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In an earlier post, I said that technology had not met its potential to positively transform education.  We have not used all the new tools now available and we have not combined them into really comprehensive solutions.  We also have failed to provide pathways for developers who might have the resources and perseverance to build these needed, but complex, solutions to market them to a consistent market other than 14,000 individual schools who all believe that they have a unique curriculum.  Let me imagine an example using Microsoft Wordas an analogy.

Most of us are familiar with Microsoft Office. We probably don’t use all the features, but we are comfortable with using it to write letters or lengthy documents, send email, or work with numbers.  It is a powerful set of solutions, but it could be much better. What if Office incorporated artificial intelligence, voice recognition, facial recognition and even some game technology?  Let’s start by adding your own, personalized Alexa or Google Assistant to Word and power that kind of verbal assistance with powerful artificial intelligence of the type capable of “deep learning”.

With these new capabilities using Office might be an experience like this:

• When I open the Word program in Office, a voice (or dialogue box if you prefer) says, “Hello Ted, do you want to work on this document (the last one opened previously) or something else?”
• If I stayed with that document – maybe a blog post – the menus that I would see in the program were the ones that I had used the most in the last several hundred documents of this type.  (The menus and other options might be different if I were just writing an informal personal letter.  In that case Word would know my preferred format style in terms of layout, fonts and tolerance for “interesting grammar”.  The needed menus might be different, as well.)
• As I begin writing, Word would accurately autocorrect my many typos with much greater confidence, having a history of thousands (millions?) of typos in other documents.  The same would be true for spelling and grammatical errors.  I might even hear a gentle question as to whether or not I really wanted to use passive voice for a particular sentence.
• If I stated a fact in my text and it matched an Internet search completed in recent weeks, I might be asked if I want to list that source or add a footnote.  
• …Your imagination can take it from here.

Now let’s apply some of that type of technology to an education example.  Let’s say I am a 4^thgrade Math student sitting at my work station (which might not look exactly like a computer).

• “Hello, Ted (or Angela or Jerome, because it recognizes every person in the school). It looks like it’s time for Math today. Should we start where we ended Tuesday?”
• “Great. It looks like you have done well in computing the multiplications problems I set up for you the last two lessons.  You were able to correctly multiply numbers with two places by other numbers with two places [like 64 times 27] almost all of the time.  I sent your Mom and Dad examples of how well you were doing.” (My teacher really signed the note electronically.)
• “Let’s use those new Math skills in some real-life ways.  This is a video of a parking ramp from a drone flying all around it.  (Ramp next to shopping mall for suburban students, large vegetable garden for rural students in temperate climates.)
• “If the ramp is full and has 10 levels and there are 84 cars on each level, how many cars in the whole ramp (or how many sweet corn plants if there are 84 plants in each of the ten rows shown in the video)”?
• The avatar for my workstation asks me if this looks like a problem of counting things in groups or something else.  
• The avatar could be modeled after an image of my teacher taken from a picture as she signed in that day. It might also be from a special resource teacher assigned to me who had entered the classroom. In either case, the teacher would have been alerted to my progress, reminded of the need to check in with me, and given suggested prompts for the interaction based on my recent progress. In no case does any of this replace the teacher. the technology extends her presence and makes her more efficient.
• You can imagine the scenarios from here..

This 4^thGrade Math example is only a few minutes of experience that would be laid out among thousands of others just for 4^thGrade Math.  As a student, I might need more coaching and multiple attempts with human support or intervention, as needed, according to my support profile from the last 24 months. The program would need multiple ways to present similar content in order to be effective with a variety of learners.   I picked the “cleanest” subject area and grade in order to make the example simple.

Other subjects or grades would be more complex and more nuanced.  High school Physics and Chemistry would need sophisticated simulations where I could apply concepts that had been presented in “real-life” experiments.  many such simulations are already available, but lack comprehensive integration into a major curriculum.

Personalized instruction and coaching in middle school composition skills would be more complex, but if the program learned from the progress of millions of middle school struggling writers who had engaged with the same concepts, the more successful strategies would be more evident. If this sounds far fetched, remember that “deep learning” in artificial intelligence has already mastered chess and even more complex game strategies by study millions of prior games to determine the best states in a wide variety of situations.

This is all much more complicated than getting every student a tablet or laptop, even if we ensure that teachers are ready to use the available programs.  Developing such comprehensive and deep solutions requires a very large upfront investment.  Developers cannot take the chance that they must be left to market independently to each of 14,000 school districts.  If Microsoft Office has enough flexibility to be used in millions of very different kinds of workplaces, then major instructional solutions of this type can work in millions of classrooms across thousands of school districts.  Districts would be eager to take advantage of this kind of solution and it would not need to be required or usurp local control of schools.  But, if consortiums of states formed national partnerships with developers and provided solutions to districts and schools at very low cost, adoption of high quality, comprehensive solutions might be assured.