As the new year dawns, and the holidays become fond memories, it is natural to start thinking about the future.  We asked ourselves such questions as: What will the year ahead hold for us? What will we learn from the events and happenings of 2011?  What will we do to make our community, and this world, a better place?  Where will our travels take us and, more importantly, where will our learning take us?

With these questions in mind, and since this is the first NewsFlash of 2012, I would like to take this opportunity to do some forecasting.  I would like to take you on a quick journey to the future and explore where this year may take us.  I ask you to imagine, just for a moment, what our lives will be like in 2020.  Just imagine all the changes the next 8 years might bring to you and your family, your lives, and your learning.

The year, then, is 2020.  AIS-R opens for the new year in its state-of-the-art campus.  Students and parents disembark from their hover-cars while maglev shuttle tubes unload in the bus area. As students pass through the gates, their ID tags signal their attendance, register their current GPA, record a baseline brain-activity level and log their daily calorie intake thus far.  During the short walk to their morning meeting, students check their digital tablets to read the AIS-R daily news and see what classes they will be attending this week.  Since their learning is individualized, classes change from week to week depending on what they need to learn to get to their next target learning level. Their teacher—or Learning Facilitator as they are now called—has sent them a welcome message, an overview of their personalized learning plan and details of the learning cohort they will join for the week.

Eager to get started, students spend some time in the commons areas, catching up with friends and checking in with those in their learning cohort.  The week’s learning will be challenging but by collaborating and making good use of the strengths of each member of the group, the project will inevitably be a success.

Some students have already begun finding background information for the project and sharing what they have found with their team.  Each student has his/her own digital computing and communication device which is always with them, and it is light and portable enough that they carry it everywhere without even a thought.  It is more of a digital assistant than what they used to call a computer in 2011, and yet its power, speed and capacity far exceed the capabilities of all the “computers’ AIS-R had on campus just 8 years ago.

AIS-R parents often ask their children, jokingly: why do you need to attend AIS-R, when all the information in the world can be found easily and quickly with your digital computing device?  But, our students understand that information is not knowledge.  Facts are not valuable (when anyone can Google them for free), unless we can put them into context, solve problems and create new ideas.  All the data, information and facts in the world have not made us “smarter”.  But analysing that data, discussing its implications with peers, applying ideas to solutions, looking for trends and patterns in that data offers students opportunities to create new knowledge: this is how students can make a difference.  That is what makes their learning successful.

Sometimes it is overwhelming of course: the sheer amount of information available, and the scope and complexity of the challenges they are presented with by the  Learning Facilitators often seem impossible to tackle.  Fortunately, the AIS-R learning community exists to support each and every learner, through collaboration, teaching, coaching, guiding and nurturing.

While this might, in some ways, seem like a far-off future, it will be here before we know it.  Our AIS-R fourth graders will be graduating in 2020.  So much change will take place in the interim it is nearly impossible to predict.  Nevertheless, we must prepare all AIS-R students to graduate ready for this unknown future.

What we do know is that the world they will be working in will require creativity, collaboration, critical-thinking, problem-solving and excellent communication skills.  We know that the amount of information available to them will increase exponentially over the next 8 years.  We know that they will need to be able to learn new things constantly, and un-learn things just as quickly.  We know that they will need to use technology tools to find the right information for a given task, and make sense of it with the help of technology, as well as other people, near them, and around the world.

This new year promises many changes.  New websites that we have not imagined, will appear in 2012.  Only 5 years ago, Youtube did not exist; Moodle has only been used at AIS-R for a year and a half.  Already, Moodle has become an online hub for teaching and learning at AIS-R. This year Moodle will see many improvements including a video module.  Like Youtube, the advent of video will likely bring an explosion of new learning opportunities through Moodle. Gmail and Google Docs are still in their first year of use at our school.  This year we will undoubtedly see the use of online document creation, online collaboration and file-sharing take off.  Our online learning community will continue to grow and support what we are doing in the classroom for the benefit of all of our students.

New tools to access these sites and information, to learn, communicate and collaborate, will appear.  In just a year and a half, the iPad has changed the way we think about computers. Lighter, more powerful tablets and smartphones are changing the way we work and learn.  A future where every student at AIS-R has a digital learning device with them throughout the day is not far off.  Even now, students in high school are encouraged to bring their laptops and iPads to school each and every day because they need those tools for learning.  We expect that trend can only increase over the next year.

While no one can predict the future, we do know that we want our children, our students, to be successful when they leave AIS-R.  Their success will require them to be creative problem-solvers, critical-thinkers and skilled communicators.  They will need to communicate with people around the world and work with others to create new products and ideas.  They will need to do much of this with technology tools coupled with their own collaborative skills.

This year, we will continue to help our students reach these goals and more, we will continue to teach, guide and facilitate, and we will continue to grow as a learning community, together, in partnership.

Michael McGlade
Director of Technology

The 2011-2012 school year marks a first in several years at the American International School Riyadh: this year we are not adopting any new, large-scale technology systems.  Over the previous three years AIS-R has undergone many significant changes in its communications systems.  We have changed our virtual school platform from Blackboard to Moodle as well as adopting Google Apps as our email system instead of FirstClass.

So, why not anything new this year?  Surely technology is not standing still and waiting for us to catch our collective breath.  No, technology continues to change around us and new tools for schools emerge almost daily vying for teacher's attention and use.  Experience tells us, however, that trying to keep up with the latest tools and always adopting new systems is a losing proposition.  Teachers and students need opportunities to learn a tool and consolidate that learning by using the tool over an extended period of time.  This is especially true for the types of large-scale systems we have adopted in the past two years.  Changing email systems is not something one wants to do every year.

So, this year at AIS-R will be a big learning year.  We have nearly one full year of Moodle experience and we have only touched on Moodle's potential   Teachers and students will continue to sue Moodle to post homework, assignments and resources.  We are also asking all teachers to create some kind of interactive forum on their course to engage students in a dialogue about their learning.

This year will also be our first year using Gmail and Google Docs as our email and document sharing suite.  We have much to learn about its features and potential as a collaborative tool.  Google is constantly updating and improving this program, so we will always have access to the latest tools that Google has to offer.

We hope that, by not taking on any major new Technology Systems this year, teachers, students and parents at AIS-R can consolidate and deepen their learning about the systems we have.  This should make them more useful and improve their potential to improve student learning and build our community partnership.

Michael McGlade
Director of Technology