2014

 Target Audience: The top 10 IT Issues, 2014 report would be most useful to decision makers in higher education. This includes both institutional leaders and top IT professionals who support school administrators. The report also holds some value for educators and instructional designers. However, its utility to these stakeholders is limited to proper alignment with the strategic goals of institutional leadership.  Strengths: In terms of identifying the critical issues that educational leaders will face during 2014, the report covers appropriately the underlying drivers. It aptly states that to maintain and enhance their competitiveness, schools need to address organizational challenges, such as proper IT staffing, risk management, and privacy issues related to cloud-based storage and the constantly increasing usage of LMSs. At the same time the report encourages institutions to take advantage of new opportunities like integrating technology as part of course content delivery and establishing a partnership between IT and institutional leadership to develop a collective understanding of how to best leverage IT to achieve critical institutional outcomes. The data displayed in charts and sidebars is well structured and pertinent to the issues at hand. Various references to extensive data sources are provided throughout the report. Grouping the issues in a multi dimensional matrices and bar charts further helps the reader develop an understanding of different institutional aspects related to IT.  Limitations : The sections of the report contain statistics generated primarily by analyzing the responses of audiences from the US – only about 10% of the participants originated from other countries. Increasing the representation of other parts of the world could easily augment the report. In addition, separating the geographical regions into sub-reports would make it easy to see what differences exist between the top 10 issues in different regions.  Summary : Overall the report is a good source of information for institutional leaders and top IT decision makers. Future releases can help these stakeholders identify, track, and align with trends in the field of education, plan better for the development of their organizations and departments, and ultimately accomplish successfully the mission of higher education to produce remarkable individuals.

The Journal’s report on “10 Major Technology Trends in Education” is a useful article for professionals and entrepreneurs in the education industry. It pulls together information on the current use of technology in the education system that was compiled from the results of hundreds of thousands of Speak Up Surveys from 9,000 schools and 2,700 districts across the country. The 2013 Speak Up Survey, conducted by national education nonprofit group Project Tomorrow, helped outline the current trends in technology by targeting a variety of players within the education system, including students, teachers, administrators, librarians, and parents. Although information was lacking on exactly how schools and districts were selected or contacted to take part in the survey, the numbers in the survey pool were quite large. The overwhelming majority of respondents in the survey were students at 325,279, followed by parents at 39,986, and teachers and librarians at 32,151. Riedel makes good use of the survey’s statistics in his article to paint a picture of what type of technology is currently being used in schools and at home by students and teachers. His article reinforced the assumptions many of us already have about the trends in technology and education, which is that an increasing amount of students have access to mobile devices and internet connectivity, more students prefer to use internet accessible devices (particularly their own) at school, and that gaming and social media are becoming an integral part of the education process. Other trends, that were not so obvious, that the article does well in pointing out, are the rise in students who are using primarily 3G and 4G enabled devices to access the internet at home and school, and the increasing number of students and teacher who are using video for classwork and homework. Both these trends support the notion that we are seeing a shift in education toward mobility and “anywhere” and “anytime” access. I found this article gave a clear and concise overview of the current trends in education, and although not all the information was novel, it did provide me with some valuable insight as to what type of technologies students are using and which ones they prefer, and as a professional in the education industry, that is extremely valuable.