2020 Vision

Change is inevitable and constant, but with new and different tools of technology evolving every day, it seems that the speed of change has been increasing. Life in our homes, jobs, and classrooms has been greatly impacted with the new technologies involving computers and the internet. When I consider the changes that will affect education in the next years, I see the potential for great change. What will education look like in the year 2020?

The numbers of computers in homes and schools will greatly increase by 2020 due to affordability. Many students will bring their own laptops to school and the schools will be wired for wireless access providing learning opportunities wherever the student may want to study. For those students who cannot afford a laptop, schools will provide them to their students since computers will be a necessary tool for instruction. Today schools are fairly isolated from each other. Learning is done in the classroom and often separated from any opportunity of doing or collaborating with offsite opportunities. With the addition of readily available internet access, technology creates connections with other schools and places all over the world. Classrooms will become a global community where students are researching and interacting with experts and students all over the world. Students will be using video and audio tools to see and communicate with others on the internet.

Education will become more student-centered in the years leading up to 2020. It will become more personalized and the curriculum will be much broader due to easier access to knowledge and curriculum through the web. Schools will now offer a much broader curriculum and teachers’ roles will evolve into facilitators. Class work can now become more differentiated for students and deal with their personal learning needs and interests. More class work will be posted online with some entire classes being completed online. Students will be offered classes from many different schools besides their own. They will be able to access class material anytime of the day all week and learning is not dependent upon the place or the time. They will use different technology tools such as wikis, blogs, video feeds, and audio feeds to communicate and collaborate with other classmates. Technology will provide a means of making classes more relevant and adaptive. Due to more colleges offering online classes, many students in high school will be taking college classes for dual credit.

Teachers will be communicating with each other and sharing ideas and knowledge. Computers will be an essential tool of their classroom and they will be required to use them for communication and record keeping for their districts and students. Some classes will be taught using a blended environment with part of the instruction provided in the classroom and the rest online. Other classes will be offered totally online by the instructor. A teacher’s class may consist of students in other schools as well as the ones in his building. Instead of taking home a pile of papers or projects to grade at night, most of the students’ work will be filed online and contained in their e-portfolios. A teacher will make comments on the digital copy and it will then be read by the student. Classrooms will not need to use much paper. Few classes will have actual textbooks anymore and most labs will be virtual labs. Worksheets or needed handouts will be on the class website, and they will be able to be downloaded by the student as needed. Tests will also be taken online.

Offices in the school environment will be basically paperless in the year 2020. Teachers will complete all records and necessary paperwork on the computer and it will then be stored on the school’s servers. When students move in or out, records will be quickly forwarded to the new location. Grade keeping, attendance, and other necessary records can then be entered by the teachers on their computers at school or at home. Special education records such as IEP’s are all internet based and all professionals working with a student can access to them and update them at any time and from anywhere. Parents can also access their students’ grades, assignments, and notes from teachers from their own computers and cell phones.

A college degree will be easier to obtain in 2020 due to the abundance of classes and degrees available online. Many students will be able to work and still take college classes in their homes, resulting in many more adults, young and old, now obtaining college degrees and additional training in their fields. Physical access to a college campus or financial difficulties will no longer be a barrier to obtaining further education.

It is not my vision that all students will be lined up at computers during all classes with no personal social interaction with other students or teachers. I believe that young students through the teens need face to face social interaction for developing interpersonal skills, basic collaboration skills, and necessary intervention. But I do believe that the classroom will look different especially in the higher grades in 2020. Technology enhances learning and will play an instrumental part in changing the delivery of information and the learning process. It supports the processes of delivering information and investigating and analyzing what is being learned. It makes learning less dependent upon the school facilities, teacher style, and available text. The classroom of 2020 can be one of students investigating, learning, and communicating with sources all over the world in topics that they are interested and vested in. We as teachers must be willing to adjust and adapt to the changes that are coming and willing to learn how.

Web Applications

The Google Notebook appears to be a good web application for students who have organizational problems. Many times when those students are researching information for a paper or project over several days, they have difficulty hanging on to their notes or notecards. They remember reading something and then later can’t go back and find it when they decide they want it. Google Notebook allows them to save text, images, or links as they are surfing along with adding their own notes. These pages can also be made public so that they can be shared or used for collaboration. This application sounds like a good method of helping students by keeping their notes organized and saving time from repeated searching and looking for missing or incomplete information. As a teacher, one could use the notebook application to share research that a district is focusing on. The links and information could then be shared with the other staff, administration, and board. Google Notebook is a free service from Google and is worth checking out. www.google.com/notebook

The Paperless Classroom

In a paperless classroom, students would be taking charge of more of their own learning since they would be required to use the technology tools to learn and produce. They would be able to contribute to what interests and excites them by adding links of information, pictures, sounds, and videos to supplement what is being studied. Teachers would become more of the facilitator rather than the total expert. Collaboration, critical thinking, and analyzing would be encouraged as students shared and challenged each other. Students could take what was presented in class, expand, and add to it. They would be creating class content along with the instructor. To measure learning, one would have to consider the ongoing contributions as an assessment rather than a final product. Paperless classrooms would encourage networking and make it easier to build. When completed work is handed in on paper, that student’s ideas and contributions often stop at the teacher. Paperless classroom allows those ideas to be shared with all, reflected on, and expanded. Students would take more pride and ownership in their work if it was presented in a paperless classroom.

