Tonight, after packing for the IATEFL YL & LT SIG conference in Milan (see http://www.iatefl.org/content/events/sigevent.php?id=11), I came across the newly published K-12 Horizon project report (http://www.nmc.org/horizon/), which provides a lot of food for thought.

The Horizon Reports are always a good read - published by the New Media Consortium, and looking at 'emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe'. This time, young learners are the focus, which is timely given the theme of the Milan IATEFL conference.

Here's a few points that I picked up on after my first reading of the report:  

Collaborative Environments

There's no doubt in my mind that our young learners will have to spend more time collaborating with people over the globe when they grow older, and this has been recognised by many educators, many of whom are keen to make use of the online tools that support team working skills and "tap into the perspectives of people around the world with a wide range of experiences and skills that differ from their own." I personally look forward to the day when language educators can make better use of tools that are becoming widespread today, which allow us to communicate with other classes around the globe. For many of us now (not all of course), this is now technologically possible, but there are still barriers placed upon creativity by organisations who insist on blocking these tools. Whether because of fear or misunderstanding, or a desire to exercise control and limit what kind of activities go on in the classroom, or other more valid reasons, let's hope that this situation continues and teachers can use this emerging technology to foster greater cultural understanding and real communication between different groups of language learners.

Mobile Learning

It surely can't be long before the tide turns. And instead of asking our students to switch off their mobile phones when they come to class, we ask them to use this increasingly more powerful technology as an aid to learning. This is one of the predictions in the report, which focuses particularly on the transformation of what are now powerful handheld computers from being telephones with added gimmicky features to fully fledged 'social networking, learning, and productivity' tools

Asessment

Another one of the areas they touch upon is Assessment, which is a special area of interest in Milan. Not surprisingly, the report states that 'Assessment continues to present a challenge to educators at all levels, particularly in the context of new media and collaborative work; evaluating student work that includes blogs, podcasts, and videos, or establishing how much an individual student contributed to or learned from a collaborative project, is difficult.' Let's hope that some of the educators speaking in Milan can help come up with some answers to this thorny issue.

These are just a few of the areas that the Horizon Report mentions - there are a lot more. Why not read it yourself and add a comment here or write your own blog post about what interests you?

I'll finish with a quotation from the report that for me seems to be one of the key issues that educators need to face now that we are in the midst of this digital revolution:

"There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. New skills are required of students in writing and communication, different from those of even a few years ago. Students and teachers both are finding it necessary to be technologically adept, to be able to collaborate on a global scale."

I'll be mentioning more of this as it forms part of the thrust of my plenary talk at the IATEFL conference in Milan. Watch this space for more on this and reports of what other people have to say at the conference about young learners and emerging technologies...