Mobile and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Africa and the Middle East: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

The number of mobile phone users in Africa and the Middle East has exploded in the past decade and a half.  Africa, the continent facing the most urgent educational challenges, is expected to have over 735 million active mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012.  In 1995 there were only 600,000 subscriptions.

For the first time in history, a majority of Africans have individual access to interactive information and communication technology. In the Middle East an even higher percentage of people own and use mobile technologies. And since the 2011 Arab Spring no one questions their potential to connect and empower average citizens.

According to the UNESCO published paper, Africa and the Middle East are “leapfrogging” the earlier PC revolution and enthusiastically embracing the more recent mobile revolution. Unlike countries in Latin America for example, African countries (and many in the Middle East as well) have not made substantial investments in filling schools with computers or providing laptops to students. At some level, Africa is (for lack of a better phrase) a “clean slate” when it comes to ICT use in education. Because so many Africans have mobile phones, many educators are eager to leverage these devices to improve and provide greater access to education.

One model of accomplishing this is called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The name is sufficiently descriptive: according to this model students simply use the mobile phones they already own for educative purposes, and sometimes for purposes recommended or required by schools and teachers. The approach has gained traction in many developed countries (most notably in the United States) due to its affordability and flexibility.  Other models require schools to purchase mobile devices for students which dramatically increases costs.

The obvious disadvantage of BYOD programs is that not every learner has the same device or even a device at all.  Also, managing different types and models of devices on a school network can be difficult, and incorporating mobile learning into curricular activities is much easier when the same devices are being used by all learners. Yet in Africa and the Middle East cost is paramount, as illustrated in the paper. Schools often have difficulty providing basic infrastructure for students let alone personal technology.

What do you think?

1. Could BYOD work in Africa and Middle East?
2. How would it look compared to, say, BYOD models being employed in North America?
3. How might countries maximize the cost and convenience benefits of this model while still ensuring equity?
4. Is BYOD the future of access to mobile learning in developing countries?

Mobiles and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Africa and the Middle East: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

This paper describes several projects that use mobile technologies to support teaching and learning as well as educational administration.  The paper argues that basic mobile phones (often referred to as “feature” phones) are not especially conducive for tasks beyond rudimentary communication.  While a number of projects have assisted teachers and students by pushing educational materials to their phones via SMS, projects that attempt richer collaboration and greater interaction tend to rely on smartphones.

While most experts agree that smartphones will eventually become commonplace in Africa (and have already made serious inroads in the Middle East), today a majority of people in developing countries own basic mobile devices: the screens are small; resolution is mediocre; navigation can be cumbersome; and text and images often display only in black and white.  Therefore, in Africa as well as many places in the Middle East the immediate question is: How can basic mobile phones be used to improve teaching and learning?

The paper describes a number of innovative approaches, several of which have gained traction and benefit large numbers of students (for example, Momath and Yoza both in South Africa).  Yet despite these promising projects, there are not a huge number of models to choose from when it comes to improving or extending education with basic phones.  Although projects like SEMA! in Kenya aimed to impact teaching and learning and foster greater collaboration among educators, it has been most influential as a means of streamlining data collection about enrolment rates.

According to the paper, the project, despite lofty ambitions, seemed to revert to a sort of digital notice board and quantitative questionnaire.  This does not, of course, mean the project was a failure (if there is one area in which mobile technologies have proven themselves in education, it is as an cost and time efficient means of collecting administrative data).  Instead the SEMA! project signals the difficulty of developing mobile learning programs that rely on basic phones, as opposed to smartphones.

What do you think?

1. What are some of the ways basic mobile phones might be used to assist teachers and improve their practice?
2. How can educators in Africa and the Middle East leverage the phones that are already in their pockets (and often in the pockets of their students) to enhance learning?
3. Or, alternatively, has the educational potential of basic mobile phones been overstated?

