So what does 2020 look like? EdTech trends 2015-2020

So what does 2020 look like?

As I sat down to think and read about future trends in classroom technology, I stumbled across the The NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. The title sounds dry enough, but the report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Consortium for School Networking. was delivered during the ISTE 2015 conference, and addresses both emerging technologies in education and takes a stab at projections over the next five years. After reading (and honestly, skimming) the report, I’m going to recommend that you should read (or skim) the report too.

The annual publication, running for more than a decade, articulates emerging technology trends in education, making predictions on what will have the most impact over the next 5 years, as well as listing what some of the biggest challenges will be.  The trends are identified both by their difficulty level (rated from “solvable to wicked”) and time to implementation, from “short-term” (1-2 years) to “long-term” (4-5 years).  The panel that determines trends and narrows down the final list is truly global. This year’s included “56 education and technology experts from 22 countries on six continents.” The gist of the 2015 report can be summed up in this chart.

image from ISTE 2015 NMC Horizon Report

It should come as no surprise that topics we are broaching weekly in KSP 689 are on the cutting edge. Seriously!  

The NMC report identifies six emerging practices or technologies destined to impact education.  They include:

• Rethinking How Schools Work,
  including a rethinking what mastery looks like. One example cited in the report considered what educators can learn from the Google Campus.
• Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches
  including challenge and problem based learning. An example cited included the Next Generation Science Standards. While PBL still needs support at the policy level, interest from national leaders will drive these models to the front of curriculum development.
• Increasing Use of Collaborative Learning Approaches, including using technology to leverage teacher and student connections. One excellent example included the NAIS challenge, which paired schools from different countries who wanted to work on the same problems.
• Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators, with emphasis on creativity, an understanding of copyright and fair use, and the collaborative benefits when students teach students.
• Increasing Use of Blended Learning, including flipped and alternative day classrooms, as well as re-examining whether bell-driven schedules are effective, and
• Moving from STEM to STEAM learning

The report also included six challenges broken down by difficulty level, including:

Solvable challenges:

• Creating Authentic Learning Opportunities
• Integrating Technology in Teacher Education

Difficult challenges: (understood problems but with or not-so-obvious solutions)

• Personalizing Learning (including how to rollout to larger populations)
• Rethinking the Roles of Teachers (scary journey for many teachers, and an area that could be quickly politicized depending on who is promoting the new role)

Wicked challenges (complicated to even define, much less address)

• Scaling Teaching Innovations - when something works, how can it be effectively spread to other teachers, students and classrooms?
• Teaching complex thinking
  

The report also included six tech developments on the horizon (or already here), providing the timeline until these developments would reach mainstream status.

Fully saturated in the next year:

• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Makerspaces

Two to Three Years until it hits mainstream status

• 3D Printing
• Adaptive Learning Technologies

Four to Five Years

• Digital Badges
• Wearable Technology

Each of the areas of the report includes greater in-depth data and examples, as well as links to supporting articles; many are worth reading.  

While I read the entire report with curiosity and interest, I couldn’t help but noticing that the supporting articles were all written by and about charter schools.  Charters don’t have to live by the same rules as public schools, and often are able to work with a smaller student population, making them more nimble.  

This article also reminded me of the flip-side perspective, from another article a colleague had shared with me, demonizing technology and specifically Smartboards (?!!?), suggesting that the movement for tech integration has been part of a corporate takeover of curriculum in an anti-teacher, anti-public education “reform” movement.  Just goes to show that not everybody is on board, I guess, and some of our colleagues will need more convincing than others.

While I haven’t had enough time to digest the NMC report fully, I can’t help but think the full report along with linked articles will be a resource I bookmark and revisit again, in additional to marking my calendar for the ISTE 2016 trends next June.