The
research behind The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition is a collaboration
between the New Media Consortium (www.nmc.org), theConsortium for School
Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education
(ISTE).
The NMC
Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition examines emerging technologies for their
potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative expression
within the environment of pre-college education.
Key trends
The following
five trends have been identified as key drivers of technology adoptions for the
period of 2011 through 2016; they are listed here in the order they were ranked
by the advisory board.
1. The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators
2. As IT support becomes more and more decentralized, the technologies we use are increasingly based not on school servers, but in the cloud
3. Technology continues to profoundly affect the way we work, collaborate, communicate, and succeed
4. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to
5. The perceived value of innovation and creativity is increasing
Critical Challenges
Those
challenges ranked as most significant in terms of their impact on teaching,
learning, and creative inquiry in the coming years are listed here, in the
order of importance assigned them by the advisory board.
1. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
2 Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of schools. Digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking.
3 The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices.
4 A key challenge is the fundamental structure of the K-12 education establishment — aka “the system.”
5 Many activities related to learning and education take place outside the walls of the classroom and thus are not part of our learning metrics.
Technologies to Watch
Cloud computing
Cloud-based
applications and services are available to many school students today, and more
schools are employing cloud-based tools all the time. Now schools are looking
to outsource significant parts of their infrastructure, such as email and
backups, to cloud providers. Together, these developments have contributed
considerably to the adoption of cloud computing approaches at K-12 schools
across the globe.
Mobiles
Mobiles,
especially smartphones and tablets, enable ubiquitous access to information,
social networks, tools for learning and productivity, and hundreds of thousands
of custom applications.
Game-based learning
The greatest
potential of games for learning lies in their ability to foster collaboration
and engage students deeply in the process of learning. Once educational gaming
providers can match the volume and quality of their consumer-driven counterparts,
games will garner more attention.
Open content
Far more than
just a collection of free online course materials, 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.
Learning analytics
Building on
the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools,
learning analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the
service of learning and embrace the complexity, diversity, and abundance of
information that dynamic learning environments can generate.
Personal learning environments (PLEs)
This term
refers to student-designed learning approaches that encompass different types
of content — videos, apps, games, social media tools, and more — chosen by a student
to match his or her personal learning style and pace. PLEs are currently more
of a theoretical construct; the notion is of intense interest to many educators
who see PLEs as having considerable potential to engage students in ways that
best suit their individual learning needs.
