Manufacturers, vendors and education professionals are already eyeing the ever-nearing horizon, where convergence and hyper-integration will catalyze new ways of creating and sharing content across different media.

“Blogging, SMS to TV, Podcasting, IM and VoIP, Connected Cocooning, are some of the fast emerging trends in mobile technologies that are promising to play a significant role in the way things will be taught and learned in future. Web 2.0,

Collaborative Learning tools like Mobile Blogs,Video Blogs, Podcasts, P2P, Swarmcasting, are all poised to transform 21st century learning in the world,” predicts Parveen, Edutech.

At the same time, the heightened connectivity of the digital environment will give teachers the ability to connect with students, and with one another globally to share resources and pool expertise. “The traditional 'presentation' of content will have to evolve - as teachers draw on the global network of knowledge that is the internet to locate resources and to personalize presentations through responding to the feedback of the group,” says Reeves of Promethean. The trend is already gathering pace, with portals and forums from teachers springing into being. Content and collaboration are patchy at the moment, but have the potential to bring about widespread change once a critical mass of global participants starts using Web 2.0. The scope of interactive technology will also change to include numerous learning environments including learning challenged, distance education, corporate training, military briefings, language training. “Essentially, any environment that requires the collaboration and sharing of information is an ideal environment within which to apply interactive technology,” contends Reeves.

Globally, an increasing number of countries are recognizing the need to apply interactive learning technology into their classrooms to keep up with student expectations about the place of technology in everyday life. With countries now understanding the clear connection between a technologyliterate workforce and global competitiveness, many more countries today are looking for strategies that can work to transform teaching and learning. In fact, Decision Tree Consulting (DTC), a leading UK research company that has been documenting interactive whiteboard sales for seven years, forecasts that one in seven classrooms worldwide will have an interactive whiteboard by 2010.

Interactive technology also has the potential to address teacher shortages, both in absolute numbers and in specialty areas such as maths and sciences. As interest grows in extending a teacher's reach beyond the local classroom to distant students and dispersed classrooms, the role of interactive technologies in performing such a task is being explored. Nancy Knowlton of SMART believes this will mean that teachers will have to learn how to gain and maintain the interest of students locally as well as remotely, which will involve the development of new strategies and techniques.

Teachers will need to become expert in mixing digital tools with traditional tools, learning and adapting their practices to the technology of the day. But they will have help as online communities grow stronger and pedagogical material becomes readily available, with lesson planning assuming a collaborative approach.

As the future approaches, data and content becomes more mobile. While many parts of the world are pushing to introduce rudimentary networking in schools, other areas have moved past computers as the mainstay of communication. For instance, Promethean’s Mark Reeves says that only 11% of Japanese teenagers use a computer to access the internet and communicate, preferring to use mobile phones and other digital devices. The next step for interactive learning is the ability to capture lessons as video, web-ready FLASH, java applets, or any other format to make sure that such content can be used with any device. While learning technology may be moving towards mass integration and high mobility that promises content any time and anywhere, it is not available to everyone. In fact, the steady march of progress tends to exacerbate the knowledge and digital divides for those are already marginalized. Globally, civil society, organizations and schools are waking up to this inequity, and are trying to solve it by judicious use of information technology to the benefit of the disadvantaged. This is not saying that IT is a final solution. It merely has the potential of communicating over long distances with geographically dispersed locations that may not have the best infrastructure. By lowering the costs of information transfer, it can help level the playing field. As long as support and investment remain forthcoming, the next five years should see education technology permeate historically inaccessible areas to the benefit of students and teachers alike.