The provision of appropriate educational technologies can be an advantage of higher education institutions in terms of marketing, or branding, and for managing and supporting students’ learning.  However, these kinds of technologies evolve rapidly, and it is therefore sensible for educational institutions to explore the current trends and impact of innovative (or emerging) technologies prior to their broad adoption by the mainstream in order to create an early competitive advantage. The purpose of this research was to examine the current trends and impacts of emerging educational technologies that are expected to be in most higher education institutions.  In this research, the information extracted from the literature was collected through a scoping literature review.  In addition, the Technology Hype Cycle by the Gartner group was employed for identifying the emerging key technologies for education.  In addition to the literature review, the interviews were carried out as semi-structured conversations with university lecturers from different universities in Thailand to find out the current trends of using and impacts of emerging educational technologies on teaching, learning and creative inquiry in higher education.  In the presentation of the results, the technologies are grouped into four sets representing the current trends in educational technology development which are: 1) multimode or multichannel technologies for learning, 2) social learning technologies, 3) cloud-based learning technologies and, 4) ICT interoperability.  From the analysis, these emerging technologies are appropriate for the context of Thai universities in terms of project budgets, manpower, and time constraints.  In conclusion, addressing the right question and making a good decision on appropriate educational technologies can lead to high quality instruction for students in need of 21st century skills regarding knowledge transfer, lifelong learning and mastering of technology.