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3 AI Trends to Watch in K–12 Educational Technology for 2022

Natalie Gross is a freelance journalist and podcast producer based in the Washington, D.C., area. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University.

Editor’s note: To help IT leaders prepare for the year ahead,  EdTech  is pulling together the biggest tech trends for K–12 districts in 2022. You can find our  overall top trends here , and be sure to check out our  trends in cloud technology  and  asynchronous learning .

There’s no question the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to everyday life. But it has also  spurred rapid growth in technologies  that aim to make everyday life simpler, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Many industries have been fueling this growth, automating processes through AI (the  use of computers and machines  to mimic human problem-solving and decision-making abilities).

K–12 education is no exception. As schools rushed to accommodate remote learning with little notice — and maintain a secure online network for students and staff —  many incorporated elements of AI  and ML. Between digital assistants, endpoint security, chatbots and more, AI is gaining a foothold in U.S. classrooms.

Click the banner   below to be the first to learn about new trends in K–12 educational technology.

Here are three trends to look for in 2022:

1. AI in Digital Assistants Helps K–12 Teachers Manage Classrooms

“Alexa, read us a story.”

That’s  one way  teachers are using digital assistants, such as the popular  Amazon Echo  device — technology that many parents of home-bound students  used last year  to aid in their children’s educational routines — in the classroom.

One school district in California has integrated this technology even further with the  Symphony Classroom device  from Merlyn Mind, described as the world’s  first digital assistant for education . The device is powered by Edge AI, combining artificial intelligence with edge computing technology.

READ MORE:  A digital assistant for educators helps with K–12 classroom management.

It’s a way of getting technology to kids where they’re at and when they need it, says Brian Fish, an English teacher at Rancho Verde High School in California.

“Nothing can replace a teacher. However, technology can expand teaching,” Fish says.

Elsewhere in the Val Verde Unified School District, first grade teacher Jennifer Thornton says it comes in handy in her classroom because she’s never at her desk for very long. Through voice commands, Merlyn — the name given to the AI — can navigate tabs on Thornton’s computer and play or pause a YouTube video for a lesson, for example.

“It’s helped a lot with the classroom management,” she says.

Darren Crist, an elementary special education teacher in the district, also uses it for videos in his classroom. But Merlyn’s best feature, at least for Crist’s students, is its visual timer, which helps them with time management and more.

Crist also assigns students to be in charge of Merlyn as a classroom job, which helps them develop life skills.

“As a special ed teacher I’m focused a lot on, not just the normal standards of academics, but making sure that my kids are able to get some of that executive functioning they might be lacking,” he says.

Brian Fish English teacher, Rancho Verde High School

2. Next-Generation Cybersecurity Solutions Integrate AI Technology

The use of AI and ML is also shaping  cybersecurity and the IT industry . For example, these technologies “can offer IT security professionals a way to enforce good cybersecurity practices and shrink the attack surface instead of constantly chasing after malicious activity,”  BizTech  reports.

So, what does that mean for schools?

Between January and May 2020, as the pandemic took root, the use of remote management and collaboration apps  increased by 87 percent and 141 percent , respectively, in K–12 schools, according to an  Absolute Software survey  of more than 10,000 school and district representatives.

Despite the rise in online applications for teaching and learning, “educational institutions are spending more on endpoint security yet gaining less visibility and control. Forty-one percent of schools say tracking devices is one of their most significant challenges,” Forbes reported.

That’s where technology such as  next-generation endpoint security  comes into play. “This advanced protection leverages artificial intelligence to recognize potentially dangerous threats — both known and unknown — in real time without the need for signatures, increasing speed-to-action via a proactive, streamlined security protocol,”  according to a CDW•G white paper.

Cybersecurity solutions powered by AI and ML are  becoming more popular in school districts  because they give time back to small IT teams and allow them to scale security with the introduction of large device fleets.

EXPLORE:  Grade your district's cybersecurity preparedness with this IT checklist.

