Horizon Project: Trends in Technology for K-12 Education
Author: Rick Phelan
Published: 07.01.13
Where is technology going in the next five years? School planning teams would do well to have a long-term plan for technology that guides progress over a three- to five-year period. Because of the constant changes happening in technology, those plans should take national and worldwide trends in educational technology into account as they focus on local needs. The Horizon Report is a resource that can help schools with the development of forward-looking technology plans.
For the past 12 years, the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project has been researching emerging technologies and their impact on people around the globe. Working in collaboration with the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the New Media Consortium (NMC) produces a comprehensive report each year. The report has sections detailing the top emerging technologies, trends, and challenges K-12 education will face over the next five years. Report sections are authored by an international advisory board of K-12 educators and researchers.
The 2013 Horizon Report for K-12 was released a few weeks ago. Here’s a snapshot of the information it included.
Six Emerging Technologies
The report identified two emerging technologies for the near term (assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for schools within the next 12 months).
- Cloud Computing | Use of Internet services for computing and communication, data storage and access, and collaborative work.
- Mobile Learning | Smartphones and tablets are increasing access to the Internet through Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and one-to-one school programs at younger ages. Mobile devices are gateways to 24/7, 365-day learning, collaboration, and productivity.
Two emerging technologies for the mid term (assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for schools within two to three years) were also identified.
- Learning Analytics | Examines trends and patterns from huge sets of student-related data to further the advancement of a personalized, supportive system of K-12 education. “The widespread adoption of learning management systems has refined the outcomes of learning analytics to look at students more precisely. Student-specific data can now be used to customize curricula and suggest resources to students in the same way that businesses tailor advertisements and offers to customers.”
- Open Content | This area began when universities such as Stanford and MIT began making some of their courses freely available to anyone through the Internet. “The open content movement is increasingly a response to the rising costs of education, the desire to provide access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn.”
Emerging technologies for the far term (assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for schools within four to five years) include:
- 3D Printing | Schools are starting to use 3D printers to help students understand the design process, build rapid prototypes, and create models that demonstrate concepts in curricula. This trend is recognized with the combination of low-cost printing “replicators” ($1,500 to $3,000) and open source files that allow anyone to create their own 3D images of real objects for “printing.”
- Virtual and Remote Laboratories | Some schools are starting to take advantage of virtual interfaces and simulations to provide students with authentic scientific experiences without the associated costs of building and maintaining physical lab spaces. “Virtual and remote labs have benefits that hands-on environments do not; in virtual and remote environments, an experiment can be conducted numerous times with greater efficiency and precision. Granted 24/7 access and with more room to make mistakes, students can spend more time making scientific measurements and engaging in laboratory practices.”
Key Trends
The 2013 Horizon Report acknowledges “key trends” based on what is currently happening in the context of K-12 education and in the world at large. The advisory board came up with these trends based on, “review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research to identify and rank trends that are currently affecting teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in K-12 education.” The key trends for 2013 include:
- Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning, and collaborative models.
- Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and communicate.
- Openness – concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information – is becoming a value.
- As the cost of technology drops and school districts revise and open up their access policies, it is becoming more common for students to bring their own mobile devices.
- The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
Challenges
The Horizon Report advisory board examined recurring challenges that were expressed in interviews and research papers, and through observations. The K-12 challenges that leadership teams need to attend to in developing 3-5 year plans include:
- Ongoing professional development needs to be valued and integrated into the culture of schools.
- Too often it is education’s own practices that limit broader uptake of new technologies. In order for students to get a well-rounded education with real world experience, they must also engage in more informal in-class activities as well as experience learning outside the classroom.
- New models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to traditional models of schooling.
- K-12 must address the increased blending of formal and informal learning.
- The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
- We are not using digital media for formative assessment the way we could and should.
To learn more about details and information shared here, download the complete report from the NMC Horizon Project website.
Blog: Technology for Learners
