Time Travel

Day 12 Blog Prompt: How do you envision your teaching changing over the next 5 years?

Let's start by looking at the profession 5 years ago. Most schools were just switching over to online gradebooks, lesson plans, and referral systems. Imagine calculating all of your grades for every student with a calculator at the end of each marking period now...seems archaic, doesn't it? There was limited technology to quickly assess students beyond Scantrons, clickers, and a handful of web-based platforms that were limited at best. Now we have software from Apperson that puts Scantrons to shame, Plickers and other apps that have made Clickers irrelevant, and too many great online platforms to choose from. I remember cutting out every box score for the other wrestling teams in my area so I could have all of their results in one place. Now I can click on a team name online and see more data than you could dream of in a newspaper.

I think back to when I was in college from 1998 to 2002 and the biggest technology trends were cell phones and AOL. When I started college, the Zach Morris cell phone was stored in everyones' bag because it wouldn't fit in a pocket. The trend by the time I graduated was to make the phone as small as possible. (I still laugh at the SNL skit w/ Will Ferrell driving a cart into a fashion store with the smallest phone imaginable in his pocket) The big social trend was the Instant Messenger where everyone would have it running at all times so we wouldn't miss anything. At that time, you had to have an active college email address to be on Facebook!

There are a lot of things that will change or evolve in the next 5 years. Most of them will involve technolgy, assessment, and teacher evaluation. If we look at recent years you have things like Twitter, flipped classrooms, online assessment tools, Instagram, and augmented reality blowing up. I find it hard to imagine what will be trendy in 5 years, especially with technology. With the new e-wallets, Google Glass, Apple Watch, and other technological advances recently, it's impossible to predict 5 years from now.

I hope, with growing class sizes, that technology trends towards individualized instruction in all areas, not just math and language arts. Ways to formatively assess students and adapt instruction based on the results should be easier for the teacher and functional for large groups. With the popularity of MOOCs, I believe this will happen.

The ultimate goal for education, in my opinion, should be to find a way to eliminate the idea that every child the same age should be at the same academic level. It is almost criminal that we hold all of these children to the same expectations based on how many days since birth. We should let them grow at their own pace and support where they are socially, emotionally, and academically, regardless of age. I do not see any evidence that this will happen in the next 5 years, but it sure would be nice if it did!