You can’t fight the screen—but you can use it. After two years of disruption and remote learning, teachers and students are more than ready to reconvene in person and make up the educational losses the pandemic created.
Many lessons may still involve electronic devices, but using these tools in the classroom and in person can make all the difference in learning outcomes. Keep an eye out for these educational technology trends to watch in 2023.
Smart Tables
These wonders of technology bring an interactive screen to any flat surface. Students can work together to identify geographical features on a map, solve puzzles, and create visual stories. New versions can handle more than 40 touchpoints for busy little fingers and are designed to be wheelchair accessible and extremely stable.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Medical schools are already using augmented reality to train surgeons. But virtual and augmented reality can make a history lesson or novel discussion come to life in a three-dimensional, virtual world. Tour world heritage sites or bring historical costumes to life with technology that puts students in the middle of real or imagined places.
Content in the Cloud
Schools can access and store a bevy of educational content in the cloud, from digital textbooks to film, video, and audio content. Cloud-based technologies facilitated remote learning during times of isolation and continue to augment in-person learning with vast amounts of searchable content.
Students can easily store and share work in cloud-based learning systems, and teachers can gather data, track student progress, and step in to help when students fall behind or have trouble with assignments.
3D Printing
Encouraging creativity and inventiveness in students is easy with the addition of 3D printing technology. Students can print three-dimensional models of biological specimens, toys they design, and helpful gadgets that serve as organizers. They can create historical costume pieces for school reports or theatrical productions and build miniature houses according to their own innovative designs.
Teachers can enhance the study of almost any school subject with 3D-printed manipulatives that provide insight into scale, dimension, and function. Students benefiting from the use of 3D printers have already created fidget toys and even a survival pod with a mask that firefighters can throw to people waiting for rescue in burning buildings.
Gamification
Many school systems and employers have been using games to teach and train for years, and the trend will only continue in 2023. Gamification makes learning repetitive, technical, or difficult material easier and more fun. Using systems drawn from the gaming world, learners earn rewards like electronic stickers or tokens as they progress through material.
Educators and employers can use these systems to track who successfully completes learning assignments. Gamification also promotes teamwork, as students and employees can complete assignments together in a fun and cooperative way to earn prizes or advance to the next level of learning and training.
In some ways, the educational technology trends we expect to see in 2023 are simply extensions of trends that are already in use; in other ways, advances in education technology are unpredictable. No one saw the challenges of prolonged remote learning coming, but the lessons learned about the importance of combining in-person teaching with cooperative learning will affect educational technology development for years to come. Whatever surprising twists and turns come along that affect education, technology will develop to address them and advance education in new and innovative ways.