The 2017 K-12 Horizon report identifies two trends that are currently influencing my teaching including coding as a literacy and measuring student learning. As the reports contends, coding as a literacy is a short term trend which is “driving technology adoption in K-12 education for the next one to two years” (p. 2). In fact, a year ago, teachers in my school district were provided an opportunity to attend a one-day training with code.org. In 2017, the code.org website boasts that it has reached 20% of US students and 600,000 teachers. I am one of 40 educators from the district that has been trained. While coding may be influencing technology adoption, I suspect that the implication of coding as a practice is beyond a mid-term trend (more than 5 years away).
Case in point, our middle school continues to limited students to a choice of traditional electives such as drama, cooking, sewing, speech and debate, video production, yearbook, ASB and Spanish. At the local area high schools, students may be offered 1 or 2 computer based electives. Meanwhile, my local high school does not offer any computer programming. One argument the NCM made for coding to infiltrate K-12 education is to make “a case to embed coding into K-12 curricula” (Freeman et. al, 2017, pg. 11). Yet, as a teacher of a STEM subject, I am unclear where I would find extra time to devote to coding. Moreover, science is soon receiving their own set of new standards and curriculum. While I agree that coding initiates learning including structure and logic, I do not believe that they are completely transferable to learning mathematical concepts. In my opinion, the best case for increasing computer literacy is to offer coding as language similar to what is being implemented in Florida. I believe students can be provided a choice of which language they choose to learn, whether it is Spanish, French or coding. Measuring learning is another identified trend that is a current focus in my content area. We refer to this district led initiative as PLC or Professional Learning Communities. While NMC classifies this as a mid-term trend, IUSD has already begun its' 2nd year of a three-year plan towards full implementation. NMC comments that one key attribute of successful data collection is that it is both timely and accessible. While teachers are inundated with timely and accessible data, I believe the real issue is how to make sense or interpret the data. In my math classroom, I easily collect over 1,000 pieces of data from students each week. As teachers, we all try to support measuring learning targets using technology support tools like zipgrade and socrative. In my classroom, I utilize the online quiz functions in Canvas by offering homework online. As the NMC (2017) report suggests, blended and hybrid courses may be our best case for initializing innovative data collection and analyzation. These courses have technology embedded in them that affords practical data analysis techniques. Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.
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