8. The Future
(1) Portable and wireless is going to be huge over the next 5-10 years.
Estimates are that desktops will have the smallest percentage growth out of all the technologies and that the sale of portable items (iPods, mobile phones, pdas, tablets, eBook readers) will be about 20 times higher.
(2) Blackboard seems to be one of the more popular learning management systems in the USA, but it is very costly and out of reach of many schools. Moodle is getting a large foothold in the USA and may be the way to go. It has a modular design which allows schools to start using a few tools, while working gradually to add more.
(3) The Horizon Project which will produce a report focusing on emerging technology and its applications for education (broadly defined) in Australia, New Zealand, and Australasia generally, is worth a visit.
(4) Storage is already an issue, particularly in ICT savvy schools where students are creating a large amount of multi-media. One option is to store files off-site at hosts such as Google.
Google docs provides the ability for staff (and students) to collaborate without duplication of documents. Instead of multiple versions of a document, there would be one latest version only.
Photos can be stored on sites such as Ning, Flickr, Webshots or Photobucket. This protects them from fire, storage malfunction and reduces the demand on file storage. Premium use of these sites may require fees.
(5) Emerging Technologies.
Listen to this ISTE podcast to discover what they think emerging technologies are.