3. Chatbots Rely on AI to Improve Communication and Tutoring

AI-powered chatbots have been shown to  improve classroom efficiency  and help teachers communicate with parents.

Since the onset of the pandemic, even more uses for chatbots have started to gain steam. With tutoring seen as a solution to helping students overcome the COVID-19 learning disruption,  chatbots could help bridge the equity gap  between students who can’t afford private, traditional tutors and those who can.

“To me, AI is just a set of simple tools that we can use, in this case, to figure out some problems that teachers and kids are persistently having,” researcher Neil Heffernan, a computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, says. “The real magic is giving human tutors and teachers a little bit of information on what’s going on so they can be more efficient.”

Google  released a suite of programs for higher education that include virtual assistants and,  as of November, an AI tutor . The applications in this software suite, called  Student Success Services , can be customized for use in K–12 classrooms.

Which of these trends is your district planning to explore in 2022? Follow  EdTech  on Twitter at  @EdTech_K12  using the hashtag  #K12TechTrends22  to learn more about popular educational technology all year.

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What Schools Can Do Now to Ensure Their New Technology Lasts Beyond the COVID Cash Boom

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Billions of dollars in unanticipated funding for new laptops, tablets, 3D printers, and hotspots sounds like a district technology leader’s lucky day, not a slow moving train wreck.

But that’s what some educators and experts see when they consider the current picture in many schools. Driven by an urgent need to make it possible for millions of students to learn virtually and fueled by tens of billions in federal relief cash, districts tripled or quadrupled their fleet of devices over the course of just one school year.

Many of those districts have embraced 1-to-1 computing initiatives and the changes to instruction, classroom management, and professional development that come with them. But in a few short years, the devices bought with federal emergency funds are going to be outdated or even stop working altogether, experts warn. Districts have different deadlines for spending various pots of federal funding, but the last of it must be allocated by September of 2024.

Many districts are not planning for that reality.

“I’m hearing from other CTOs across the nation that there are leadership groups and school boards that feel like ‘You’re good, you don’t need anything else,’’’ said Kelly May-Vollmar, the assistant superintendent of educational technology services for the Desert Sands school district in southern California. “It’s all fine for today, but a few years from now, about the same time the money runs out, we’re going to have a big problem on our hands.”

The complication goes beyond just the cost of laptops and tablets, added May-Vollmar, whose own district went 1-to-1 several years ago after carefully crafting a sustainability plan.

“You’re teaching teachers how to use [devices],” she said. “You’re teaching kids how to use them. You’re spending a lot of time and money. The investment goes far beyond the cost of the device.”

I'm hearing from other CTOs across the nation that there are leadership groups and school boards that feel like ‘You’re good, you don't need anything else.' It's all fine for today, but a few years from now, about the same time the money runs out, we're going to have a big problem on our hands

The time to start planning is now

Districts don’t usually go on a tech buying binge. Instead, school systems with a lot of hardware to manage typically have a set replacement cycle. For instance, they might swap out a quarter of their old laptops and tablets each year and replace with them new ones. That way, no student is typically given a device that is more than four or five years old, and the district can space out its spending over a longer period.

But the federal relief money—and the immediate need to help kids secure devices and internet capability in order to learn virtually—meant many districts purchased a slew of laptops, tablets, hotspots, even 3D-printers and interactive screens, all at once.

“They had to do the quick spend, and it was a lot of money,” said Diane Doersch, the technical project director at Digital Promise, a nonprofit that works to improve learning through more-effective use of technology. “But now, they’re gonna have to start planning: ‘How am I going to divide this fleet up intelligently so that I don’t have these high-spending years to replace the whole fleet at once?’”

If districts don’t think ahead, four or five years from now they may be “stuck with a whole bunch of devices that don’t work and no money for replacements,” said Doersch, who previously worked as a chief technology and information officer in Wisconsin.

That’s particularly problematic because districts are reimagining professional development and curriculum to make the most of the new technology. Three or four years from now, teachers will likely have grown used to working with laptops and other devices, particularly in districts that went 1-to-1. It would be a big U-turn to go back to Chromebook carts and computer labs, Doersch said.

