Having been raised in a small town in rural New Jersey I am always surprised and intrigued to discover the differences in public school appearances between smaller and larger districts. Califon is a town with slightly more than one thousand residents nestled into a quaint, beautiful square mile in north-central New Jersey, complete with a K-8 public school that cannot even afford a bus system –though I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of walking to school everyday until I was in high school. My own graduating class, with whom I spent the formative years of my childhood, consisted of 24 students (though this total fluctuated as families are wont to move in and out of the district), which was considered to be a large class for Califon Public School, and growing up in the transition period when computers were merely interesting (I graduated from middle school in 2004), at least, when contrasted with the innovations that the surge of technology in the past decade has afforded the students of 2014.

I vividly recall most classrooms having no more than two computers, save the modest school library/media room, which could boast roughly twelve functional PCs, though, as you no doubt noticed, this was only able to provide access for half of my classmates at any given time. I could tell horror stories about having to learn to use a QWERTY keyboard with black and white photocopies of a real keyboard, though, surprisingly, I can claim to type 100 words per minute with perfect accuracy, so perhaps there was something to that grueling, and nontraditional, tactic. I can also vividly recall the school having perhaps one media cart, consisting of a projector, computer, and VHS (and later DVD) player. Before I bore you with more of the 21st century equivalent of a grandfather describing his twenty-mile (“uphill both ways” as the story goes) sojourn to public school I would like to tell you about the astounding advances in public school technology that have been made in the fifteen years since; I merely wished to provide context for my own amazement at the progress that has been made, and my own hopes for the progress that is yet to be made as we move forward.

Both through my research, and through further discussions with parents of today’s elementary students, I have discovered the rise in what are known as “1:1 programs”, which aim to raise the ratio of mobile devices to students to one. This is a consequence of the nearly unfathomable advancements made in technology in the past decade, which have made mobile technology feasible, affordable, and portable enough for this program to even be considered. In the past year alone (according to the 2014 National Survey on Mobile Technology for K-12 Education), the percentage of schools that report that at least a quarter of their school has integrated mobile technology has risen by ten percent (from 60% to 71%), while the percentage of schools that have not integrated mobile technology has fallen by the same amount (from 21% to 12%). Even more encouraging is the two thirds of that remaining twelve percent already has plans in the works to implement mobile technology into their schools by 2016, which would raise the percentage of schools where some level of mobile technology is present in classrooms up to an astounding 96%. To call this encouraging would be an understatement to say the least.

While these figures only describe the implementation of any mobile technology into a school’s program, there has been an observable trend towards replacing the previously dominant cart model with 1:1 programs. I recall carts from

my own time as a public high school student, and, while I found the carts to be practical, economical, and convenient, I find this developing trend quite encouraging for the future of technological integration into the education system. Since 2013 there has been a 9% decline in the percentage of schools where multiple classrooms share a single cart (51% to 42%), and a corollary 8% rise in classrooms implementing a 1:1 program (12% to 20%).

Also of note is how such technology is being implemented. Through further research I was able to find suggestions and proposals as to how such technology would be utilized in the classroom setting, and I was, once again, pleasantly surprised by my findings. Notable suggestions include using this technology for file sharing (via cloud applications like Google Drive or Dropbox), scheduling, note taking, digital textbooks, and document and multimedia file creation. All of these functions are implementations of today’s exciting technology that I first encountered at the graduate level, and I am enthused by the prospect of their use in elementary and high school classrooms. I believe that educators can already see the utility of such applications in their classrooms, but I now challenge those reading this blog to come up with their own, original applications of this technology. Innovation has opened up a massive void of new possibilities in the realm of education, and today’s educators find themselves standing on the precipice of a vast unknown; though, they stand perhaps as artists in front of a blank canvass, left to contemplate this question: How will your school seize this unprecedented opportunity and lead your students into a bright, new future of potential knowledge?

All of these statistics offer evidence of an exciting move towards a revolution in the very structure of the classroom; mobile technology is no longer an external tool that can be brought into the classroom, but, rather, can now be fully integrated into the very structure of the classroom itself. On a purely technical level, this movement is a clear improvement upon the prevailing implementations of mobile technology in the classroom, however, we must recall that a revolution in the basic structure of education system requires that we begin to ask questions as to how we would like this new system to function. These questions are best answered — and even posed for that matter — by someone more knowledgeable than myself, however, it would not avail us to ignore the structural ramifications of the development and proliferation of mobile technology in the classroom.

References:

http://go.amplify.com/2014-mobile-report?rc=BSDAds_MobileLearning2014_EdWeek_DedicatedEblast_060314&utm_source=EdWeek&utm_medium=DedicatedEblast&utm_campaign=MobileLearning2014&utm_content=EdWeek_DedicatedEblast_060314

http://www.educationdive.com/news/3-takeaways-from-iesds-k12-mobile-tech-report/268524/