The annual ISTE conference is rapidly approaching, convening this year in Chicago. The ISTE conference is the largest ed-tech conference in the U.S, and will offer more than 1,091 educational sessions to nearly thirty thousand teachers, professors, and administrators. Examining the ISTE 2018 conference landscape through conference session analysis goes a long way to help inform us about what is trending in education. I also use this analysis at the university, comparing emerging trends with current teaching content, thus ensuring our student courses stay vibrant, current, and fresh (as opposed to stale and unappealing).
Let’s zoom in on some of the developments emerging from this impending U.S. educational technology event.
The Predictable
Schools are still quite mesmerized by all things Google; free apps; and free stuff. These topics command high numbers of sessions offered throughout the conference. That’s no surprise, of course. I just wanted you to know that these passions didn’t go away. But these topics take up all the oxygen in the room, it seems. Sometimes it feels as if everything else (like your product) has to fit in the margins, as far as most educators are concerned.
The Explosive
Two areas are newly experiencing absolutely explosive growth in the number of sessions being offered at the conference. ‘Coding’, aka computer science, programming, and computational thinking is clearly the over-the-top winner in number of sessions offered. This is likely due to an international focus, as governments and ministries direct increased importance and funding to this area. In second place, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), along with STEAM, which includes the arts, is shaking the foundations of education everywhere, dominating the mindshare of many conference sessions.
The Blossoming
A number of other topics have gained modest traction this year, evidencing slight growth compared with last year’s conference. These topics include:
Personalizing Learning. The newest take on ‘individualized’ and ‘differentiated’ learning in schools, ‘personalized’ learning allows for students to pursue their own pace, pathways and choices in their educational journey, with technology being an essential tool along the way.
Accessibility. Technology resources aimed at educating special needs students is considerable attention density at this year’s conference,
Virtual Reality. Virtual reality offerings have increased over last year. It’s not explosive growth, particularly, but at least it’s a steady pace. A slight majority of sessions, however, appear to focus on student-created content, not commercially available content.
Gamification. Gamifying learning (or building motivating gaming principles into otherwise dry and lackluster instruction) is strong this year, growing at a healthy pace.
Leadership. There is indeed a renaissance in leadership offerings this year, as schools apparently tire of being buffeted by poor planning and haphazard implementations. Much more than in the past, schools are hungrier for leadership strategies that can make their technology initiatives go more smoothly, with less avoidable headaches.
Professional Development. Teacher training offerings also saw a slight uptick this conference season, as teachers recognize that technology never reaches its potential without an adequately prepared/trained teaching staff. Display manufacturers, through their integrators or otherwise, should take this trend seriously by bundling training with their product offerings. Schools tend to pay for training from different budget sources, so it won’t affect your bottom line in sales. And if tacked on correctly, it could become an additional revenue stream for your business.
It would be wise for the industry to become more familiar with each of these trends, in the hopes of becoming co-travelers.
Ideas to Watch
Some of the conference sessions offered at ISTE 2018 offer interesting implications and require careful tracking over the coming years:
Design Thinking. One topic racing forward from zero to sixty this year is the notion of Design Thinking, which is a framework for an iterative process of problem identification, gathering inputs, generating potential solutions, prototyping, testing solutions, and then refining the solution. In some circles, this way of thinking is called “the design process.” Design Thinking has stepped on the stage at ISTE 2018 with more than 14 focused sessions, which immediately seized my attention.
Edupreneurship. Another emerging topic worth watching is edupreneurship (and its close cousin, social entrepreneurship), a learning environment in which teachers and/or students create businesses (or solve social problems) as a part of their learning experiences.
Visualization. Visualization is important to educators: it leads to learning, to sense making, to insight. To quote Robert Kosara of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte “The purpose of visualization is insight, not (pretty) pictures.” This topic isn’t new, but its growth is of paramount importance to the display industry. This is what displays do. And the ISTE 2018 conference offers at least 15 breakout sessions built around this all-important topic. That’s a nice increase over previous years. It’s comforting news.
The Small Fry
Sometimes there’s a story in the small, new things: ISTE is offering seven sessions dedicated to Artificial Intelligence in education and three sessions exploring the use of intelligent voice assistants in the classroom. Are these to become “the next big thing?”
The Shrinking
Two topics seem to be shrinking in their conference representation this year, one bewildering, the other quite expected. First, Augmented Reality has seen an apparent reduction in the number of offerings, as compared with last year. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s a fluke, maybe not. I bet it’s back on track next year. Second, 3D printing is clearly undergoing a slight dip this year, perhaps more due to softly waning enthusiasm than to market over-penetration.
These observations are collected from a conference session analysis only, but they remain informative. The key opportunity here demands: “How can we tie display products to more contemporary and attractive use cases in the education market?” I’d start right here.—Len Scrogan
