As the 2009-2010 school year moves through its fall semester, my visits to schools and colleges reveal many common questions and concerns about the role of technology in teaching and learning. These fall into three main topics:

• The classroom
• Mobility
• Online learning

This article looks at these trends for 2010, and their implications for the work of teachers.

The classroom

The place that we have known so well is getting ready to change. Teachers tell me that they know that the new digital technologies allow for new kinds of activity and new ways to learn in the classroom, and they are beginning to do some serious experimentation. They are letting laptops in as well as other devices that enable students to reach out to new ideas and to reach in to interact with the folks around them. They are preparing their presentations more carefully, adding rich media and interactive questioning. They are authoring online companions to each of their lectures, to keep the students gainfully occupied while they're on their laptops. They are realizing that they do not need always to be the center of attention in the room -- that they can use technology to help the students focus on ideas and content rather than the teacher himself.

At Hunter College in New York, this is the first semester ever that every teaching space -- auditoriums, classrooms, conference rooms -- is equipped with projector and internet access. At Killingly High School and and at the University of Missouri every student carries a laptop to every class. Middle schools in New York City all sport Smart Boards in all their classrooms. That's the mainstream. At the cutting edge, schools outfit selected classrooms for one-button webcasting, and others for interactive access by distant guests. They build group-polling and online brainstorming software into the classroom repertoire. They arrange their video assets into well-indexed online libraries, available digitally to every classroom through the network at the click of a button.

How about your classroom? Which technologies would help you to improve your teaching?

The question, of course, is how teachers will take advantage of these classrooms. How will they teach differently, now that they are armed with these technologies? What difference will all these classroom improvements make to the learning experience of the students?

Mobility

If we wrote it as an equation, this idea would be

M + W = 24/7

Miniaturization plus Wireless equals 24-hour access 7 days a week. From anywhere.

We see students in the library, but not using the books -- they are instead working with their project group to research a new idea from sources available only online. Working adults use their laptops to learn at a distance, enjoying full human interaction with the rest of the class. Young students go home with a bookshelf of new stories and texts on their iPod or Kindle or whatever. College students review illustrated podcasts from their professors as they commute to campus. As the tools shrink smaller, the intellectual resources available to them grow broader.

Next to the iPod on the table in front of me is a projector of the same size . I connect the two with a short cable and I can present slides to my seminar anywhere. And show student work. With one miniature device in each pocket, the portable professor can be quick on the draw, ready to shoot ideas onto the nearest wall.

The same iPod houses hundreds of books, from The Odyssey to Paradise Lost to Programming with PHP/SQL. As well as Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, and dozens of lessons in learning Chinese. And an animated school bus for beginning readers, along with an interactive number line for learning fractions is also available at a touch.

What's on the iPods of your students right now? If you had your druthers, what would you want to see on there?

Online learning

Google will soon have the text of all the world's books online, searchable by keyword and readable by everyone. On whatever device they have on their desktop or hold in their hand. MIT has posted most of its courses online for the world to see. The Perseus project has posted most of the classic Greek and Latin texts online, with full translation, cross-reference, and cultural contexts. The Internet is become an enormous academic archive that can be used for teaching and learning.

And schools are taking advantage of it. Teachers are organizing the content of their courses into platforms for learning. The School of Education at Hunter College in New York has posted its required course in child development as a rich series of interactive lessons, with podcasts for every topic, active discussions among students, and assignments that delve deeply into the issues. The iSchool in New York City is making the entire high school curriculum available online to its students. And granting them credit when they complete it.

While a few fly-by-night outfits have given online learning a bad name (see the dog who earned his MBA online), many legitimate institutions are taking full and respectable advantage of the possibility of reaching out to more students in more ways by building their own Internet archives. Many good examples can be found at iTunes U. Couple the intellectual archive with the mobile device and you open up many new possibilities for learning.

What kind of archive are you building for your students? What new aspect of your own professional development might you explore through an online course?