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"Remember the hype around gamification? About a decade ago, FarmVille and other Facebook games were all the rage. It led the Horizon Report, an annual attempt by a panel of experts to forecast educational trends, to predict in 2012 that gamification would be a major force in education within three years. But here we are in 2019, and people aren't talking much about gamification in education. In fact, after 2015, the Horizon Report stopped mentioning it at all. This week Educause released the higher education edition of the Horizon Report for 2019, and for the first time it looked back on how well past reports did at accurately predicting what would be on the horizon. Titled "Fail or Scale," the new section of the report includes three essays that look back at three predictions from past reports with the benefit of hindsight."

It is tempting to make predictions of the skills that our students will need beyond their time at school. Such wondering can be a useful guide as we contemplate what we shall focus on with our curriculum. Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of predictions for future skillsets published by educators, economists and analysts. What might we learn from such lists, and how should education systems respond?

"From autonomous vehicles, predictive analytics applications, facial recognition, to chatbots, virtual assistants, cognitive automation, and fraud detection, the use cases for AI are many. However, regardless of the application of AI, there is commonality to all these applications. Those who have implemented hundreds or even thousands of AI projects realize that despite all this diversity in application, AI use cases fall into one or more of seven common patterns.  The seven patterns are: hyperpersonalization, autonomous systems, predictive analytics and decision support, conversational/human interactions, patterns and anomalies, recognition systems, and goal-driven systems. Any customized approach to AI is going to require its own programming and pattern, but no matter what combination these trends are used in, they all follow their own pretty standard set of rules. These seven patterns are then applied individually or in various combinations depending on the specific solution to which AI Is being applied."

"I've shared some ways that word clouds can be used in the classroom, and here's another activity that works for all ages and subject areas. Find a website that you are planning on sharing with students. This could be an informational text on a science topic or simply a current events article. Copy and paste the website URL into the online tool Tagxedo. This website will create a word cloud using text from that website."

How do we prepare students for work that hasn't been invented yet? While it's difficult to predict what the social and economic climate will be like in the years to come, we can analyze trends and extrapolate future scenarios.

The start of a new year brings the perfect opportunity to consider the time ahead and make some predictions for what might be the next big thing. With change as inevitable as taxes a new year is likely to see new ideas bubble to the fore and some old ways of doing things shift into the background.

"Reading for Meaning is a research-based strategy that helps all readers build the skills that proficient readers use to make sense of challenging texts. Regular use of the strategy gives students the opportunity to practice and master the three phases of critical reading that lead to reading success, including Previewing and predicting before reading. Actively searching for relevant information during reading. Reflecting on learning after reading."

"As mobile technology continues to permeate every facet of society, the mantra of today's youth seems to be "Make it Mobile!" With this influx of technology it will be interesting to see how the classroom looks 5, 10, 15 years down the road. Do you have any predictions?"

"Guessing what the future of education holds is equal parts logic and guesswork. The logical part is simpler-take current trends and trace their arc further, doing your best to account for minor aberrations. If the majority of public education in the United States is waist-deep in adopting new academic standards, it doesn't take Nostradamus to predict they are going to have a strong gravity about them in the education at large."

The potential for reliably predicting the outcome of any change effort is surely difficult if not even impossible once the number of influences becomes large. Acknowledging the complexity that exists and seeing the potential for growth, creativity and innovation that can exist within an organisation at 'the edge of chaos' are useful strategies as schools face a period of unprecedented change. 

"According to Marc-André Lalande,  "a Personal Learning Network is a way of describing the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their references. Your PLN is not limited to online interactions, but it is that online, global interactive part that really makes it special. It is personal because you choose who's part of that group; you choose if you want to lurk-just check out what people are saying-or if you share; because you choose when to do so, and how to do so." As for this graphic? You can thank Sylvia Duckworth, who always does a great job sharing simple sketch notes to help teachers. (She also took our 12 Rules of Great Teaching and created a predictably wonderful graphic to supplement the text, among others.) We've taken her graphic and provided starting points for each 'reason' a teacher need a PLN."