Gartner's report on technology trends is here. What does it mean for the classroom?

Emerging technology trends in education: Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends list is here again this year. There are a few repeats from the 2018 list and a few newcomers to the list. Some of these may just turn out to be fads, but some could have a lasting impact on education over the next 30 years. I decided this year to take Gartner's technology trends for 2019 and apply them in the context of education and the classroom and how these technologies could potentially change how we reach students in the classroom every day.

In the podcast, I discuss the things I found on how each of these technologies could have an impact on education. In the show notes, I am listing the notes I took from my research, links to articles I found, and also a list of citations of various website articles and research publications I found helpful.

Gartner's Technology Hype Cycle

1. TREND: Autonomous Things

Definition: Gartner defines autonomous things in five different types:

vehiclesroboticsdronesappliancesagents

These five types all exist across four different environments:

sealandairdigital

Impact on education: Drones are a fantastic way to teach all areas of STEM. Just a simple google search for “Drones in Education” brings up a ton of different resources for teachers to bring drones into the classroom. I’ve been patiently waiting for the price of drones to come down so that there’s equitable access to this wonderful way to teach kids about coding, robotics, aerodynamics, physics, the four forces of flight (lift, weight, thrust, drag). The price is slowly coming down, but we still have a ways to go for schools to be able to supply entire classrooms with drones.

Skills needed:

Indeed put together this report on the companies, locations, and skills needed for jobs in autonomous vehicles. 

Top 10 skills for autonomous vehicles jobs

   Wired has good article on the past, present, and future of autonomous vehicles.

2. TREND: Augmented Analytics

Definition:  The term Augmented Analytics was first introduced on Gartner’s 2017 report as a method to automate insights into data using machine learning and natural-language generation. This article does a great job explaining what this actually means. Analytics by itself is useless in a business. There needs to be some insight, supplemented with additional data to find reasons for changes in the data, and actionable insights need to be created. Without these, all the data in the world is useless.

Impact on education:  Learning analytics - Teachers, administrators, and other educational leaders will have access to more and more data to make informed decisions, which can have a  massive impact on individual student performance as well as school performance to help close achievement gaps. Data analytics is already present in finance, medicine, science, and business. Use of data analytics or learning analytics in educ...