In the realm of education, innovation has been a sought-after spark to help evolve how we teach our students. In recent years, technology has evolved in leaps and bounds, creating new ways for how education is delivered.
This month, CoSN has released the Top Hurdles, Accelerators, and Technology Enablers Shaping K-12 Innovation in 2025. This is a comprehensive list of the obstacles, initiatives, and tools that will shape our technological year going forward.
What are the Hurdles, Accelerators, and Technology Enablers?
For 2025, technology in education is primed for innovation the likes of which we have never seen before. CoSN has identified tools that will be majorly impactful, areas that will help push us forward in educational technology, and areas that we can tackle to make the educational space better overall.
Tech Enablers for 2025
- Generative AI: Artificial intelligence is becoming more commonplace in schools as well as in our general lives. Finding safer and more effective ways to implement generative AI is a goal that will help both students and teachers.
- Analytics & Adaptive Technologies: Data can be a powerful tool, and the data from education can be used in many ways, including helping educators make more informed decisions on their interactions with students. Meanwhile, adaptive technology can bring us closer to personalized education that caters itself to the needs of each individual student and brings them closer to recognizing their full potential.
- Untethered Broadband & Connectivity: In order to keep up with the evolving trends in education, a steady and stable internet connection is required. Being able to consistently access the internet without the need for wires and cables can increase our mobility and open up a world of new possibilities.
Accelerators for 2025
- Learner Agency: Giving students the ability to take control of their education can have a profound impact on engagement, improving the overall quality of the instruction they receive. This idea breaks a student out of the typical idea of school, turning them into learners and giving them more freedom in how they learn. This also would fundamentally change the role of the teacher, giving them the opportunity to evolve their instruction to better suit the needs of all their students.
- Building the Human Capacity of Leaders: In the same way businesses invest in their employees, schools investing in their educators can improve the educational environment. Providing the opportunity to learn new skills through PD can spark innovation in teachers and break through the stagnancy of current education models.
- Changing Attitudes Toward Demonstrating Learning: If the question “Where am I going to use this information?” has ever popped up, then there might be a need to reexamine how we understand and assess student learning. Finding and promoting connections between K-12 learning and higher education or the professional world can better inform how we teach and help students relate to what they are learning.
Hurdles for 2025
- Attracting & Retaining Educators and IT Professionals: Both school teachers and IT professionals are seeing obstacles when it comes to working in an educational environment. These can range from daily stressors to inadequate compensation. Teachers may specifically deal with more stress due to academic numbers and interactions with students, while IT professionals might find it hard to work in a school when they may have better opportunities elsewhere.
- Evolution of Teaching & Learning: As the world around education continues to evolve, so too must the world of education evolve. In order to best prepare students for the road ahead, schools must be able to keep up with trends. This includes breaking from older forms of teaching and learning, enabling students to learn in ways that suit them best, and empowering teachers to better understand how they can play a role in a student's formative years.
- Digital Equity: Students are better able to succeed when they have the tools necessary to do so. This can mean physical tools such as laptops and Chromebooks, or this can involve the attention and detail provided by educators to enhance their understanding of the technology of the times. Students will also be primed to succeed in education when they are properly represented in the tools they use and experiences they have. Finding a way to achieve this outcome may have a profound impact on education.
How These Topics Were Chosen
Preparing for the world of tomorrow is an ongoing task in an everchanging education landscape. While these nine topics are each important individually in helping education ready learners for the future, there are overlapping themes.
“These are the nine topics that a global board of 130+ educators and technologists identified as most important,” says Laura Geringer, Driving K-12 Innovation Project Director. “At the end of the day, it’s not about telling you the answer, or predicting the future, but rather about the future(s) we’ll create together.”
As the years have gone by, the topics we see as being important may fluctuate, but the overall message remains the same. To achieve the educational environment we want to see, we must remain vigilant in pushing the space forward in all aspects.
“The Advisory Board identifies the most important topics for driving K-12 innovation in the coming year, but we also look for bridges that span multiple topics,” says Geringer. “This year, ethical innovation was a theme that appeared time and again in our conversations: the ideas that the why of innovation or change matters, as does who’s included in and served by the process. We also saw themes of personalization, the future of work, and critical media literacy arise with several of the Top Topics.”
It’s clear that education is in a different place than it was decades ago, but for educators and decision makers, there is still plenty to do to ensure that the future of education and our young learners will remain at the forefront of innovation.
For more information on the Top Topics Driving K-12 Innovation, click here!
