I’m not that old, but I went to high school in a time before Facebook, before Google became a verb. But it still wasn’t that long ago.

When I was in school, I used a search engine, I had instant messages, I even had a social network. But just in the short amount of time between when I got my diploma and now, the landscape has changed.

We have a generation of digital natives who aren’t keen on a learning model that was made for the 20th century.

Here we have 10 of the latest technology trends that are at the forefront of the education ecosystem.

1. Gamification

Gamification is a slightly overused term to describe turning a certain series of tasks into a game. This doesn’t mean using a giant wheel of prizes when you take a quiz. Games, particularly roleplaying games, have a system of challenging the player, rewarding the player, then giving the player harder challenges with bigger rewards. It’s been shown in studies that dopamine is released when you win at a game.

Bringing these tools to education is easier than you might think: Challenge the students, let them feel good about overcoming the challenge, then challenge them more. For example, Duolingo, a language tool, promises to give you 11 weeks of college-level courses in under 40 hours. It works by learning a few words at a time, then building up to longer sentences as you gain more points. Or consider Classdojo, an app that alerts classmates and parents when a student does well on a course, and adds social media tools like texting and sharing photos. With these and similar tools, the better a student does, the more rewards he/she gets.

2. Flipped learning

Flipped learning is most often described as “homework at school, schoolwork at home.” While this accurately describes a flipped classroom, the whole idea of flipped learning is to change from a model where the teacher bestows information to the students to a Socratic model where students use critical thinking skills to learn from each other. A number of studies have confirmed the success of a flipped-learning environment.

The four pillars of flipped learning, according to the Flipped Learning Network, are:

• Flexible environment: accommodating when, where, how and how long it takes to learn
• Learning culture: switching from the teacher being the expert to the students engaging in active discussion
• Intentional content: teachers determine that they want the students to learn themselves and what material the teachers should lead themselves
• Professional educator: teachers continually assess their students and provide important feedback

3. Distance education

Distance education is not a new idea. Forty years ago, David Vetter, the “boy in the bubble,” tried using a speakerphone in his second-grade classroom because he’d get sick if he left his house. We’ve come a very long way since the days of speakerphones. Consider Kubi. It could be considered an education robot, but really it’s a stand that holds a tablet. It can be moved from one classroom to another, and it can move the tablet up and down to get the best view of the teacher. But the actual video is nothing more elaborate than Apple’s FaceTime. Kubi is being used to great success in a town in Texas by letting students who can’t make it to school come in virtually.

Just as you can bring in students remotely, you can also bring in teachers remotely. By using today’s communication technologies like video conferencing, class forums, pre-recorded videos, social media, and even the humble email, students are able to tailor their education to their needs and their schedule. No matter how remote a school is, or where in the world a guest lecturer is, they are no farther than their nearest Wi-Fi network.

4. Mind mapping

Mind mapping is a way to brainstorm and take notes. It’s graphic and visual, rather than linear and text-based. It is a type of spider diagram, so ideas are circled or otherwise demarcated and linked to each other with lines. Software that makes mind maps, like Mindmeister, BigMind Pro, Brainstormer, and many others, make it possible for educators to make presentations that are fun and easy to understand.

Mind maps work more closely like the human brain, with ideas linked to other ideas. It makes it a great tool to more easily recall information. It also can be used to generate both individual notes and collaborate on ideas. Using mind-mapping software, you can share maps as easily as you would send an email. Mind maps are another example of how learning can be interactive and multi-dimensional rather than unidirectional and passive.

5. Social media

Social media is a polarizing subject in the field of education. Some feel that it is a distraction from real work. but there are ways that social media can benefit the classroom.

For example, social media can bring students together in a small online group to work on an assignment together. You can create a hashtag for Twitter, make a Pinterest board, start a Facebook group and more. There are also social media platforms, like Kidblog, that is strictly monitored by teachers to make sure every post is safe for students.

