Emerging Technology in Early Childhood Education

Leadership is an essential aspect if the success of an organization, regardless if it is for profit, nonprofit, or other type of business. It is essential because, leaders see opportunities for growth and can also anticipate threats and respond. Leaders are responsible for crafting and implementing vision and certainly influence the overall operations of their company. In Leading Digital by author George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee there are several suggestions support ways in which leaders can stay current and adapt to technology changes. For this week, I was drawn towards Chapter 6 – Engaging the Organization at Scale. This particular chapter highlighted that in order for organizations to lead employees through digital innovation a leader frequently engages employees about how, why, and the goal organizational change. The benefit of technology for a leader is utilizing it to draw and engage employees during organizational change. I recently attended a conference that utilized technology to address organizational change occurring at the federal level for early childhood programs. The goal was to provide a platform in which users could vote, comment, and give feedback specifically about the changes in performance standards that would directly impact daily operational functions. This strategy, ties neatly into Weinberger’s suggestion that knowledge is social, that in fact, knowledge was shared through conversations with others. However, Weinberger also highlighted that there used to be a natural size to such networks suggesting that there was limit to the system of knowledge being shared (Ch.4, Loc 995). In my particular shared example this is true, in the last two years the organization has expanded and programs cumulatively served 1,076,000 children (birth to 5 and pregnant women) throughout the 2013-14 program year. The opportunity comment and share feedback on a web-based platform for a program that has 250, 000 program staff this platform allows for a systematic approach to collection as much feedback as possible considering the organization has certain limits based the size and scope of programs spread throughout the US.

A second aspect of this week’s goal is to predict how changes come about. Again, Westerman et. al has some strong suggestions regarding predicting changes. The authors suggested leaders typically take either an offensive or defensive response when adapting to technological advances. The book provides a great example, I would recommend reading about leader Jean-Pierre Remy and his offensive approach as CEO of Pages Jaunes supporting an organization based in paper transition into the digital ad age. As CEO, Remy embraced a strategy recommended in Garner’s article this week and that is that if an organizations wants to support full mobility through apps or introduce a wider range of technologies must first themselves master the technology. 

The internet trends were interesting when I looked at the graphs determining the level of structural impact for a given field. As an educator, of course I was interested in the education slice of the pie. I must admit, I was surprised that only a fourth of the pie was highlighted. Perhaps it is because in early childhood there has been a lot of recent implementation of technology and integrating it into the classroom. I would have thought it would have been more impacted. I noticed this too on the Wikipedia page regardingemerging technologies. The only spot I noticed education pop up was in virtual realities which prompted me to think about our local community college. Metropolitan Community College’s early childhood department uses live feeds during courses so students can see teaching live in action. The instructor can then link the content of the class being delivered to what is occurring in the classroom. While is it not a true virtual reality experience, it does bring up an emerging technology that is impacting teachers in the educational field.