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Mobile and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Asia: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

The paper explains that South Korea has made concerted efforts to improve education with technology.  Computers and mobile devices are common in classrooms and teachers and students are, by and large, eager to use them.  Recently, the government announced plans to transition from paper textbooks to digital textbooks by 2015.  The government wants textbook content to display on a variety of mobile devices including smartphones and larger-screen tablet computers. Leaders of the initiative have been piloting digital textbooks that can be tailored to a student’s individual abilities, interests, and pace of learning.

Within the past several weeks however, Korean officials, responding to widespread concerns, have promised to slow down and even reconsider the plan.  Perhaps surprisingly, the strongest opposition to digital textbooks is not related to doubts about their educational effectiveness or potential.  Instead parents and others are worried that young people are overly reliant on digital technologies.  A South Korean government survey suggested, for example, that one in 12 students between ages 5 and 9 are addicted to the internet.  Many Koreans are concerned that a full shift to digital textbooks could accelerate what is, in some instances, an already unhealthy relationship to information and communication technology.  A columnist for the Washington Post recently wrote about the controversy.

In the past several years, journalists and scholars have exposed a dark side to digital technologies.  Bestselling books like The Shallows written by Nicolas Carr, who has also moderated an EduTech Debate, and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together argue that increasingly ubiquitous (and increasingly mobile) technology may not be good for our brains, our broader health, and perhaps even our productivity.

What do you think?

1. Should South Korea initiate a full transition from paper to digital textbooks by 2015?
2. Are arguments—such as the one Carr made famous in his Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid—compelling enough to slow down well-intentioned efforts to integrate technologies in education? 
   

Mobiles and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Asia: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

The most significant project described in the paper is Text2Teach (T2T) in the Philippines.  This project, unlike a majority of its peers, has aged well: begun in 2003, it has been implemented in 555 schools in nine provinces, trained 1,500 teachers, and impacted over a half a million 5^th and 6^th grade students.  Currently, the project is entering a third phase and planners are hoping to integrate it into broader and more permanent national education plans.

At first glance, T2T is simple: it relies on mobile phones to bring educational videos into classrooms.  Essentially, teachers download videos aligned with science, mathematics, and English language curriculums using school-purchased mobile phones and then play these videos by attaching the phones to televisions.

While T2T owes its success to many factors—from robust partnerships and community “buy-in” to regular modification—the paper emphasizes the salience of quality that is often overlooked: ease-of-use for teachers.  Too often efforts to integrate mobile technologies in education stall because they make life more difficult for already busy (and sometimes overwhelmed) teachers.  Mobile learning projects tend to reach schools as “yet-another-thing-to-do,” rather than something that will make teachers’ jobs easier.  The approach of T2T is different.  Teachers who participate in the project say that it makes lesson planning less time consuming.  Each video is accompanied by a suggested lesson plan and this, according to the paper, ensures that T2T “gives teachers more time to spend with their families.”

The project—from its inception to its on-the-ground implementation—has sought to make teachers more effective, yes, but also to ensure that they complete less work, not more.  Teachers report liking T2T precisely because it makes an already difficult job a bit less difficult.

What do you think?

1. How can projects best leverage mobile technologies to improve teachers’ day-to-day jobs?
2. What are your ideas for mobile learning projects that might give teachers less to do, instead of more to do?

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Mobile devices and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Europe: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs in the European Union and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

As detailed in the paper, many European countries have adopted policies that restrict the use of mobile technologies in education, particularly at the lower grade levels. In this context, it is meaningful that the few countries which have lent serious government support to mobile learning saw explosions in innovation and levels of use. The paper describes a massive initiative in the United Kingdom (UK) called the Mobile Learning Network (MoLeNET) which spanned three years, involved 7,000 staff and 40,000 learners, and had a budget of 12 million British pounds.

The initiative spawned a panoply of smaller mobile learning projects and experiments, many of which were shown to improve student retention and lower drop-out rates, two goals of the overarching initiative. Although MoLeNET was shelved in 2010, its influence continues to reverberate not only in the UK but across Europe. The paper explains that the Netherlands and Denmark have also invested public money to improve education with mobile technology. Tellingly, both countries are considered to have some of the most advanced and impactful mobile learning projects in Europe.