What’s more, for some lower-income families, the school-issued laptop or tablet is the sole device for an entire household.

“I have heard of families where that is the only computer that the whole family has, and mom and dad have been able to apply for jobs on it and, you know, do these other things that the family needs a computer for,” Doersch said. While there are federal programs to help families obtain devices, they can be hard to navigate, she added.

The first step is to take a hard look at what devices you have and how old they are

One of the first steps many districts must take in coming up with a sustainability plan: Figuring out what hardware they already have, how old those devices are, what kind of shape they’re in, and where they are, physically.

Doersch suggests districts spend this coming summer analyzing their inventory, asking questions like: Which devices came back from students’ homes? What didn’t come back? What’s damaged, but fixable? What needs replacing?

Districts also need to consider expenditures beyond just replacing and repairing many more devices. For instance, if a district bought iPads, the tablets themselves may last up to six years. But the power cords will likely need to be replaced long before that. Interactive whiteboards come with remote controls that run on batteries that will wear out. And on and on.

“There are always hidden costs and tentacles,” Doersch said.

But more devices can open additional savings elsewhere, she added. For instance, if a district has gone 1-to-1, can it purchase fewer textbooks? Save on printing costs? Digitize student documents?

Districts also have the option to seek outside funding. Wichita Public Schools in Kansas is working with Verizon Innovative Learning to ensure that kids at low-income schools can continue to have access to a device and internet services at home—initiatives that were initially funded by federal programs that are likely to be phased out. The district has also crafted a five-year sustainability plan for the 50,000 devices it purchased with the help of federal relief funding.

Wichita also brought on new software for teaching and learning, including Nearpod, which allows teachers to create digital presentations and share them with student devices, and BrainPOP, which offers online learning games.

When the federal money runs out, the district may have to take a close look at its software programs and phase out those that aren’t getting much use or are duplicative , said Rob Dickson, the district’s chief information officer.

The district may have to be “OK with not doing some things, maybe those are old pieces of software, or old pieces of curriculum that you’re not using that you just need to say, ‘No, I’m not going to renew that, because I’m not seeing the usage’,” he said.

It may ultimately be tough for many districts to completely blunt the impact of the federal money running dry, even if they are thoughtful about sustainability, Doersch said.

“It is going to be a big challenge, no matter what, because money that was there is no longer going to be there,” she added.

Although school districts invested a lot of the federal money in new devices, most opted not to use the one-time cash to hire additional staff to help with repair, administration, and technical support. Salaries and benefits can be a hefty, ongoing expense, Doersch said.

That choice left some district IT departments overwhelmed and understaffed, dealing with far more devices but the same number of personnel.

Wichita Public Schools’ creative solution to the staffing problem: “We started hiring students to do our tech work,” Dickson said.

The district teamed up with Wichita State University and WSU Tech, another local postsecondary institution, to help train the students. The kids get high school credit and dual enrollment credit, plus $15 an hour, in exchange for their work. If the students perform well, Dickson anticipates hiring some of them after they graduate.

Paint the picture of what this looks like in four years if there is not proper planning

The sustainability push may require district tech leaders to wear yet another hat: Public relations professional. They will need to convince school boards to finance new technology to replace pandemic-purchased devices once they become outdated.

Those conversations should start now, May-Vollmar said. When her district launched a 1-to-1 initiative in 2018, prior to the pandemic, she had frank discussions about sustainability with the local board of education, ultimately persuading members to commit to replacing one-sixth of the district’s devices every year, as a regular part of the budget.

District tech leaders may have to go on a charm offensive, she said, without sugar-coating the fallout of inaction.

“You have to paint the picture of what does this look like four or five years from now, if we don’t have a sustainability plan, and what’s the impact to our students?” she said. “You got to be able to tell that story and you have to be able to tell the story now, before you’re in a position that it’s an immediate need, because technology is not cheap.”

