I venture to guess that if people over 25 toured most of today's public schools, they would look very familiar to the very place they met Dick and Jane, learned the sounds made by long and short vowels, and experienced their first fire drill. We've been hearing a lot about technology in the classroom and asking what classrooms of the future will look like. When will things not only begin to look, but actually be different? We may finally have an answer. 

A recent report by The New Media Consortium, Horizon Report, 2010 K-12 Edition, gives a probable timeline for adoption of emerging technologies and examines their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative expression within K-12 education. 

The report proposes the following windows for technology adoption: 

One year or less  

• Cloud Computing: Cloud-based apps and services are already available to students at some schools but will continue to become more useful as more teachers and students take better advantage of the opportunities and collaborative possibilities.

• Collaborative Environments: These environments can have tremendous implications for interaction among peers, mentors, and experts, and can broaden the worldview of the teachers and students who collaborate. While these opportunities have been adopted in part, the full potential has yet to be realized.

Two to three years 

• Educational Games: While the value and effectiveness of educational games have already been established, their potential for education, collaboration, and the enrichment of 21st century skills has scarcely been tapped.

• Mobile Devices: The number of applications for mobile devices is growing exponentially. Everyone from large companies to student developers is getting into the act, yet security risks and the policies of some schools continue to hinder the full acceptance and the opportunities they offer for teaching and learning. 

Four to five years

• Augmented Reality (AR): An interactive combination of the real and the virtual worlds available in real time, AR has become something we can all use. Its potential for schools can literally transport students and allow them to interact with real-world objects in real time. This is exciting but also is a few years over the horizon.

•  Flexible displays: Touch screens, screens embedded in books and on desks and integrated with other devices are the wave of the not-too-distant future. With applications and hardware in development, it will be exciting to see how we and our students begin to interface with these exciting technologies. 

If these projections seem unrealistic to you, remember when a computer took up an entire room of the workplace and when mobile phones were luxury items. As we move forward as educators, we must overcome the fears of the open classroom and the flat world and dive in. With fully online curriculum and enriching supplemental applications available to educators around the world, it's getting easier to take the plunge. After all, our students have. 

Which of these emerging technologies are most exciting to you, and which predictions are most realistic?