Yet despite these examples, mobile learning projects are generally perceived as being less reliant on government funding than earlier efforts to integrate technology in education. They are commonly characterized as bottom-up, rather than top-down initiatives. As the UNESCO Working Paper Series makes clear, a large number of projects have grown up in the “peripheries” of education: many initiatives start small and aim to help learners outside the structures of formal education. 

This approach has had advantages: projects tend to be original and diverse, and they are able to respond quickly to the needs and challenges of particular contexts. However, by tracing the impact of major government-supported initiatives, the Turning on Mobile Learning in Europe paper suggests that public money may be crucial to efforts to move mobile learning from the margins of education to the mainstream.

What do you think?

• Are major government investments necessary to make mobile learning work?
• Are mobile learning projects really forged from the bottom-up?
• Can mobile learning initiatives directed from the top-down be successful?
• What are the risks of this approach? What has been your experience?
• Is government support necessary (or has it perhaps been an impediment)?

Mobile devices and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Europe: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

This paper describes projects that are using mobile technologies for education in productive, yet decidedly “unsexy” ways.  To cite just one example, the Molly system designed by Oxford University seems to do little more than provide students a portal to information about their classes: they can access syllabi, calendars, schedules, and podcasts of lectures from a variety of mobile devices.

Other projects described in the paper are similar.  A project underway at Yorkshire Coast College in the UK allows teachers to set up texts timed to remind students of homework due dates.  Still other projects detail programs that allow teachers and school administrators to send text messages to students’ parents to notify them about student progress and disseminate information about events and school closures.  None of this is blow-your-socks-off exciting.  Indeed many of the initiatives use mobile phones in ways that they have been used for over two decades: to communicate short, simple, and concise bits of information.  Yet (and this is the important part) the programs work. 

They may not be using the GPS feature in the newest smart phone or high-end apps, but they do a job for teachers and schools and, as explained in the paper, more often than not, they do it well.  Parent attendance at back-to-school nights increased between 60% to 80% when schools in Norway decided to send parents text messages reminding them of the event.  This is a type of mobile project that while painfully simple, has helped teachers.

What do you think?

• When we talk about mobile learning we tend to focus on the “bleeding edge” of technology.  We think about how to use the best technology in the flashiest gadgets to do new and amazing things.  This is important surely, but it is hardly a license to ignore the “ordinary-but-still-effective” uses of mobile technologies.  What then are the “un-fancy,” “make-me-yawn,” “commonplace,” and “staggeringly mundane” ways that mobile technology can be used to improve education?  If the projects described in the paper are any indication, these uses are sometimes the most effective.

Forthcoming titles in the series will also be published on the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning site.

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Mobile devices and policies

The first of the North America papers Turning On Mobile Learning in North America: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications describes a number of mobile learning initiatives in schools and universities, surveys existing policies, and explores the implication for revising or creating national, state, district and institutional policies related to mobile learning.

The paper reveals that of the policies that do exist, many are too broad or restrictive to enable mobile learning. An example is the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which addresses concerns about access to offensive content over the internet on school and library computers. Since 2001, when rules for implementing CIPA were issued, many district administrators have remained confused about its proper implementation.

Liability and concern for student safety have led to extremely restrictive policies prohibiting mobile devices in many US and Canadian districts and schools. For example, almost every school district in the USA has a filtering system, and more than 55% of district policies are more restrictive than the federally mandated CIPA regulations.

For policies at the district and institutional level the paper urges a shift of focus from behaviour that is acceptable – encoded in Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) – to that which is responsible, described in Responsible Use Policies (RUPs). The role of the school, and parents, shifts from policing mobile phone use and online behaviour, to developing responsible learners and children.

What do you think?

• Are most high-level and school policies too restrictive?
• How can we find the balance between being inclusive enough for learners to benefit from online access, and being restrictive enough to protect them?

Mobile devices and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in North America: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks at the relatively nascent area of how mobiles are being used, or could be used, to support teachers and their professional development. Of particular interest is how mobile access increases opportunities for teachers to participate in online communities of practice, which is a proven way to support teachers. Mobiles also provide a way for teachers to enjoy professional development anytime and anywhere.