To make her case in Desert Sands—a district with students from a wide variety of socioeconomic circumstances—May-Vollmar collected data on how many students had quality internet access and a device at home. She worked methodically, promoting her plan first to the school board, then school leaders, teachers, parents, and students.

Equity was at the center of her pitch. She told the school community that when students go home, “if they have a device and internet connectivity, the world of learning is open to them. [If they] don’t have that, they’re limited to what’s in their textbook.”

To be sure, crafting a long-term sustainability plan and selling it to district leaders is a big-time commitment for IT departments that are already stretched thin.

But that’s become the nature of the job for district tech directors these days.

“Starting with the pandemic, tech leaders had to do more than manage boxes and wires,” Doersch said. “They were the visionaries. They had to build strategy. Everything seemed to depend on the technology. And so their leadership game was upped, most definitely.”

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Global education trends and research to follow in 2022

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emily gustafsson-wright , emily gustafsson-wright senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @egwbrookings helen shwe hadani , helen shwe hadani former brookings expert @helenshadani kathy hirsh-pasek , kathy hirsh-pasek senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @kathyandro1 maysa jalbout , maysa jalbout nonresident fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @maysajalbout elizabeth m. king , elizabeth m. king nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education jennifer l. o’donoghue , jennifer l. o’donoghue deputy director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @jennodjod brad olsen , brad olsen senior fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @bradolsen_dc jordan shapiro , jordan shapiro nonresident fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education @jordosh emiliana vegas , and emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development @emivegasv rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

January 24, 2022

• 12 min read

As the third calendar year of the pandemic begins, 2022 promises to be an important one—especially for education. Around the world, education systems have had to contend with sporadic closures, inequitable access to education technology and other distance learning tools, and deep challenges in maintaining both students’ and teachers’ physical and emotional health. At the same time, not all of the sudden changes precipitated by the pandemic have been bad—with some promising new innovations, allies, and increased attention on the field of global education emerging over the past three years. The key question is whether 2022 and the years ahead will lead to education transformation or will students, teachers, and families suffer long-lasting setbacks?

In the Center for Universal Education, our scholars take stock of the trends, policies, practices, and research that they’ll be closely keeping an eye on this year and likely in the many to come.

More than ever, in 2022 it will be critical to focus on strengthening the fabric of our global education system in order to achieve positive outcomes—particularly through an increased focus on data-informed decisionmaking. We have seen a renewed focus on different forms of data that are critical to enhanced education outcomes, such as real-time performance data, which allow teachers and other decisionmakers to course-adjust to the needs of learners to better support their educational journeys. Additionally, high-quality program cost data are needed for decisionmakers to plan, budget, and choose the most cost-effective interventions.

One way we are seeing these areas strengthened is through innovative financing for education, such as impact bonds , which require data to operate at full potential. This year, pooled funding through outcomes funds—a scaled version of impact bonds—should make a particularly big splash. The Education Outcomes Fund organization is slated to launch programs in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and we also expect to see the launch of country-specific outcomes funds for education such as OFFER (Outcome Fund For Education Results) in Colombia, the Back-to-School Outcomes Fund in India, and another fund in Chile. At the Center for Universal Education, we will be following these innovations closely and look forward to the insights that they will bring to the education sector.

As we look ahead to 2022, one continued challenge for many families is navigating the uncharted territory of supporting children’s learning with a growing number of school closures . But while the pandemic forced an abrupt slowdown in modern life, it also provided an opportunity to reexamine how we can prioritize learning and healthy development both in and out of school. Moreover, the cascading effects of the pandemic are disproportionally affecting families living in communities challenged by decades of discrimination and disinvestment—and are very likely to widen already existing educational inequities in worrisome ways.

