Emerging Technology in the Classroom

It cannot be denied that we live in a society driven by technology, with new technologies emerging everyday. The current trend is that "technology continues to profoundly affect the way we work, collaborate, communicate, and succeed. Information technologies impact how people work, play, learn, socialize, and collaborate" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). This reality needs to be addressed and brought into our classrooms and included in the general curriculum. This statement brings me to a critical problem that currently exists in education: students are changing rapidly, "but educational practice and the materials that support it are changing only slowly" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). In response to this problem, The New Media Consortium has been supporting an ongoing research effort to "identif[y] and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). The annual report released by The New Media Consortium is a great resource that summarizes the current trends, critical challenges and emerging technologies surrounding education. I found this report to be an excellent resource not only for information about issue of technology in education, but also for new ideas to bring into the classroom.

One technology in the report that really resonated with me was the collaborative environments, “online spaces where the focus is on making it easy to collaborate and work in groups, no matter where the participants may be” (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). As stated in the 2010 Horizon report, “The value placed on collaboration in the workplace is high, and professionals of all kinds are expected to work across geographic and cultural boundaries more and more frequently.” We need to be supporting the development of students' ability to collaborate using technology, as well as face-to-face. In addition, collaboration with students and individuals from other schools or countries expose learners to different perspectives they might not otherwise be exposed to in the classroom.

During my student teaching experience, I used a few of the technologies mentioned in the Horizon Report, including VoiceThreads and Google Docs. However, my use of them was limited to the students using the applications to create group presentations. After reading the Horizon Report, I would like to try using one of these collaborative environment technologies to have students from my school collaborate with students at other schools in the district, state, country, or world to complete a community/global service initiative or research project pertaining to one of the content threads of the science curriculum. I believe such a project would help students build communication skills, collaborative skills, critical thinking skills, as well as expose them to other perspectives and help them release the synergy of collaborative work on a large-scale.

Technology is an area that we cannot ignore as educators and I plan to continue reading the Horizon Reports as one means to personally stay abreast of this issue and learn about new applications to bring into the classroom.

http://wp.nmc.org/horizon-k12-2010/