The paper found that many teachers are eager to engage in mobile learning for professional development because of the flexibility it provides. Without mobile technologies, participation in professional development necessitates attendance at an event or at least access to a computer; with a mobile device, teachers can access online professional development from any location that has wireless connectivity.

Mobile devices enable access to online courses and other types of professional development opportunities – such as communities of practice, social networking sites, and content repositories – at any time, so teachers can structure their professional growth according to their schedules and preferences.

What do you think?

• Professional development requires engagement, focus and usually some face-to-face instruction or discussion time with peers. Can mobiles really be used to support professional development, or do they only trivialise down to bite size chunks what should be a dedicated and time-intensive exercise?

Forthcoming titles in the series will also be published on the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning site.

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Mobile Devices and Policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Latin America: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

The paper reveals that many Latin American governments have sidelined education initiatives that use or call for mobile phones because they have already made substantial investments in one laptop per child (or 1:1) programs. For example, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela all have national and mature 1:1 laptop programs, and many students in these countries use school purchased laptop computers. By contrast, programs employing mobile devices are nascent at best, particularly at the national level.

The paper alludes to debates unfolding in Latin America regarding the cost of mobile learning programs—which use mobile phones and not computers—versus 1:1 laptop programs—which use laptop computers exclusively. Conventional thinking holds that while mobile learning programs might be cheaper to launch (due to the lower prices of mobile handsets), 1:1 laptop programs might be more cost effective over longer periods of time (mainly because laptops do not require on-going subscription fees and are less easily lost).

The paper states that new ICT in education initiatives, if they are to be implemented successfully, require substantial funding. Governments usually need to improve telecommunications infrastructure, purchase and distribute equipment, develop digital content, train teachers, and provide maintenance and technical support.

Given that major efforts are already underway to advance 1:1 laptop programs in Latin America, the paper concludes that many governments “consider their educational ICT agenda to be saturated, and that mobile learning initiatives will need to wait until there is more ‘room.’” Generally, the feeling in the region is that education systems should more or less ignore programs that utilize large numbers of mobile phones until ambitious 1:1 laptop goals (often articulated years ago) have been achieved.

What do you think?

• Are programs that use laptop computers and programs that use mobile phones an either/or proposition?
• Is it redundant or wasteful to have 1:1 laptop programs as well as, for example, a 1:1 mobile phone program?
• How should countries that have made substantial investments in 1:1 laptop programs proceed when considering learning initiatives that call for mobile phones?

Mobiles and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Latin America: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks at how mobile devices are being used, or could be used, to support the work of teachers and enhance their professional development.

The paper devotes significant space to contrasting two major initiatives: Bridge IT and EMIA-SMILE. Both seek to improve teaching and learning practices in classrooms. Interestingly though, the initiatives rely on very different approaches. The BridgeIT project focuses heavily on training teachers to plan lessons that employ interactive and student-centred learning activities. Mobile devices—equipped with a library of videos aligned to particular subject curriculums—are provided only to teachers. By contrast, the EMIA-SMILE project gives mobile devices directly to small groups of students in order to direct collaborative and inquiry-based learning. The EMIA-SMILE project is less reliant on teachers and, unlike BridgeIT, does not invest substantial resources training them. Instead, the instructional pedagogy is mostly embedded in the mobile devices themselves.

The paper found that a majority of mobile learning projects ask students to interact directly with handsets and that, generally speaking, this approach is considered effective for promoting experiential learning and building twenty-first century skills. These assumptions, the paper concludes, may explain why the vast majority of mobile learning initiatives in Latin America focus on students rather than teachers as the primary users of mobile technologies.

What do you think?

• Should students as opposed to teachers be the primary end-users of mobile technologies?
• To what extent can instructional methodologies be programed into mobile devices?
• How reliant should mobile learning initiatives be on teachers?
• Is it possible to design a mobile learning project that is “teacher-proof”?
• Is this approach advisable or even desirable?

