Technologies For The Classroom Will Target Students' Results

Schools have an unfortunate reputation of implementing new technology because it's cool, and then asking if it's useful. Increasingly, however, the key test for a potential acquisition in instruction-oriented technology is: Will this result in higher student achievement, i.e., individuals' test scores, through increased personalization, collaboration, and interaction in the classroom? While instruction clearly varies across grades, schools, countries, and regions of the world, we see increasingly student-centric, outcome-oriented approaches including:

• Interactive and engaging teaching sparks creative learning. Gone is the ideal of a silent room filled with terrified students listening to a dour-faced teacher reciting the lessons. Lessons are shown on Smart Boards, which reference Internet resources to clarify a concept. The lessons are punctuated by queries to the class to which the students respond with clickers. The answers are immediately tallied and projected so all students can gauge their understanding, and the teacher can adapt the lesson to make sure it is understood. Multipoint technologies also facilitate classroom engagement. With Smart Technologies' Smart Board technology and Microsoft's Mouse Mischief plug-in for PowerPoint, teachers engage students with polls, puzzles, and other interactive games that they participate in with individual mice. Microsoft's MultiPoint, and now Userful's MultiSeat, technology also enable multiple students, each with their own station including not only a mouse but also keyboard and monitor, to use a PC. Microsoft MultiPoint Server 2010 provides a Windows-based version while Userful's MultiSeat Linux 2011 leverages open source infrastructure and applications.

• Mobility extends the classroom and enables continuous learning. Mobility is a major theme in education technology as teachers and students look to leverage a more extended classroom and extend the classroom itself to those who can't come to it. New tablet PCs allow teachers to take interactive learning out into the field. Students can take notes, look up terms, and respond to questions while out observing the launch of their test rocket, the birth of a cow, or the passing of a comet or meteor. With the mobility and flexibility of new touchscreen tablets — an Apple iPad or an HP EliteBook — teachers use applications like the University of Washington Classroom Presenter or DyKnow Vision to really test student understanding. These interactive tools extend the concept of polling beyond multiple choice, allowing students to respond in freeform or even draw their response Teachers and students also use Cisco Flip cameras to film school news shows and class plays or capture and share resources in school, out in the community, or on a field trip.  In China, the government's BlueSky eLearning initiative provides students in rural areas with remote access to educational content and urban faculty members. 

• Student collaboration provides practice for future team work. Preparation for the real world, particularly in secondary and higher education, means encouraging and facilitating collaboration — not only for the collaboration skills themselves but also for the familiarity with the collaboration tools. Students increasingly work in groups to complete projects, using online communities in Microsoft Live@edu (Office 365) or the open source software Moodle for document sharing, information posting through wikis, profile management, or other custom developments.  Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation allows teachers to create community sites for online class projects. And, Facebook's recent move into messaging and their announced support of Microsoft Office documents suggest that social media players will move into student collaboration as well. Connecting informal learning and social environments with the formal learning environment is an area of research and technology innovation in education. 

• Formative assessment enables personalized learning. Another innovation and developing trend is the ability to know what the students don't know or understand immediately and tailor a lesson to a particular student. In education lingo, that means using "formative assessment" to create "personalized learning paths." Teachers and professors test students individually during a lecture or activity, as mentioned above and even through annotations in an electronic textbook. The Adaptive Book developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University allows tablet PC users to create, organize, and share pen-based and audio annotations.  The Adaptive Book can then collect and analyze interactive data; using the collective data, teachers can see students' notes and respond to them. Educators can apply business intelligence to student performance as well, which provides the analytics to create a smarter classroom that becomes more of a personal learning environment when equipped with these new technologies. 

"Educational institutions will increasingly invest in technology to compete, offering the promise of preparing students for a global, technology-driven economy. Technology both in the classroom and in the back office will be a competitive differentiator. Savvy vendor strategists will include education on their syllabus and structure offerings and business models to address the educational community."