Three Trends Defining Teaching in the Future

See how the face of teaching and learning is changing.


 In today’s dynamic classrooms, the teaching and learning process is becoming more nuanced, more seamless, and it flows back and forth from students to teachers.

 1. Collaboration - Communication -
 Sites like Classroom 2.0, Teacher Tube, PBS Teachers, Edmodo, Edutopia, and countless others are lit up with teachers sharing success stories, asking for advice, and providing support. Collaboration is happening offline, too, at schools where educators team-teach and organize professional learning networks.

2.  Tech Powered
Teachers are using Guitar Hero, geo-caching (high-tech scavenger hunt), Google maps for teaching literature, Wii in lieu of P.E., VoiceThread to communicate, ePals and LiveMocha to learn global languages with native speakers, Voki to create avatars of characters in stories, and Skype to communicate with peers from all over the world — even augmented reality, connecting students to virtual characters. And that’s just a tiny sampling.

Tech-savvy teachers are threading media-making tools into the curriculum with free (or cheap) tools, like comic strip-creation site ToonDo, Microsoft Photo Story 3 for slide shows, SoundSlides for audio slide shows, Microsoft Movie Maker, and VoiceThread to string together images, videos, and documents, to name just a few.

Students in high school and college are using digital portfolios — the equivalent of resumes — to showcase the trajectory of their work on websites that link to their assignments, achievements, and course of study, using photos, graphics, spreadsheets and web pages.

3.  Blended
Teachers are directing students’ natural online proclivity towards schoolwork. It’s referred to as different things — reverse teaching, flip teaching, backwards classroom, or reverse instruction. But it all means the same thing: students conduct research, watch videos, participate in collaborative online discussions, and so on at home and at school — both in K-12 schools and in colleges and universities.

 What this means for teachers and students.

• Teachers’ and students’ relationships are changing, as they learn from each other.
• Teachers roles are shifting from owners of information to facilitators and guides to learning.
• Educators are finding different ways of using class time.
• Introverted students are finding ways to participate in class discussions online.
• Different approaches to teaching are being used in the same class.
• Students are getting a global perspective.

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Three Trends That Define Teaching and Learning in the Future