Children starting school this week will expect to finish school education in 2020. What can they expect? Those who left school in July after 13 years have lived through a lot of changes. How much has technology contributed?

In 1995 the WWW existed and was probably already the significant bit of the internet. If you had it in school or at home it usually meant a 56Kb modem – a long way from today’s home speeds of up to 2Mb or higher. Wireless was something you listened to - instead of iTunes – and of course your Walkman. You might own one of the 320 by 240 pixel Apple Quicktake or a similar Casio product to take digital photos. If you could afford the £800 you may have had a PDA – an Apple Newton – with a grey and grey screen- but good handwriting recognition. You would have used Altavista to search the net using Netscape browsers. An APPLE 660 AV let me digitise video and edit with Adobe Premier (that came free with digitizing cards). MS Office was usually bundled in most educational purchases. You could project onto the wall – I used a device that sat on an overhead projector – which was good because I didn’t get in the way of the screen.

The technology of what is happening in schools today as “good ICT based practice” was around at the time. Apart from the introduction of the verb “Google” what has really seeped itself into embedded practice? There are beacons of hand-held learning –notably in west Midlands and Bristol. There are good examples of digital video. There are good examples of managed learning. However, they are “examples”.

If I was writing this 13 years ago (about 26 years ago)….. I would be saying that schools were getting their first microcomputers. The MEP primary programme were making good exemplary software available to schools. Some were getting excited about LOGO…. And some schools had started to use a new service from News International (owners of My Space): TTNS - It was very innovative - it provided online information pages and electronic mailboxes for every student in the country!

So what of the world when today’s infants become “freshers”? Will their schooling be that different? I believe there have been far greater transformations in out-of-school activity than there has been in in-school activity.