Special Article Personal Wearable Technologies in Education: Value or Villain?

Wearable personal learning technologies can gather data from the person wearing the device or from the surrounding environment and enable that data to be transferred to another device or shared via the cloud. Wearable technologies can serve as a valuable asset in the classroom enhancing differentiation of instruction and student engagement. They also can assist students with a variety of physical limitations. Data collection from these wearable personalized learning technologies enables the building of student profiles—leading to a “quantified” self for assessment and instruction. However, the proliferation of wearable devices may also increase concerns about privacy and security of data, dependence on outside vendors for storage and analysis of big data, and access by students of all socioeconomic levels. Addressing these issues in the teacher education curricula suggests added emphasis on affordances for instruction, digital citizenship, and a code of ethics related to data use. Classroom application represents one area for research by and about innovative educators.