To be a life-long learner is one of the many mantras in education. However, when it comes to change regarding education fundamentals, those in leadership positions tend to make decisions and implement policies and procedures based on what made them successful in the classroom years ago. Educational leaders must be open to the mindset and reasoning of today's learners. Change is necessary because it allows for growth, progress, and new opportunities. Yes, it can be challenging to adapt to change, and I understand the hesitation of today's educational leaders. Still, we are faced with a generational environment shift in the education sector where change is necessary, or the future of today's learner will be one of uncertainty.
To revamp the current state of our educational system, we must leverage the technologies available to us right now. Our society spends billions of dollars improving and researching personalization algorithms for products and services. Organizations like Amazon, Apple, and Google built systems to learn their users' behaviors over time to provide a better-individualized user experience in real-time. Their implemented systems can accurately anticipate what products we might like or buy next to include the consideration of emergency relief products during natural disasters. Yet, public education institutions offer close to nothing to personalize today's students' digital learning opportunities and experiences based on their day-to-day learning and personal environments.
A platform that I had the opportunity to use as an Instructional Technologist was iReady. To watch students' lessons adjust in real-time and to see intervention groups change week to week for teachers based on characteristic strengths for the current lesson was mindblowing. The manual process would take our teachers weeks to decipher, given the amount of data in play. iReady also provided our teachers with individualized reteach lesson plans based on how a student performed initially, allowing classroom teachers to do what they loved to do, and that's teaching. Sadly, this program went by the wayside.
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