The Future

For this last tech task, we were asked to read the K-12 Horizon Report and comment on what we thought the future holds for education. There were two sections that I decided to focus on.

1. Increasing Use of Hybrid Learning Designs

This section talked about using a mixture of traditional classroom activities and technology to engage students. I think that a lot of teachers are going to start using the flipped classroom more and more. If you aren't familiar with the flipped classroom, it's basically when students watch the instructional part of a lesson at home and then class time can be used for extra help, group projects, and practice rather than instruction. I think that it is a cool idea but I think that I would only use it occasionally with a topic that is fairly simple to learn. There will be more and more times this will be used now that students are busier and miss class a lot due to extra-curricular activities. 

2. Rethinking How Schools Work

I found this section very interesting because we have talked about changing the way the school day is organized, particularly in high school, in other courses this year. The problem with high school right now is that it is hard to do cross curricular projects because math class is used for math, and physics class is used for physics. It doesn't matter that you are using a lot of the same concepts in both. I think that in the future, schools will start to combine courses that have a lot of similar concepts. This helps students see connections, and why what they are learning might be helpful to them later in life.