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Over five weeks UNESCO, in partnership with Nokia, is launching its Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning with the release of a set of twelve papers reviewing mobile learning initiatives, implications for ICT in education policies and how mobile technologies support teacher development. The papers will be released according to regions of the world.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can contribute to achieving the pillars of Education for All (EFA), which are universal access to education, equity in education and the delivery of quality education. Given the unprecedented uptake of mobile devices in the world – there are now almost 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions – these ICT present a new and exciting possibility for supporting EFA.

UNESCO is committed to fully exploring how mobile learning, using mobile devices alone or in combination with other ICT, can improve education. While mobile learning is certainly not new, only in very recent years is it receiving widespread attention and building serious momentum. The evidence base for how mobiles can improve grades, increase learner motivation, deliver content to hard-to-reach communities, support district and school administration, and enable adult education in areas such as literacy, is mounting.

However, many challenges still abound, including the lack of an enabling policy environment, inequity of access, negative social attitudes towards mobile devices as learning tools, lack of awareness of mobile learning, high cost of usage and concerns around online safety. It is essential that the ICT in education community engages with these issues in open dialogue with policy makers, principals, teachers and parents so that the potential benefits of mobile learning are realised, and the challenges are addressed. Two areas of particular interest to UNESCO are policies related to mobile learning, and how mobiles can be used to support teachers and their professional development.

Mobile learning initiatives and related policies

Many governments have adopted some form of national ICT in education policy. However, many of these policies were developed in the ‘pre-mobile’ era. The few policies that do refer to mobile devices either reference them obliquely or, in some cases, ban them. Overall, there is a dearth of considered and thorough mobile learning policies. To address this vacuum UNESCO will develop a set of guidelines for mobile learning policies to help national governments and educators create environments in which mobile learning can flourish. The papers released over the coming weeks are the initial research to inform the guidelines, which will be published in late 2012.

Mobile technologies for teacher support and professional development

There is a global shortage of trained and motivated teachers. In order to meet the EFA goal of achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE) by 2015, 5.4 million primary teachers are needed. How can mobile technologies play a role in meeting this need, in supporting teachers and their professional development, and in retaining existing teachers? Initial research has shown that this is a relatively unexplored area of mobile learning and that there is much more that can be done with mobile technologies. UNESCO’s forthcoming papers identify some of the existing mobile-based teacher development projects, and how this area can be further developed. The papers inform four projects that UNESCO will implement with teacher training organisations in Nigeria, Senegal, Pakistan and Mexico in 2012 to further explore and understand this area.

Release schedule

For each region there is one paper on mobile learning initiatives and related policies, as well as one on mobile technologies for teacher support and professional development. The papers will be released as follows:

• 26 April: Latin America and North America papers
• 3 May: Europe papers
• 10 May: Asia papers
• 17 May: Africa and Middle East papers
• 22 May: Two global findings papers that synthesise information across the five regional papers in each series

Please note that the papers are not a comprehensive regional review, but a regional scan to identify and review illustrative cases of mobile learning initiatives, related policies and examples of teacher support and professional development projects via mobile technologies. UNESCO embraces a purposefully broad definition of mobile devices – including mobile phones, e-readers, tablet computers, MP3 players and handheld gaming consoles – in recognition that the list is dynamic. Of importance is not the exact definition of mobile devices but rather how they can be used to support education. However, while UNESCO supports a flexible definition, its current work in mobile learning will focus predominately on mobile phones because of their widespread pervasiveness. The papers thus look at mobile phones in particular when discussing mobile learning.

As a whole, the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning provides a valuable snapshot of what mobile learning looks like around the world.  Collectively and individually, the papers consolidate lessons learned in different regions to provide policy makers, educators, and other stakeholders a tool to help them now and in the future better leverage mobile technology for learning.

Please provide feedback on the papers. The input of the widest possible range of stakeholders, from national policy makers to rural teachers, is critical for helping develop and improve the field of mobile learning. Comments from practitioners in particular regions are especially valuable as the mobile learning landscape is highly uneven and nuanced. It will take a global view, but local conversations, to understand how mobile learning is best applied in particular contexts.

