#3 NMC Horizon Report K12

• NMC Horizon Report: 2014 K-12 Edition, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in schools.

• Each of the three global editions of the NMC Horizon Report — higher education, K-12 education, libraries, and museums — highlights six trends, challenges and emerging technologies that are likely to enter mainstream use within their focus sectors over the next five years.

• The framework focuses on the systemic approaches that are needed to scale up innovative pedagogical practices, especially in ICT-enabled learning settings.

• The process used to research and create the NMC Horizon Report: 2014 K-12 Edition is rooted in the methods used across all the research conducted within the NMC Horizon Project.

• The procedure for selecting the topics in the report is based on a modified Delphi process refined over 12 years of producing the NMC Horizon Report series, and began with the assembly of the panel. The panel represents a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities, and interests, yet each member brings a relevant expertise.

• The panel was composed of 53 technology experts from 18 countries on six continents this year;

• A key criterion for the inclusion of a topic in this edition is its potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in K-12 education.

• These questions were designed to elicit a comprehensive listing of interesting technologies, challenges, and trends from the panel:

• What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which schools approach our core missions of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry?

• What do you see as the key challenges related to teaching, learning, or creative inquiry that schools will face during the next five years?

• Which of the key technologies catalogued in the NMC Horizon Project Listing will be most important to teaching, learning, or creative inquiry in K-12 education within the next five years?

• What key technologies are missing from our list? Consider these related questions:

• > What would you list among the established technologies that some schools are using today that arguably all schools should be using broadly to support or enhance teaching, learning, or creative inquiry?

• > What technologies that have a solid user base in consumer, entertainment, or other industries should schools be actively looking for ways to apply?

• > What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that schools should begin to take notice during the next four to five

• The NMC Horizon Project model derived three meta-dimensions from the CCR framework that were used to focus the discussions of each trend and challenge: policy, leadership, and practice. Policy, in this context, refers to the formal laws, regulations, rules, and guidelines that govern schools; leadership is the product of experts’ visions of the future of learning, based on research and deep consideration; and practice is where new ideas and pedagogies take action, in schools, classrooms, and related settings.

• Expectations for teachers are evolving rapidly, especially as student-centered learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly emphasized by departments of education and school administrations.

• The teacher’s role is becoming that of a mentor, visiting with groups and individual learners during class to help guide them, while allowing them to have more of a say in their own learning.

• Teachers are no longer the primary sources of information and knowledge for students when a quick web search is at their fingertips. Instead it is up to teachers to reinforce the habits and discipline that shape life-long learners

• One visible example of the transformation of teaching is the Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching (RESPECT) project, an educator-led initiative in the U.S. that aims to better prepare students for the 21st century workforce.

• Universities are also working to evolve the teaching practice by providing K-12 classes with entrepreneurial experiences

• Key to nurturing the new role of teachers is providing them with plentiful opportunities for professional development.

• For educators in other parts of the world, a number of online platforms have been developed recently to equip teachers with technical skills without the expense of traveling, including the international NMC Academy, along with EdTech Leaders Online, which focuses on aligning teaching practices with the Common Core.

• Rather than the teacher using class time to lecture and dispense information, that work is done by each student after class, and could take the form of collaborating with their peers in online communities, curating online content, watching video lectures, listening to podcasts, and more.

• Deeper learning is a term increasingly used to describe a variety of approaches in which students gain knowledge and skills by investigating and responding to a complex question, problem or challenge.

• Deeper learning can be an important approach to making schools more relevant and effective, and this trend is gaining traction across the world.

• To enable the shift to deeper learning, schools are thinking about how they can leverage technology to produce products and extend the learning experience beyond the classroom.

• Education leaders are working together to develop more professional development opportunities for teachers so they can integrate deeper learning in the classroom. The Alliance for Excellent Education ,the Buck Institute for Education,33 and the Hewlett Foundation are just a few groups leading efforts to work with states and districts to improve learning goals, provide teachers with ongoing training and tools, and share best practices from exemplary schools.

• School leaders seeking to learn more about the impact of large-scale implementation of OER can look at state-wide and district-wide initiatives.

• To aid teachers with integrating OER into their classroom practices, the OER Commons is an online hub for content curation and training that was developed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education.

• Hybrid learning models, which blend the best of classroom instruction with the best of web-based delivery, place a strong emphasis on using school time for peer-to-peer collaboration and teacher-student interaction, while online environments are used for independent learning.

•  Blended learning is often used as a synonym for hybrid learning.

• Hybrid learning is seen as a way to level the playing field for rural schools by providing more access to a variety of high-quality courses.

• Electrovibration refers to the process when a finger is dragged across a conductive, insulated surface, creating an electrostatic force that results in a rubbery, sticky, bumpy, or vibrating sensation.

• The future of “feel screen”-enhanced devices offers many possibilities for deeper interaction with educational content, and with it and accessibility that caters to users with physical and mental disabilities

• Being able to interact with the material on the screen improved letter and word recognition among students.

• While the traditional model prevails in many classrooms, there are initiatives now that award funding to schools for their work toward innovative redesigns of the school day.

• Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), for one, allocates funding for Breakthrough School Models, which put personalized learning first through flexible learning environments that leverage time, space, roles, and instructional modes to meet the needs of each student.

• Though this trend is at least five years away from mainstream implementation, there are certain schools that, after setting the precedent, are actively working to help other schools replicate progressive school structures through teacher education.

• In Future Classroom Lab Learning Zones, six schemes are outlined and are intended to optimize physical space, leverage ICT resources, and address the changing teacher-student dynamic. Each scheme is centered on a specific skillset —Investigate, Present, Interact, Create, Exchange, and Develop — and is supported with a list of key objectives, useful equipment, and resources.

• Innovative learning environments call for teachers to have a solid grasp of the underlying pedagogies that support the use of technology in order to holistically transform the school experience.