learning with tech must move beyond the simple use of a tool to assist in learning something new. How will this impact life?
- Authentic learning is not a trend - it is a necessity. Learning should be more than just lectures and quizzes. We should see students experiencing learning with their hands and coming up with ways to show that learning.
- There is no replacement for good teaching - the role is just evolving. Teachers are no longer the sole source of information in a student's classroom. With the tools that are provided, teachers must become less of a source of information, but more of a guide, coach, or mentor in the learning process.
- Schools are prioritizing computational thinking into the curriculum. Students should be using technology tools to help analyze, computate, and share data that they have collected. It is important to prepare them for working in the jobs of the future.
- Learning spaces must reflect new approaches in education. One of my favorite things to do is compare classrooms from 100 years ago to classrooms of today. While there are noticeable changes, there are also noticeable similarities in each room. Think about what we are asking students to do and how our seating and arrangement impact that.
While these are just the headlines part, I will continue breaking out the more of the Horizon Report so that it can fuel some critical conversations and we can start to think about small changes we can make. Stay tuned!
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