The Stories We Were Told about Education Technology (2017)

I’m about one week into my annual “Top Ed-Tech Trends” project – something that will take me the rest of November and most of December to complete. I’m in the process of going through all my Hack Education Weekly News articles – the round-up of education and technology news I...

Here are links to all the Hack Education Weekly News articles published in 2017: January 6 January 13 January 19 January 27 February 3 February 10 February 17 February 24 March 3 March 10 March 17 March 24 March 31 April 7 April 14 April 21 April 28 May 5...

Even though there are still four months (and change) left in 2017, I’m fairly certain that I’ve already identified the “top ed-tech trends” I will write about in my annual series. This will be the eighth year I’ve undertaken this project, and I know by now that it’s an immense...

Although publication of my “Top Ed-Tech Trends” series happens in December, it’s truly a year-round project. As we're about halfway through 2017, I'm already starting to think about what I'm going to write about in those articles. I’ve penned a couple of stories so far on “trends to watch” –...

In the last few years, the “skills gap” has been invoked by politicians and pundits alike. It’s a narrative that gets wielded to justify changes to the structure of both K–12 and post-secondary education. I’ve noticed a growing number of startups that say their product/service works to address that gap,...

Earlier this month, I gave the closing keynote at NMC’s summer conference: “‘The Brave Little Surveillance Bear’ and Other Stories We Tell About Robots Raising Children.” The talk was inspired by a product showcased at CES in January: Mattel’s Aristotle, which at the time purported to be “baby’s first virtual...

OK, fidget spinners aren’t really a “trend to watch.” I imagine they’re going to be one of those consumer products that gets a lot of news, generates a flurry of sales, prompts schools to establish all sorts of rules and punishments, and then disappears by the time I write my...

Last year, I called “social-emotional learning” a trend to watch, noting that companies were seizing on buzzwords like “grit,” “growth mindset,” and “resilience” in order to build technologies that purported to measure and monitor students emotional not just academic development. “Social-emotional learning” didn’t make the cut of my final list...

I have added a script to my websites today that will block annotations – namely those from Genius and those from Hypothes.is. I have been meaning to do this for a while now, so it’s mostly a project that comes as I procrastinate doing something else rather than one that...

Last year, I called “disrupting procurement” a trend to watch, noting the repeated argument that the reason why the ed-tech industry struggles – with making money, with making decent products – is that the market is so difficult to crack; the procurement process is so cumbersome. When I wrote my...