Page 14 - THE Journal, March 2017

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14
| MARCH 2017
TECH TRENDS
Dian Schaffhauser
5 Ed Tech Trends on the Way Out in 2017
Education technologies shift with the passing years, so it makes sense to revisit what may be on the wane as topics of interest to educators. A panel of K–12 experts offers its views.
OMETIMES IT SEEMS like education technology is as static as monkey bars in winter. Other times it feels as frantic as a swing set at recess. This coming year will be no different, according to a panel of K–12 experts. Some
of what was hot this last year (we’re looking at you, flipped classrooms) is on the way out. How to interpret that? Perhaps it means that teachers are
no longer diving into professional development to learn more. Or it could be translated as simply not being part of those team planning session discussions. Or
it could signify that educators have subsumed the technology or practice into their daily activities. However it’s translated, five ed tech topics are definitely cooling down in the new year: bans on cell phones, Common Core, flipped learning, homework and grading, and the use of tablets. Two others — arts education and blended learning — appear to have gone into hibernation.
Cell Phone Bans
It’s time to hang up your arguments about why cell phones shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom anymore. In fact, as David Ross, the CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21), quips when he’s speaking at events with teachers, “I don’t
care if you take notes during this entire presentation, but I want you to write this down because this is the most important thing I’m going to say for the next 45 minutes. The internet has been invented. Teachers don’t know that.”
As Ross sees it, “Every kid has the sum knowledge of everything in the world in their
pocket. And the idea that you wouldn’t use that — something that is such a significant part of everybody’s social-emotional mental lives — as an instructional tool is incomprehensible to me.”
Tom Redmon, a teacher at Hamilton School District No. 3 in Montana and a facilitator for LearnZillion, concurred. “There are more and more resources that we can take advantage of as teachers by using that technology.” As one example, he referenced Desmos.com, which has an app for graphing. “It’s amazing because what students would spend $100 on to buy a calculator they can now pretty much do on a phone.” On top of that type of program are tools for “messaging, feedback and collaboration.”
Of course, Redmon is not oblivious
to the other reason cell phone bans are disappearing: impracticality. “Part of it is just that it’s so difficult to regulate,” he said, adding that even some of his fourth graders have their own phones.
Common Core
Even though the Common Core has been around for several years, educators are really only now
beginning to get their arms around how
to teach to the standards. However, while the standards may be becoming “more universally known,” as Redmon put it, that’s not necessarily under the name it was christened with.
The term “Common Core” “is on life- support,” suggested Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The reason? Those two words have become
“so politically charged.” And that’s not going to change anytime soon. “Clearly under the Trump administration and clearly with what the [new] secretary of education is saying, she has made
it very clear she does not support it. But even
if it had you had a secretary of education and
a president that wanted to do something, it is unlikely that something would happen.”
Cheryl Williams, interim CEO for the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), readily agreed, calling
the Common Core a “political hot potato.” “Right now, states are flying under the radar screen because that’s where they have to be to be successful,” she said. The early adoptions that thrived, such as in Kentucky, succeeded because one of the first things those states did was change the name from “Common Core”