Despite being four years old, NMC/CoSN’s Horizon K-12 edition report of 2017 contains valuable information about the deployment and use of educational technology that remain relevant to educational experiences today. The report immediately notes that “technology alone cannot cultivate education transformation; better pedagogies and more inclusive education models are vital solutions, while digital tools and platforms are enablers and accelerators” (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 8). Technology is not a panacea for authentic and sustainable improvement in student achievement. In order to achieve such results, stakeholders “must be able to make connections between the tools and the intended outcomes, leveraging technology in creative ways that allow stakeholders to more intuitively adapt from one context to another” (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 9).
The article mentions six technologies that will gain widespread acceptance in school communities over the five years following its publication in 2017. Of these, makerspace has really come into its own, especially in STEAM classes and in school libraries. Makerspace “has gained significant traction in mainstream education in part because the concept is often used as a catch-all for any hands-on experiences that place learners in the role of creators,” (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 40). Led by our two school librarians, our district deployed makerspaces in both the elementary and the middle/high school libraries, providing opportunities for students to come and complete projects and competitions, as well as design their own challenges for other students.
In my previous role as school librarian, I aimed to make the library the heart of technology use. I attended every professional development opportunity I could find on Google, Schoology, and iPads. In collaboration with the Director of Technology and the curriculum team, I provided workshops for teachers and students on adopting technology and its best practices. I supported efforts to increase effective technology integration with teachers, and introduced several resources, such as Kahoot! and EasyBib that were later adopted district-wide. As Freeman et al. point out, library media centers and learning commons “are also at the nexus for rethinking learning spaces because they are the largest yet often least-utilized spaces. Experiential learning through robotics, 3D printing, and virtual reality often occurs in the library media centers, requiring the purging of some reference items to create more room for these activities” (2017, p. 18). I eliminated an entire shelving section in the library to make room for makerspace, and we suddenly noticed a spike in library usage. I collaborated with teachers to create activities for whole classes, as well as offering individual after school challenges.
Robotics is also an area that has become commonplace in schools. In partnership with First, one enterprising math teacher began offering a Lego robotics club in 2017 that aimed to solve a specific problem with ingenuity and Lego pieces. Though it attracted two handfuls of students its first year, it soon grew to needing three teachers, and, prior to Covid, some of our students participated in regional challenges. We had similar engagement with Minecraft and Code.org clubs.
We have recently begun deploying data analytics, or the ability to “analyze and identify previously undetected patterns,” (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 44). The data contained in PowerSchool, our student information system, allows us to extract information that can identify very specific groups of students. After ten years of a declining drop-out rate, we have seen an uptick in the last two years. Using data analytics, we cross-referenced all data points on student dropouts for the last fifteen years, including grades, attendance, disciplinary issues, counseling services, medical issues, special education or 504 identification, length of time for receiving services, length of time in the district, multiple entries and exits from the district, ethnicity, gender, and other data points. Data analytics revealed that our dropouts are in majority male, have received between 3 and 7 years of special education services, have been in the district an average of 9 years, and had irregular attendance, with the average dropout cohort of 3 students representing an average of 35% of all absences for their graduating class over the previous 8 years. Prior to big data, it would have been time-consuming and required much labor to achieve these results. Data analytics have allowed us to target a specific population with intervention strategies at a much earlier stage, and we expect to see a gradual decline in our dropout rate in the next few years, followed by a more precipitous decline in 3 to 5 years, with the ultimate goal of reaching 100% graduation rate, something we attained twice in the last ten years.
Despite predictions that virtual reality would become widespread in three to five years (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 46), it remains uncommon in most schools. Our district has not adopted virtual reality, mainly due to the cost of the infrastructure required to run it when compared to the impact on the curriculum and student achievement that it would be expected to have. As more applications are developed and as the price of hardware and software solutions providing virtual reality drop in price, I fully expect that within the next five years it will move beyond the novelty stage in our district, and within ten years be widely adopted. I have seen some amazing virtual expeditions, and can see the value of consulting books equipped with virtual reality, but until more studies demonstrate an impact on student achievement, it will remain a hard sale, considering the cost and the professional learning that will need to occur to effectively deploy virtual reality.
Finally, artificial intelligence has percolated down to schools in surprising ways. Computer systems that deploy artificial intelligence “accomplish tasks and make decisions based on inferences drawn from machine learning or from consumption and processing of massive data sets” (Freeman et al., 2017, p. 48). Opaque algorithms and ethical issues continue to plague the use of artificial intelligence, but there are usages that are already providing benefits to our school district. Our Internet filter, iBoss, uses artificial intelligence to identify sites we access frequently, and discern patterns of student usage during the school day and beyond. Sites that become suddenly popular, such as game sites or proxies that were misidentified by our filter, are flagged for manual review and can then be blocked. Our network infrastructure, Extreme Networks, also has some artificial intelligence capabilities, identifying times where excessive demands are made on access points and rerouting traffic to alleviate some of the resulting signal conflict issues. The artificial intelligence built in SonicWall identifies intrusion attempts and attacks in real time, taking countermeasures and sending alerts to school officials. The use of artificial intelligence in other aspects of our educational experience remains limited, but I expect more systems, including our student information system, to adopt some form of artificial intelligence that will identify patterns and report suggestions for improvement.
One of the technologies that was simply not mentioned in the report was video conferencing. Like most school districts, my school district is filled with committees and meetings. It was simply unthinkable not to have committees examine issues and propose possible changes to the administrative team. The pandemic upended this model, and over the course of sixteen months we have seen the power of having less committees and less meetings. Of the committees that remain, attention has been more focused and meetings have been shortened. Virtual meetings are now the norm, even if we are in the same building. Special education offered meetings to parents during the school day, and these parents needed to take the time off work to come in and participate. Virtual meetings can now be held in the evening, and everyone is comfortable with the idea. Bells have disappeared. The administrative team was adamant in the past that students needed the signals provided by the bells to move from one place to the other. Pandemic short-circuited that idea, and we have realized that both teachers and students are responsible enough in middle and high school to move at the appropriate times without a reminder that it is time to do so. We now stream our athletic and scholar events, for parents who are not able to attend in person. We’ve implemented outdoor time in all classes, something that the administrative team frowned upon prior to the pandemic. I pat myself on the back for having purchased several Zoom licenses in the spring of 2019, to provide Special Educators the ability to connect parents who were unable to attend in person meetings. We provided professional development to special educators, and this suddenly became very handy at the beginning of March when we purchased a district-wide license, arranged impromptu trainings by our special educators on how to run a Zoom and the best practices they had learned, and implemented a software client rollout on all iPads and staff devices in one week, right before we went virtual for the rest of the school year. I looked like a genius for having pushed this issue back in 2019!
Technology continues to evolve, and schools will always be behind the curve, trying to catch the next wave as it has already washed over us. Yet it is imperative that we continue to adopt and deploy the technology that will improve student achievement, as well as provide opportunities to develop creative and digitally responsible citizens who can tackle the big problems that are already affecting our world.
References
Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN horizon report: 2017 K–12 edition. Austin, TX: The New Media Consortium.
