The next 5 years

Yesterday I was interviewed by a team of researchers from Telstra and Deloitte and I was asked, not only, "What do you see happening in the next five years?", but also "Where are your frustrations with the technology not meeting your needs?"

Interesting questions, as in some areas of technology, e.g, Social Networks things have really slowed down. When recently delivering Cyber-Savvy Parent Education Sessions the only recent development to add into my content was Tinder, the rest that impact our community: Instagram, KIK, SnapChat and Facebook have all been included for at least 18 months now. 

The areas of frustration for me also tie in with where I see technology in the next five years, as they are both areas where the technology exists already but no one is combining them to meet my needs.

One is eTexts, interactive rich text versions. Text books that engage, challenge, introduce levels of mastery and encourage students to be curious. I've been watching the publishers closely and meeting with local eBook and eText providers regularly over the past two years, however no-one has perfected it as yet. The publishers are all doing their own thing, publishing to their own platforms which doesn't interest us at all. We provide a seamless SSO (single Sign On) environment at school and we want to use something within our existing platform. One argument is to utilise the subject experts in-house but apart from being terribly time poor they often don't have the technology and instructional design skills to meet our needs either.

 

Second is data collection and security. How can we combine the technology that allows us to collect a student's well being, health and academic data side by side and combine this existing technology that uses accelerometers (e.g. the Up, FitBit, FuelBand  type bands) with the microchip that comes embedded in our swipe security cards.

This second point is linked to where I see technology growing exponentially over the next five years - wearable technology. We already use drones and GoPro's to support our Sports Team's but what if we provide every student with a waterproof wristband with the options to do the following:

• Track Physical activity
• Track Sleep and Moods
• Compete with a team or against others
• To use data to problem solve
• Secure entry to school facilities e.g. a weights studio or pool
• Set levels where alerts are triggered to a mentor to enable early, or even immediate, intervention

Google Glass is another, although they'd have to be far more attractive to appeal to girls if they were expected to wear them. Teachers could take attendance records via facial recognition and it could capture/record each class for uploading to the Learning Management System for those that couldn't attend.

So many exciting advances to look forward to and I can't wait to attend the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference in Atlanta over the break to see if any other schools are incorporating these technologies into the education environment and to possibly work with them to assess the benefits, as well as the issues.