This fall the New Media Consortium (NMC), together with the Consortium for School Networking (COSN), released their annual K12 Horizon Report.† According to the NMC, “The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in school communities across the globe.”
This report has been around a long time. “With more than 14 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.” The full report can be accessed here.
Dissecting this report helps not only with an understanding of the ebb and flow of the educational marketplace, but more importantly, it supplies some of the key nomenclature that will help your message resonate with educational customers, world-wide. The following chart helps lay out the big ideas in this report.
Although the 2016 K12 Horizon report largely speaks for itself, in this piece I will offer a bit of translation for leaders in the large and mobile display industry. With full disclosure, I must mention that I served as one of the 50+ panelists who developed this report over many months. Serving as an expert panelist for the both last year’s report and the newest 2016 Horizon K12 report, I think I can add beneficial nuance to the findings, from an insider’s perspective. Findings and my commentary to follow.
IMPORTANT OBSERVABLE TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY FOR K12 SCHOOLS WORLD-WIDE
Long-term trends
- Redesigning Learning Spaces
- Rethinking How Schools Work
There is growing interest these days in reshaping the ways schools work—from extending or redesigning the school day to extending the school year to reframing where learning actually takes place. Educators are rethinking basic assumptions about ‘school’ as we know it.
Educators are also thinking hard about how to make learning spaces that more effectively contribute to learning. It’s is a theme I see strongly emphasized in four upcoming 2017 conferences (SXSWedu, FETC, and ISTE), so it comes as no surprise that the 2016 Horizon Report caught the scent of this innovation coming to schools. This is ultimately of great importance to the display industry, since as the physical classroom evolves, so display and projection technology must adapt.
Mid-term trends
- Collaborative Learning
- Deeper Learning Approaches
Collaborative learning continues as a topic from last year’s report. For an understanding of the collaborative learning meme, and how it is playing out in education, see my previous Display Daily piece entitled “Huddle Up.” This article speaks directly to the display industry in terms of the growing phenomenon in schools of collaborative learning.
The 2016 Horizon Report defines deeper learning as the “mastery of content that engages students in critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and self-directed learning.” The report recommends that “pedagogical approaches that shift the dynamic from passive to active learning” represent the way forward. Moving away from the low-lying fruit of retention, memorization, and industrial-style education, the report favors the use of those technologies that can “boost the quality, breadth, and reach of student work…”
Short-term trends
- Coding as Literacy
- Students as Creators
Coding (imagine programming, computer science, computational thinking) has certainly become the latest ‘darling’ in K12 schools worldwide, and the Horizon report concurs. To date, however, the coding revolution is more bark than bite, due to a crowded curriculum, diminishing school funding, and a lack trained teachers in this field.
More pointedly, teachers are indeed shifting their thinking away from students as consumers of technology; they value students being able to produce creatively with technology. As opposed to pouring information into the minds of empty-vessel students, an increasing number of educators are making the shift to “students as creators” using displays, computers, projectors, or the technology du jour. What message is suggested by your sales literature suggest? Can you speak the new educators’ language of ‘producer’ versus the past archaic dialects of “consumer”?
In my next instalment, I am going to continue this discussion by addressing some of the current ed tech challenges the 2016 K12 Horizon report sees as throwing roadblocks into your business plans. –Len Scrogan
† Adams Becker, S., Freeman, A., Giesinger Hall, C., Cummins, M., and Yuhnke, B. (2016). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2016 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Cover Photography BigStock Photography
