Gartner Top 10 Strategic technologies 2012

As business education and technology teacher I like to stay current with technology products and trends. I chose to review the Gartner: 2012 Top Ten Strategic Technologies report that highlights the top 10 technologies for 2012. The report provides some brief backgrounds information to support how the technologies were chosen that appears reasonable; however, I would have liked to see some additional information that helped substantiate their choices.

 

The top ten technologies that were highlighted are very diverse and are applicable to many different organizations of various sizes and types including the public education system. The list doesn’t appear to be in the order 1-10 with 1 being the most strategic and 10 being the least.  Along with discussing the positive aspects of the technologies the report discusses some of the negative aspects and issues with the technologies which help the reader understand the implications of useful of the technologies. From a business venturers standpoint I think this report is useful to help them gauge the market appetite for their product or service or to help them decided what addition or feature might be appealing to the market.

 

I enjoyed reading the report and found the report useful from a public education standpoint as it highlights some of the new and innovative technologies that could be used to engage students in learning, help with varying learning styles and improve learning opportunities. However, as we are all aware budgets for technology purchases are very limited to nonexistent and so the list is more of a wish list than realty. From the list I think that Media Tablets and Cloud Computing could have an immediate positive impact if school districts had the budgetary ability to implement them, train teachers and upgrade the software as needed. A school set of tablets could be used by various teachers to add an additional dimension to learning and engage students in various subjects from reading, math, science, technology and art. Cloud computing would give students the necessary room to save assignments, projects and programs that could be referred back to as they progress through K-12.

I will definitely read future versions of this report and discuss it with my fellow business and technology teachers. Each high school in the district that I work in has a technology liaison who helps with technology implementation and technology related questions and decision. I think this report would be worthwhile for them to read and I will pass it along to them with my wish list.

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