6. Digital textbooks

When I was in elementary school, the last few pages of my social studies textbook had pictures of all the presidents, but it was one president behind, even though the president at the time was in his second term. I didn’t know it, but most textbooks are used for seven years before a new edition comes out. Textbooks are twice as expensive now as the one I had, and books are getting so heavy that they are giving students back problems.

That’s changing. Schools like Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, are eschewing dead tree books for digital textbooks. For the one-time cost of a tablet (which the student may already own) plus $150 for membership in the digital library, students are able to access every book they’ll need for the year on a specially designed app. Like every BYOD model, students will be able to take the material anywhere, so they’ll never forget a book at home again.

7. Just Google it

Albert Einstein didn’t know his own phone number. He said, “Why memorize something you can just look up?” That was back when we used phone books. Today, we have a dozen ways to get in touch with someone we already know, and we don’t need to remember anything more complicated than a first name. If Einstein wasn’t afraid to use the phone book, why should we be afraid of using the Internet to look up things we can’t memorize?

The printing press brought the written word to the masses. The pocket calculator sped up tedious calculations to mere seconds so engineers could focus on problem solving. Doctors today are turning to Google to help them diagnose rare diseases with uncommon symptoms. Every major change in the way we memorize facts or organize our thoughts has brought with it a dramatic change in the way we live. So don’t be afraid to use Google. Just don’t use it to cheat on a test.

8. Augmented reality

Virtual reality is something we associate more with oversized headsets and a slight sense of dizziness. Augmented reality is a little more like Google Glass. Using eyewear or holding your device in front of you, you can see the world around you, but you can also see important information overlaid on it. This can be anything from a translation of a foreign sign, the constellations in the night sky or information from every social media and search engine at once.

The only limit to something like this is the teacher’s imagination. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what if every book you pulled from the school library had a review written by the last person who read it, and just by looking at the cover, you could pull it up? What if you looked up at the clouds and it could show you just why there’s a good chance of rain in the next few hours? What if you sat down at a piano and it showed you which notes to hit to play the Spar Spangled Banner? Teachers can use this to make any lesson more interactive and fun.

9. User-generated content

User-generated content, also known as crowd-sourced content, is media generated by one or more often many lay-persons rather than a single expert or group of experts. The best known example of this is Wikipedia. Content generated by Wikipedia is not created or curated by one group of elites. Instead, the content is generated by users and then edited by other users. The system isn’t perfect, but it has an overall error rate that is only slightly higher than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.

Right now, all you have to do is jump on YouTube and you can learn how to bake a cake, or make fancy balloon animals, or juggle or pretty much any skill known to man. While there’s no substitute for hands-on learning, if you want to pick up the basics, all you need is a screen. Students can learn from these videos or even create their own. YouTube, remember, has private videos, so students can create videos tracking their progress on a project and showing other students how they’re doing it. The teacher, of course, can do the same thing. And the video itself can be an assignment as well, especially when it comes to creating video, music, and other media.

10. Big Data

Big Data will be a major game changer. It’ll let us see what works and what doesn’t with astounding clarity. How well did a school trip go? Did it make a difference if two teachers both gave pop quizzes on the same day? Does homework get forgotten more easily when the season finale of Singing Zombie Dragon Detectives is on? Did any of the techniques I mentioned above help any students get better jobs and compete in a global economy? There’s only one way to know, and that’s to look at the data.

Services like Edutrends and Knewton are able to anonymously mine data about students and turn that data into usable information for the parents, teachers, the school board, and other stakeholders in the schools. And it isn’t just large trends either. For example, the data may reveal that a student having trouble with word problems in math has decent math skills but is having trouble with reading. In the old system, the student would have to practice more math problems, but with the help of Big Data, the teacher would know the students needs a reading tutor. Big Data gives us the ability to dynamically adjust a course along the school year.

A new type of education, and a new type of educator, is emerging. We are going forward to a learning system of the latest gadgets and apps, while returning to an older teaching model where the teacher knows the student, not just the subject. We are finding out that anyone with the right platform can be an expert at something, and anyone with the will to learn can become a student. We have new tools. We have new toys. They are one and the same.