Credit: Edutopia

Just as the adult workforce is using off-site collaboration and remote workstations, students and teachers will embrace technology's power to connect through time and space, unleashing education at its global best and redefining what it means to "attend" school.

Leslie Shinaver

Swift Creek High School

Afton, Wyoming

I believe that there will be much more emphasis on real-life project learning across the mainstream, where all students learn skills through the process of meaningful educational experiences.

There will be more partnerships, internships, and in-classroom experiences involving the private sector to help students in grades 6-9 make connections between what happens in school and how it relates to their career paths.

Finally, I believe that the politics of public education will change. Hiring highly qualified and effective educators and administrators to shape the minds of our young people will become even more imperative. There will be much less tolerance for retaining staff due to administrator and teacher shortages.

Sandra Jewett

Feltonville School of Arts and Sciences Middle School

Philadelphia

Students will never be "absent," because they will attend school in various ways: in the traditional classroom, as homeschoolers, while on a family vacation, even while recuperating from illness. Also, we will redefine the basics. Instead of testing whether our students can recall algebraic equations or where to place a comma, we will teach them how to find their answers as meaningful inquiry experiences!

Janet Prior

The Cooperative Middle School

Stratham, New Hampshire

As tough as the present situation is financially for many of our nation's schools, things will only get tougher. Some school districts -- perhaps many -- may go bankrupt. The silver lining to this dark cloud is that schools may be reorganized into more useful forms that will be much more receptive to innovation and creativity.

James Bryant

Curator of Natural History

Riverside Metropolitan Museum

Riverside, California

The next decade will bring a widening chasm between those students who work together with adaptive-education leaders to use Web 2.0 tools and the Internet responsibly and those students behind rigid walls built on the vapors of 20th-century acceptable-use policies.

Those leaders who seek ways to tear down the walls will find both challenges and a rush of willing students desperately in need of opportunities to learn responsibility. Those who build vapors will leave their students amid rubble.

Candy Shively

Director of K-12 Initiatives

The Source for Learning

East Berlin, Pennsylvania

The most powerful 2010 educational innovation will be a more effective way to help students realize the value of connecting with their own story, their own history, and their own plans for the future. Without the motivation to study and work provided by a future focus, education goes nowhere, especially among the poor.

Bill Betzen

Quintanilla Middle School

Dallas