In the year 2020

What will we see in education?  Will our methods change?  Are we ready to move from the teacher providing the information to the facilitator who guides students to create their own learning?

That is only eight years from now.  Eight years ago I got married.  In the pictures from my wedding I see signs of "looking dated" with respect to the clothing people were wearing.  If fashion changes are noticeable with subtle changes happening each season; can you imagine what technology will look like?

Image retrieved from google images.  December 2, 2011.

Smart phones are really mini, handheld, computers.  We can access anything anywhere.  Public wifi is popping up all over.  It is the norm now.  We rented a house at the beach this past summer and of course there was wireless.  The TV was from 1980, but that didn't matter because I could stream netflix right to my laptop with a decent size screen.  (Although it is curious that the smaller the phones and computers get the larger the TV screen my husband needs.)

So we know technology is changing a mile a minute but I'm not sure education is able to keep up with the pace.  The Web 2.0 tools that are out there are still relatively undiscovered by the vast majority of teachers in our schools today.  I'm not afraid of technology and consider myself a fairly quick learner.  However, the things that I learned in this course have opened my eyes to the immense changes I need to make to better reach my students.  I think this because I had the opportunity to explore and learn about them.  What about the teachers that haven't had that opportunity?  What about the teachers teaching in schools where many children go home to a house without Internet or a computer?  That may be a foreign concept for most of you but not that uncommon in some school districts.

I am fortunate to work in a place where the administrators envision our students learning and connecting after the last bell rings and the students are dismissed.  The technology coordinators at my school are amazing.  They want to help us integrate the latest and best tools.  They are constantly sharing so many cool resources with the faculty.  The problem is finding the time to learn and implement these things.  How often do you get an email with a new idea and it gets filed for later?  The bell rings, the students have questions, the parents are emailing, the office needs you, the faculty meeting is about to start and you have to pick up the kids from daycare.  So realistically you integrate one or two new things into your classes per year.  At this rate, eight years just aren't enough to change education as we know it now.  I do believe we will see a shift but not an overall drastic one by 2020.  I think it will take longer for some teachers to make these changes.

As teachers begin to retire, the newbies will bring with them a completely different view.  The way they learned will not resemble the way we learned.  That's when and how I see a greater shift coming from the teacher.  However, the best chance we have for change will actually come from our students.  They are the ones who are growing up in a world where computers are always in their lives.  Last week my 6 year old was explaining to his grandmother how to turn the video on on her new iPad while they were Skyping.

I can only control what I do and hope that I can lead by example and share what I have learned through my own on-line learning.  When I go back to the classroom next year, I hope that my students will be blogging their journal entries, collaborating on our class wiki, listening to podcasts on their iPhones, texting their examples of a particular verb tense to a wifitti screen, interacting with native speakers around the globe, adding to our class Diigo page and creating their own learning in exciting new ways that they have not done in the past all while saving trees.  Instead of handing in a DVD of their video projects we'll be able to view it on YouTube, taking our classroom to the real world.

My hope is that our schools will change to help prepare our students for a world where collaboration is a must.  The 21st century learner is different so the 21st century teachers need to adapt too. If you did not get the chance to watch the video Changing Education Paradigms that I included on a previous post, I highly recommend you see it now.

For those people still reluctant to change I leave you with a quote from The Tech Bend Blog by Kundan Bhaduri where he writes, "technology is a weapon of mass construction".