One innovative approach to providing enriching learning opportunities beyond school walls that address the inequities in our current systems is Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL) —installations and programming that promote children and families’ learning through play in the public realm. A current focus for PLL at Brookings is measuring the impact of these spaces to show that PLL works and to garner greater investment in them. To that end, Brookings and its partners developed a framework and an initial set of indicators from both the learning science and placemaking perspectives to help assess the positive effects of PLL on learning outcomes , as well as its potential to enhance social interaction and public life in revitalized spaces. The framework will continue to evolve as we learn from communities that are testing the expansion and adaptation of PLL—this important work is just beginning.

The pandemic highlighted several trends in education that promise to be the focus of future policy and practice in 2022 and beyond: the importance of skills that supplement the learning of content, systemic inequities in education systems, and the role of digital technology in the education of the future. It has become increasingly clear that the memorization of content alone will not prepare children for the jobs and society of the future. As noted in a Brookings report “ A new path for education reform, ” in an automated world, manufacturing jobs and even preliminary medical diagnoses or legal contracts can be performed by computers and robots. Students who can work collaboratively—with strong communication skills, critical thinking, and creative innovation—will be highly valued. Mission statements from around the globe are starting to promote a “whole child” approach to education that will encourage the learning of a breadth of skills better aligning the education sector with needs from the business sector.

The past year also demonstrated weaknesses and inequalities inherent in remote learning that I’ll be closely tracking in the years to come. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that virtual learning presents risks to social-emotional learning . Further, research suggests that academic progress during the pandemic slowed such that students demonstrated only 35 to 50 percent of the gains they normally achieve in mathematics and 60 to 68 percent in reading. The losses are not experienced uniformly , with children from underresourced environments falling behind their more resourced peers.

The failure of remote learning also raises questions about the place of digital learning in the classroom. Learning will become more and more hybrid over time, and keeping an eye on advances in technology—especially regarding augmented reality and the metaverse—will be particularly important, as both have real consequences for the classrooms.

In 2022, I’ll be focusing on one group of children in particular–refugees–who are among those children who have historically had the least access to preprimary education. The pandemic has affected them disproportionally , as it pushed them and their families into poverty and deprived them from most forms of education during the school closures.

While much more investment in early childhood education research and evaluation is needed to improve evidence and channel scarce resources effectively, there are a few important efforts to watch. A report commissioned by Theirworld last year provided an overview of the sector and focused on a critical gap and opportunity to address the inequity of access to early childhood education in refugee settings by better supporting teachers and community workers. This year, Theirworld and partners will pursue two of the report’s recommendations–making the science of early childhood brain development widely accessible in refugee communities and building the evidence base on what works in supporting early childhood education teachers and the young refugee children they teach.

The report was informed by existing initiatives including Ahlan Simsim, which in 2017 received the largest known grant to early education in a humanitarian context. While the evaluation of Ahlan Simsim will not be complete until two more years, the Global Ties for Children research center, Sesame Workshop, and the International Rescue Committee will share critical insights into their learning to date in a forthcoming episode of the podcast the Impact Room .

This coming year I’ll be focused on how education systems can prepare for future disruptions, whatever the cause, with more deliberateness. The past two years of the COVID pandemic have seen education systems throughout the globe struggle to find ways to continue schooling. Additionally, there have been other public health crises, natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and severe storms, and wars and terrorism in different parts of the world that have gravely tested school systems’ ability to minimize the cost of catastrophes on students and teachers. Finding safer temporary learning places outside the school and using technologies such as radio, TV broadcasts, and online learning tools have helped, but quick fixes with little preparation are not effective approaches for sustaining and advancing learning gains.

In the age of broadcast and digital technologies, there are many more ways to meet the challenges of future emergency situations, but life- and education-saving solutions must be part of the way school systems operate—built into their structures, their staffing, their budgets, and their curricula. By preparing for the emergencies that are likely to happen, we can persevere to reach learning goals for all children.

By the close of 2021, a number of studies began to document the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ educational trajectories across the Global South. These studies point to promising trends –lower than expected dropout rates and reenrollment rates similar to (if not greater than) those of boys–while still highlighting the particular challenges faced by adolescent girls and girls living in poverty , conflict, and crisis .

