This morning I was sent this article on “Mapping the Future of Technology Education” by Patrick James.
It includes an infographic on the future of education which is extremely interesting considering what all of us are doing in the education sphere now. The article says that 65% of grade school children will work in jobs that do not even exist yet.
The infographic and article talk about the shift from classroom education towards a virtual learning environment. That is what we are trying to work on at iThemes Education. As one of our educators you are creating innovation in our country.
Additionally, I read another article recently about Estonia and what they are doing for first graders in their country. “Computer Programming Will Soon Reach All Estonian Schoolchildren” written by Richard Wilson outlines what steps Estonia is taking to develop their children into innovative creators of products. You can see that it takes a big buy in to make this type of change. Estonia made their decision to invest in this type of learning in 1997. Now it is culminating in teaching programming to every school age child in the entire country.
Here is my thought for the day for you: Think about the innovation that must be happening right now and will be happening in the near future. What can you do to move this innovation forward in your own community?
That infographic certainly highlights some important trends, and I definitely concur that we need to be finding more ways to support creativity and innovation in our classrooms, but I question the sources for the infographic and where the dates are coming from that it postulates. One of the problems with this timeline is it portrays education as somehow monolithic, like everyone is proceeding on a linear path and hitting the same milestones at about the same time. The school districts in our nation which are already 1:1 with mobile learning devices are definitely a far cry from the 2012 portrayal of “single teacher delivering uni-directional content to students” with computers concentrated in labs. Some of our OKC metro area districts have changed board policies in the past year to start allowing students to bring digital devices to school. We are not close to a tipping point for digital devices in the hands of students yet, but I think this infographic timeline really misses out on representing the digital divide which already separate many schools. Sure, many teachers in many schools ARE still teaching like it it’s 1982, but many are not and have embraced digital learning.
One regular study I highly comment which looks at edtech trends in K12 as well as higher ed is the NMC Horizon Report. I like how they forecast trends on the near, middle and far event horizons. Certainly we need to encourage more of our school board members and superintendents to recognize these trends and embrace the learning opportunities they present TODAY for students as well as teachers.
http://www.nmc.org/horizon-project/horizon-reports/horizon-report-k-12-edition
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