Predictions, Dumb and Otherwise, about Technology in Schools in 2025 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Predictions, Dumb and Otherwise, about Technology in Schools in 2025 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Predictions, Dumb and Otherwise, about Technology in Schools in 2025

One easily trips over a list of high-tech tools that have become obsolete in the past decade (e.g., floppies, fax machines). I used many of these myself and remember junking them, saying to myself: hey, these were highly touted, I bought the second- or third-generation version and now I am dumping them.  Other lists of high-tech predictions for 2020 were equally entertaining about the future of schools. This list posted by a high-tech enthusiast who yearns for a paperless society and totally customized instruction with smaller, greener schools tickled me because while I do agree with some of the items, others are, well, dreams. I have been reading such dream lists for years about high-tech devices (with brand-new names) promising a glorious (or nefarious) future just around the corner, including the disappearance of the teacher (see here).

And I have contributed to such lists with my own predictions over the past six years (see (see December 26, 2009, December 30, 2010, December 29, 2011, December 27, 2012, and December 10, 2013.). I have predicted that textbooks will be digitized, online learning will spread, and the onset of computer testing will create more access to devices across schools and accelerate classroom usage. These developments will occur incrementally over the next decade and will be obvious to observers but hardly dominate K-12 age-graded schools.

While higher education textbooks  have shifted markedly to e-books and less expensive ways of getting content into students’ devices, the K-12 market remainsa proprietary domain of a handful of publishers (e.g. Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill Education) in part due to the mechanics of  certain states (e.g.Florida, California, and Texas) dominating which texts get chosen. But changes continue (see here, here, and here) Changes in K-12 texts will occur in bits and pieces as publishers adapt to the impact of the web.

K-12 online learning will also spread slowly, very slowly, as blended instruction,personalized learning, and “flipped” classrooms gain traction. For public schools in 2016, the recent debacle in Los Angeles Unified School District largest (and most expensive) adoption of  iPads in the  U.S. continues to shadow rollouts of  tablets across the nation. Nonetheless, more and more tablets are in teacher and Predictions, Dumb and Otherwise, about Technology in Schools in 2025 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: