ISTE Says Watch Out for Coding, Immersive Tech This School Year

• By Sri Ravipati
• 08/30/17

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) this week named five technology trends to watch in the 2017-2018 school year.

Serving approximately 100,000 teachers, administrators, ed tech specialists and other education stakeholders worldwide, ISTE has a comprehensive view of the K–12 education landscape and offers a unique perspective on emerging learning technologies, according to CEO Richard Culatta.

"With improved connectivity and increasingly impactful educator professional learning around the use of technology, many students will have new experiences as the bell rings to start a new school year,” Culatta said the announcement.  

An ISTE educator from Wisconsin says coding can be taught to students as young as kindergarten.

First, the organization called coding “the international language of problem-solving” and says every student will need to know the basics of computer science. “Teachers are helping students attain problem-solving skills by infusing coding and computational thinking into courses across the curriculum and encouraging students to become digital content creators,” the organization wrote.

Second, learning feedback will happen in real-time. Therefore, schools will start to do away with end-of-unit or end-of-year tests and instead assess student knowledge as they learn.

"Tools that can visualize student progress in real time and recommend learning activities based on individual student progress are just becoming available,” Culatta noted in the announcement. “This will allow teachers to intervene and adjust more quickly when students are struggling to comprehend difficult subjects.”

Third, virtual reality and augmented reality will make a real impact in the classroom. As outlined in the ISTE Standards, “the key [with VR and AR] will be ensuring teachers continue to first consider what their learning goals are for students, and then design a learning experience that uses the unique capabilities of these tools to serve that goal,” the organization noted.

Fourth, this school year, there will be a big push for media literacy to combat fake news. Students are constantly consuming information online, so ISTE thinks that teachers will ramp up efforts to teach students media literacy skills.

Finally, there will be a shift in the conversation surrounding digital citizenship. “Traditionally, digital citizenship has been about the don'ts of online activities, with a lot of hazard signs thrown up in front of students and a focus on online safety. While online safety is critical, it's only a small subset of digital citizenship,” ISTE wrote. Instead, students can be encouraged to take a positive approach to using online tools and “become more active citizens and community members.”