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1. Mobile Learning: New advances in hardware and software are making mobile “smart phones” indispensable tools. Just as cell phones have leapfrogged fixed line technology in the telecommunications industry, it is likely that mobile devices with internet access and computing capabilities will soon overtake personal computers as the information appliance of choice in the classroom.

2. Cloud computing: Applications are increasingly moving off of the stand alone desk top computer and increasingly onto server farms accessible through the Internet. The implications of this trend for education systems are huge; they will make cheaper information appliances available which do not require the processing power or size of the PC. The challenge will be providing the ubiquitous connectivity to access information sitting in the “cloud”.

3. One-to-One computing: The trend in classrooms around the world is to provide an information appliance to every learner and create learning environments that assume universal access to the technology. Whether the hardware involved is one laptop per child (OLPC), or – increasingly — a net computer, smart phone, or the re-emergence of the tablet, classrooms should prepare for the universal availability of personal learning devices.

4. Ubiquitous learning: With the emergence of increasingly robust connectivity infrastructure and cheaper computers, school systems around the world are developing the ability to provide learning opportunities to students “anytime, anywhere”. This trend requires a rethinking of the traditional 40 minute lesson. In addition to hardware and Internet access, it requires the availability of virtual mentors or teachers, and/or opportunities for peer to peer and self-paced, deeper learning.

5. Gaming: A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project per the Horizon Report found that massively multiplayer and other online game experience is extremely common among young people and that games offer an opportunity for increased social interaction and civic engagement among youth. The phenomenal success of games with a focus on active participation, built in incentives and interaction suggests that current educational methods are not falling short and that educational games could more effectively attract the interest and attention of learners.

6. Personalized learning: Education systems are increasingly investigating the use of technology to better understand a student’s knowledge base from prior learning and to tailor teaching to both address learning gaps as well as learning styles. This focus transforms a classroom from one that teaches to the middle to one that adjusts content and pedagogy based on individual student needs – both strong and weak.

7. Redefinition of learning spaces: The ordered classroom of 30 desks in rows of 5 may quickly become a relic of the industrial age as schools around the world are re-thinking the most appropriate learning environments to foster collaborative, cross-disciplinary, students centered learning. Concepts such as greater use of light, colors, circular tables, individual spaces for students and teachers, and smaller open learning spaces for project-based learning are increasingly emphasized.

8. Teacher-generated open content: OECD school systems are increasingly empowering teachers and networks of teachers to both identify and create the learning resources that they find most effective in the classroom. Many online texts allow teachers to edit, add to, or otherwise customize material for their own purposes, so that their students receive a tailored copy that exactly suits the style and pace of the course. These resources in many cases complement the official textbook and may, in the years to come, supplant the textbook as the primary learning source for students. Such activities often challenge traditional notions of intellectual property and copyright.

9. Smart portfolio assessment: The collection, management, sorting, and retrieving of data related to learning will help teachers to better understand learning gaps and customize content and pedagogical approaches. Also, assessment is increasingly moving toward frequent formative assessments which lend itself to real-time data and less on high-pressure exams as the mark of excellence. Tools are increasingly available to students to gather their work together in a kind of online portfolio; whenever they add a tweet, blog post, or photo to any online service, it will appear in their personal portfolio which can be both peer and teacher assessed.

10. Teacher managers/mentors: The role of the teacher in the classroom is being transformed from that of the font of knowledge to an instructional manager helping to guide students through individualized learning pathways, identifying relevant learning resources, creating collaborative learning opportunities, and providing insight and support both during formal class time and outside of the designated 40 minute instruction period. This shift is easier said than done and ultimately the success or failure of technology projects in the classroom hinge on the human factor and the willingness of a teacher to step into unchartered territory.

These trends are expected to continue and to challenge many of the delivery models fundamental to formal education as it is practiced in most countries. It will be interesting to reflect back on this list at the end of the year to see which ideas have gained the most traction; and what new ideas will make a list for 2011…

Robert Hawkins wrote this post for EduTech Blog and its republished here with his permission. If you’d like to share your work, contact us today.