“If you don’t innovate fast, disrupt your industry and disrupt yourself, you’ll be left behind.” So said John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco, a few years back.
When it comes to the tech industry, truer words were never spoken. It’s impossible not to get whiplash trying to keep up with the speed at which our technology revolution is advancing. Case in point: the steam engine was invented in the early 1700s, but it wasn’t until 100 years later, in the 1800s, that it began to reshape the transportation industry. In the 1950s, computers were huge, clunky structures that sat in university and government buildings and took over entire rooms. By the 1990s, the personal computer revolution was underway but again, it took 40 years for computers to evolve from industrial machines to home desktops. Adoption of the internet and the world wide web were quicker, taking about 10-15 years to move from relative obscurity in the 1990s to ubiquitous smart devices in 2015.
In the era we now live—the AI and cloud era— these technologies exploded in less than 10 years, with Amazon Web Services launching in 2006, and cloud-first companies becoming standard by 2015.
While the Industrial Revolution progressed at what is known as generational speed, and the internet era at decade speed, we are now living in what is called “election-cycle speed,” where the tech landscape shifts every four to five years.
To our credit, public education has been impressively keeping step with these seismic shifts. It has been nearly 50 years since schools depended on blackboards, 3-ring loose-leaf notebooks, and overhead projectors for much of its learning and teaching. Today, students are provided with laptops or tablets; platforms like Google Classroom, Canvas and Schoology have transformed teaching and learning, and more schools are investing in robotics, coding labs, 3D printers and makerspaces. Furthermore, with new AI tools, threat detection, automated alerts, privacy balance and student data protection laws are making our schools safer and protecting personal data for administrators, educators and students.
In this issue of School Leader, two features address how technology will continue to affect education as we inch up to the 2030s. In our feature on the importance of technology leadership, the author highlights how essential a good tech director is in maintaining equilibrium: “Fast forward to today and technology is as essential as electricity. Learning management systems track instruction, student devices are issued 1:1, security cameras and door access run on networks, and communication systems tie it all together. If the technology goes down, schools grind to a halt,” writer Tamer Mamkej notes.
In our other technology feature, Fil Santiago does a deep dive into SaaS and data management, the critical responsibility of cyber-security, and how to successfully plan a systems integration.
In their myriad responsibilities, boards of education need to stay as abreast of new public education technology shifts as the rest of us, if not even more so. After all, who knows where we will be on the technological landscape five years from now?
I hope you enjoy this issue!