In 2022, it will be critical to continue to generate more nuanced evidence—carefully considering questions such as “for which girls,” “where,” “when,” and “why.” And then we must put this knowledge to use to protect and promote girls’ and young women’s rights not just to education, but to participate and thrive in the world around them. Ensuring that marginalized girls and young women become transformative agents in improving their lives and livelihoods—as well as those of their families and communities—requires us to develop new strategies for learning and acting together.

At the Center for Universal Education, this means strengthening our work with local leaders in girls’ education: promoting gender-transformative research through the Echidna Global Scholars Program ; expanding the collective impact of our 33 Echidna alumni; and co-constructing a learning and action community to explore together how to improve beliefs, practices, programs, and policies so that marginalized adolescent girls’ can develop and exercise agency in pursuing their own pathways.

Going into year three of COVID-19, in 2022 I’m interested to see whether countries will transform their education systems or largely leave them the way they are. Will leaders of education systems tinker around the edges of change but mostly attempt a return to a prepandemic “normal,” or will they take advantage of this global rupture in the status quo to replace antiquated educational institutions and approaches with significant structural improvement?

In relation to this, one topic I’ll be watching in particular is how countries treat their teachers. How will policymakers, the media, parent councils, and others frame teachers’ work in 2022? In which locations will teachers be diminished versus where will they be defended as invaluable assets? How will countries learn from implications of out-of-school children (including social isolation and child care needs)? Will teachers remain appreciated in their communities but treated poorly in the material and political conditions of their work? Or will countries hold them dear—demanding accountability while supporting and rewarding them for quality work?

I’m interested in learning more about how pandemic lockdowns have impacted students. So far, we’ve only gotten very general data dealing with questions that are, in my opinion, too simple to be worthwhile. It’s all been about good and bad, positive and negative, learning loss and achievement. But I’ll be watching for more nuanced studies, which ask about specific ways increased time away from school has impacted social-emotional development. How do those results differ between gender, race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location? I suspect we’re going to learn some things about the relationship between home environment and school environment that will challenge a lot of our taken-for-granted assumptions.

In 2022, I’ll be tracking emerging evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 school closures on children and youth. Several researchers, including my co-authors and me , have provided estimates of the school closures’ impact on student learning losses, unemployment, future earnings, and productivity globally. But only recently are researchers analyzing actual evidence of learning losses , and an early systematic review finds that “Although robust and empirical research on COVID-19-related student learning loss is limited, learning loss itself may not be.”

Likewise, there is little rigorous reviews of remote learning tools’ and platforms’ impact on student learning during the school closures. After the pandemic, it is almost certain that remote and hybrid learning will continue—at a minimum occasionally and often periodically—in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. It is urgent that we build the evidence base to help education decisionmakers and practitioners provide effective, tailored learning experiences for all students.

Finally, a key issue for education is how to redesign curricula so that this generation (and future generations) of students gain a key set of skills and competencies required for technologically-advancing labor markets and societies. While foundational literacy and numeracy skills continue to be essential for learning, a strong foundational knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is ever more important in the 21st century, and I look forward to contributing research this year to help make the case for curricula redesign efforts.

I will be interested to see how parent-teacher relationships progress after the pandemic has (hopefully) faded into the background. COVID-19 has had an inescapable impact on the way we deliver education globally, but none more so than on how education leaders and teachers interact with students and their families.

For the past three years, I have been studying family-school collaboration. Together with my colleagues and partners, we have surveyed nearly 25,000 parents and 6,000 teachers in 10 countries around the world and found that the vast majority of teachers, parents, and caregivers want to work together more closely. Quality family-school collaboration has the potential to significantly improve educational outcomes, spur important discussions on the overall purpose of school, and smooth the path for schools and families to navigate change together. From community schools in New Mexico  to text message updates from teachers in India , new innovations are popping up every day—in every corner of the world. I’m excited to see what the future holds for family-school collaboration!

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Global Economy and Development

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Larry Cooley, Jenny Perlman Robinson

March 8, 2024

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February 21, 2024