Looking into the crystal ball...

What does the future hold for education??

This was a good assignment to do as we are wrapping up our coursework at University, and we are about to go into the field to gain valuable real life experience. Hopefully, all of our efforts over the past five years will culminate in us getting jobs! But what will our classrooms look like in two years? five years? twenty years?

I read the Horizon Report document, and I found it very insightful. The document connected a lot of the ideas we have been blogging about already. I agreed with almost everything that I read in the document. The internet has revised our role as educators. More and more, we are becoming facilitators in our classrooms, and not lecturers. Student-driven education and lesson planning is the way that education is going. Our instruction is differentiated and plays to each type of learning style. Even our assessments are designed so that each student can prove to us what they know in the form that best suits their learning style. Success is no longer determined solely by a person's intelligence or ability to memorize facts and information; we value creativity and innovation more than any other time in the past. Being successful in the workplace means being able to find and present information when it is needed and in a creative manner, not just specifically having the information in your brain.
I believe that technology has played a role in these changes. It has affected how we work, collaborate, communicate, and succeed. People can work and learn anywhere and at any time. Information is no longer found in one single location (a library) but is accessible by millions of people in millions of locations. I love that information and knowledge is becoming open to everyone. As a teacher, I believe that it is fundamental that each person should be able to educate themselves if they so desire. More and more institutions are becoming about sharing, collaborating, and open-content, something that I have come to value because of this course.  
In summary, here is what I believe the future of education will involve: being skilled in digital media as a requirement for almost any job, increased sharing of information, collaboration, personalized education, no "set" learning environment or standardized assessments of knowledge, changing technologies, constant learning and adjustment in teacher's planning to adapt to technologies, and the need for teachers to connect what students are learning outside of school to what we teach IN the school. When I look into the crystal ball that is the future, I get very excited about the way things are going! I don't think any of us will be able to say that we are bored with our jobs!