2009 Horizon Report: The K12 Edition

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Technologies to Watch

The technologies featured in this K-12 edition of the Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative applications in the K-12 environment. The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream of schools within the next year; the second, within two to three years; and the third, within four to five years.

This edition was prepared concurrently with the release of the 2009 Horizon Report, and it was natural that the Advisory Board considered the technologies presented there, along with a great many others, and they did, but with an eye toward evaluating their likely adoption in K-12 schools. As the project got underway, there was considerable interest in seeing the how similarly K-12 and higher education were viewing emerging technology. As it turned out, there is a considerable overlap, but there are also clear distinctions. Assessment and filtering greatly impact the degree to which some technologies can be adopted in schools, which helps to explain the considerable variation in adoption time frames between the two sectors.

The first two topics featured in this edition, collaborative environments and online communication tools, are similar to topics that have appeared in past Horizon Reports; both groups of technologies are now standard in the digital toolset of postsecondary students. In many grade schools, on the other hand, integrating these kinds of technologies into teaching and learning has proven difficult because of barriers such as policy constraints on using online tools, the fact that many students do not bring laptops to school (as opposed to many college students, who do), and policies that restrict Internet access in many schools. We are starting to see the erosion of some of these barriers as mobile devices become more capable and as the value of these tools for collaborative work becomes more evident. Over the next year, we anticipate that both groups of technologies will begin to move into the mainstream of teaching practice.

In the mid-term horizon are mobiles and cloud computing. Though both appear in the 2009 Horizon Report as technologies that will become mainstream in higher education, they are on the near-term horizon for colleges and universities. The Advisory Board’s estimate of two to three years as a likely timeframe for their adoption in the K-12 sector is a reflection of the fact that younger students are, at present, less likely than college-age students to carry mobile devices, especially Internet-capable ones — although there is a growing trend that suggests this will not always be the case — and that access to cloud-based applications is more difficult for younger students for the same reasons that collaborative environments and online communication tools are often out of reach.

On the far horizon we see smart objects and the personal web. Smart object appliances aimed at consumers are appearing on the market, and the technology shows promise for linking physical objects with rich caches of online content, but common use in schools is still several years away. The technology was placed on the same horizon in the higher education edition of the 2009 Horizon Report. The personal web, on the other hand, is perceived as being slightly closer to mainstream adoption in higher education than in grade schools; the topic appears on the mid-term horizon for higher education.

Two themes arose repeatedly during discussions of these technologies: assessment and filtering. Assessment continues to present a challenge to educators at all levels, particularly in the context of new media and collaborative work; evaluating student work that includes blogs, podcasts, and videos, or establishing how much an individual student contributed to or learned from a collaborative project, is difficult. Further, translating assessments of this nature into the metrics measured by standardized tests is not at all straightforward. The issue of assessment touches every topic in this report. Likewise, the practice of filtering — limiting the kinds of online content and tools that students have access to while at school — is intimately related to each of these topics. At many schools today, the technologies named here cannot be used because they are blocked by content filters. The Advisory Board recognized the need for new tools for filtering that do a better job of keeping objectionable content out of the way while allowing useful tools and content to be accessed.

The body of the report describes each profiled technology in detail, including its relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. Specific examples that reflect the level of adoption as of the writing of this report are also included, and a list of suggested readings is provided for those who might want further information. Taken together, our research indicates that each of these six technologies will have a significant impact on schools within the next five years.

• Collaborative Environments, The value placed on collaboration is increasing in the workplace as professionals are expected to work across geographic and cultural boundaries more and more frequently. Many teachers recognize the importance of collaborative work and are finding that online tools to support it provide them and their students with opportunities to work creatively, develop teamwork skills, and tap into the perspectives of people around the world with a wide range of experiences and skills that differ from their own.
• Online Communication Tools. Communication tools are a part of most students’ daily lives outside of school. Instant messaging and online chats via desktop video conferencing are common means for social interaction with family and friends. As technology provides ways for teachers to help shape the constructive use of communication tools in the classroom, a new world of experiences is opening up for students. With most applications costing little or nothing to implement, few other technologies available today have the ability to remove geographic and time limitations from school environments more quickly than online communication tools.
• Mobiles. Commonly carried by most college students, many high school students, and a growing number of younger students, mobiles have been evolving rapidly in recent years. Multi-touch interfaces, GPS capability, and the ability to run third-party applications make today’s mobile device an increasingly flexible tool that is readily adapted to a wide range of tasks for social networking, learning, and productivity. In some places, mobile devices like the iPhone have already begun to supplant portable computers as the Internet-capable device of choice.
• Cloud Computing. The rise of large-scale “data farms” — large groups of networked servers — has made processing power and storage capacity available in abundant quantities. Applications that are developed to run in the cloud and take advantage of the ability to scale up or down along with the number of users and storage demands are changing the way we think about programs and files. Collaborative work, research, social networking, media sharing, virtual computers: all are enabled by applications that live in the cloud.
• Smart Objects. Smart objects combine a unique identifier with sensors and network access to link physical objects with a wealth of virtual information. Some smart objects include it all, combining the ability to sense themselves and their surroundings with the ability to control a computer or access online content; others are merely everyday objects that have been tagged with a special code that connects them to the virtual world. The underlying technologies that support smart objects are not new, but we are now seeing new kinds of sensors, identifiers, and applications with a much more generalizable set of functionalities.
• The Personal Web. Finding and organizing online content related to personal interests and learning objectives can be a difficult task, given the quantity of information on the web and the ease of adding more. Keeping track of one’s own contributions, and those of valued peers and colleagues, adds another layer of complexity. There are a number of technologies that are used to configure and manage the ways in which we view and use the Internet; taken together, this toolset is the personal web: a growing set of free and simple tools and applications that let us create customized, personal web-based environments that explicitly support our social, professional, learning, and other activities.