The Big Shifts

Will Richardson lists Many, Many Teachers, and 24/7 Learning as his second Big Shift coming to the read/write classroom. This is a shift that I have already experienced during the past 2 years in how I have been participating in and receiving instruction in the classes that I have been taking. Most all of the classes have been online which provides 24/7 access and many teachers besides the one who is leading the class. The interactions and sharing are much more complex than often provided in a structured fact to face setting. All I have to do to delve further into a topic is to continue on with the opportunities provided on the web by experts, authors, and available research. This access has made learning exciting again and has led to many changes in my classroom teaching. This current class has strongly reminded me how important it is to provide these same learning opportunities to my students and to teach them to take advantage of all of the “teachers” that are available to them. The new read/write tools of technology help make this possible and I need to educate my students in their possibilities. At the same time, my students need to learn that everyone is a teacher and the interactive web offers them that opportunity. This shift has already started to occur in my classroom, but from this class I now have the knowledge of many more available tools to help make it happen.

7-C-2 Comment

My comment on another blog for activity 7-C-2 is at http://tlld.edublogs.org/2007/07/19/thoughts-on-skype/#comment-7.

Using Skype

Skype was easy to install on my computer and set up. When I tried talking to someone who was also using Skype, the voice quality was good most of the time for about the first 5 minutes and then it started to cut out. A message popped up that we both needed to close Skype and reboot it. Otherwise it was very clear and easy to use. I can see where there are many ways it could be used in the educational setting especially with the conference call feature. Teaching out in a rural community and in a small high school, there is only one other part time special education teacher in my building to confer with. Skype could be used by our special education cooperative to hold information meetings where we could voice our concerns, receive ideas for help, or receive new legislative information. Sometimes it is difficult to get everyone needed at an IEP meeting and maybe Skype could be used for that. Quite often we have students who are homebound or hospitalized for various reasons and miss out on class lectures. By using Skype they could listen in on the class and even participate. Then there are all of the opportunities for students to talk to experts in different fields or classes from different areas of the world. Skype provides us with another option for easy communication and collaboration in the classroom.

6-A-1 Comment

My blog comment for activity 6-A-1 can be found at: http://teachnsg.blogspot.com/2007/07/flickr-photos-from-tkaren41.html

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Flickr in the Classroom

There are many ways that Flickr could be used in my classroom to encourage interaction along with learning. Here are a few ideas.

• When my literature students are reading novels, they are assigned to journal their thoughts on their readings on the computer. They could use Flickr to find pictures to illustrate these entries.
• To learn new vocabulary words, it always helps to have a visual. They could be assigned different words from the lesson and have to choose pictures from Flickr to help define the word.
• When we do round robin writing, each student begins a story and then passes it around for others to contribute. Using a wiki set up, the student could choose a picture from Flickr and begin his story around the picture which other students could then add to.
• The students are often searching for appropriate pictures to use in their other class projects. By using the Creative Commons area on Flickr the students would have ready access to usable pictures and easily be taught how to cite their image source.

Why did I choose this picture to post? In 3 weeks, I hope to be up in the mountains of Colorado seeing a scene just like that one! Mindy

Image Reference: Sheltgen, Michael. (2006, August 26). Wildflowers in Meadow. Sheltgen’s photostream. Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mscheltgen/225817708/.

Wikis continued...

Using a wiki to put a project together as a group worked well. The discussion area is easily used to communicate back and forth with the other members of the group. Google Reader would let me know when someone had posted a message or made changes to the page. It was somewhat of a learning challenge to try the different options on the page to format it. Sometimes graphics and words didn't go where I wanted them to and I had to experiment a little to get it fixed. I can see where using a wiki would make collaborating on a group project an easier process in a classroom. Mindy

Wikis in the Classroom

My opinions about using wikis in the classroom has changed this week after reading all of the class material and working on creating one. I found the results of studies on how accurate Wikipedia is to be quite interesting. Many of us at my district have tried to steer our students away from using it as a reliable source in the past. I now feel that students need to understand what Wikipedia is and how it is constructed along with how to check its reliability as a possible source. I have used it in the past as a jumping off point for research for my students. It has been an easy way for them to get an overview of a topic and discover ideas for further searching. I now feel it needs to be included in my curriculum early in the year so students can use it appropriately. I’m also seeing many different uses for wikis in my room such as for group projects and research. I am particularly interested in trying a wiki as a way to communicate with my students and parents such as the one shown at: http://fletcherwiki.wikispaces.com/. It seems to be a much quicker way to construct a page than using software to create a website. My group is just in its beginning stages of creating our class wiki. So far it has been easy to communicate in the early stages and will be fun to see how it develops. I will post an update on what my final thoughts are about the process and any challenges that we faced. Mindy

4-B-2 comment

My comment for activity 4-B-2 can be found at: http://tlld.edublogs.org/2007/06/28/learning-via-rss/