Isolating what technologies will exist in 5 years and whether they will emphasize teacher empowerment or student empowerment is a difficult task. One thing we probably can be confident about is that technological innovative/invention in general will continue to increase, at or beyond its current pace. I predict, however, that schools will adopt technology in an even more halting pace than they do today. It will be an especially carefully thought out pace of adoption and one that envisions very specific applications of tools to subject matter and grade levels. Economic circumstances will continue to call for precise justification of school expenditures.
A trend that I think will shape technology (even more than it has so far) in K-12 schools in the next 5 years will be the appreciation that technology becomes a tool of learning as it becomes more and more a natural extension of what students and teachers do when they learn. One result of this mindset, I think, will be the desire to get technology into everyone’s hands whenever they want it. This, I believe, will be a trend toward one laptop for every student in schools, as is even now seriously discussed. With every student having his/her own laptop, it truly becomes his/her tool—those who do not have a computer at home now have one, and each student can have the tools they use for classes or lessons ready at hand. One laptop for every student, however, will be looked at as a gradual realization due to its cost—i.e., something aimed at in terms of a 5 or 8-year plan.
Another key trend or realization is that when decisions are made to employ a certain digital tool, that tool inevitably brings with it the need to supply an underlying network infrastructure. We don’t just purchase the tool, but usually also have to change and upgrade our network to support its use. As this realization of connection is grasped, schools again begin to see why every decision about digital tools will be that much more closely scrutinized. A trend in the area of network infrastructure will be that new ways of increasing the bandwidth available on wifi networks will be discovered and perfected. There appear to be techniques available, now in their infancy, whereby wifi networks will be poised to break the 54 mbps threshold. Another trend in the area of network access will be fiber optic connectivity that will increasingly become a part of every school’s network infrastructure (replacing wired Ethernet connections and supplementing wifi). This kind of speedier and ready at hand network technology will enhance the goals/trends of making technology an invisible extension of learning because the technology now becomes always there.
Digital tools that I think will empower students that we will see more and more of in the next 5 years will be those that allow for the modeling of systems and for changes to that system to be seen when individual factored are modified. It is these kinds of tools that are some of the most powerful we have seen in the recent discussion of transformative applications (Jonassen says they are the ones that allow for the visualization of every one of the eight cause-effect relations that exist; Jonassen, 2008). Tools that will empower teachers will likely be the Smartboard that will find its way into more and more classrooms. Smartboards, again, require a certain amount of bandwidth and licensed software to support them. They appear to be a tool that will enhance student learning in significant ways—students can answer questions without fear of embarrassment, teachers can allow the proper processing time for students to make those answers, and other digital resources can be easily and quickly accessed, to name just three (Smartboards in your classroom, 2008). Finally, a source of both teacher and student empowerment will be an increasing use of collaborative Internet tools that allow students to learn from their peers and gain access to comprehensive data they would not otherwise have access to.
