The National Education Technology plan is used to
improve student learning through the use of 5 goals. The goals involve
learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure and productivity as they pertain
to technology. I have evaluated this plan through my answers to the following
questions:
As you read the Introduction to the National Education Technology
Plan, what did you determine to be the purpose of the National Education Technology Plan? How does it affect
teachers and students, people like you and me? (feel free to be critical if you
like).
The purpose of this National Educational Technology
Plan, is to provide a quality education to all citizens. This plan is put in
place to ensure that everyone is encouraged and able to obtain an education
that they can rely on for a job. This plan seeks to develop critical thinking
skills in the students by encouraging exploration and invention in students.
This plan is necessary because America has seen a drop in college graduates,
our schools are failing their students and in the near future, many professions
will require at least a bachelors degree and there is a huge percentage of
adults who lack literacy skills.
In
order to accomplish these goals, it has been determined by this plan that the
individual states need to change their standards of education to help its
students compete in the world economy.
It also states that it should better educate teachers to provide growth
in its students and better assess and track its students growth. Under this plan, states should reward and
rehire proven, successful educators and move them to the schools and areas
where they need it most. Finally, states need to fix their broken schools.
As
a teacher for me this means that unless my students test scores are on top, I
will not be rewarded and if they are, I will be taken out of my school and
placed in a school that is more desperate for quality education. It means that
my worth as a teacher will be measured by standardized tests and not on an
individual level.
As
a parent, this means my children will be held to the same academic growth
standard as students who are above their level and below it and their academic achievement
will be based on a test that is taken one week during the year rather than over
the course of the entire year and will only measure growth in the categories
included in the test.
For
administrators, this means learning to place money in the budget in the places
that the government sees fit and running schools on the new standards with the
hope of “turning around lowest achieving schools.”
Overall, I think this
plan has a great intention. I surely see a need for a plan such as this in the
school system. However, I think that this plan in particular is putting a band
aid on a wound that really needs 100 stitches.
As you read the Introduction to the National Education
Technology Plan (NETP), what were the main assumptions under which the plan was developed? (you may copy and paste
the main assumptions, and then answer the question below in your own words).
The plan is
based on the following assumptions:
·
Many of the failings
of our education system stem from our failure to engage the hearts and minds of
students.
·
What students need to
learn and what we know about how they learn have changed, and therefore the
learning experiences we provide should change.
·
How we assess learning
focuses too much on what has been learned after the fact and not enough on
improving learning in the moment.
·
We miss a huge
opportunity to improve our entire education system when we gather
student-learning data in silos and fail to integrate the information and make
it broadly available to decision-makers at all levels of our education system—individual
educators, schools, districts, states, and the federal government.
·
Learning depends on
effective teaching, and we need to focus on extended teams of connected
educators with different roles who collaborate within schools and across time
and distance and who use technology resources and tools to augment human
talent.
·
Effective teaching is
an outcome of preparing and continually training teachers and leaders to guide
the type of learning we want in our schools.
·
Making engaging
learning experiences and resources available to all learners anytime and
anywhere requires state-of-the-art infrastructure, which includes technology,
people, and processes that ensure continuous access.
·
Education can learn
much from such industries as business and entertainment about leveraging
technology to continuously improve learning outcomes while increasing the
productivity of our education system at all levels.
·
Just as in health,
energy, and defense, the federal government has an important role to play in
funding and coordinating some of the R&D challenges associated with
leveraging technology to ensure the maximum opportunity to learn.
What are some concerns administrators, educators, or even students
might have with these assumptions?
I think that assumptions are never a healthy determination to make
and this situation is no different. There are plenty of concerns that
administrators, educators and students could and should have about this
technology plan.
First, the administrators may not find the statements concerning
because they are based on great premises but they may find it concerning that they have a lot of changes
to make. There is a lot of new standards and methods that they need to take
into consideration with curriculum building, and how they assess their
students. They also need to re-train their educators and rely on the governments
input and money. They also need to move money around in their shrinking budgets
to accommodate the technology standards.
Secondly, educators need to
accommodate the new government policies, undergo different evaluations,
reeducate themselves and be willing and able to apply their new education to
their lessons and adapt to the many changes coming their way all while
continuing to help the students grow.
Lastly, the students in many ways will benefit from the
assumptions that are made, in that changes need to be made and improvements in technology
need to be made. I think that students will suffer in some ways though.
Including, the way they will be assessed and the ways their teachers will be
evaluated. Their teachers will be spread thin while trying to include their
education, the changes, and meeting the needs of each student ( which doesn’t really
change anything, this is the life of a
teacher).
As you read the Executive Summary, the NETP presents a model of
learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five
essential areas. ( You may copy and paste the areas directly from the document
and then answer the question below in your own words).
Goals and
Recommendations
To transform education in America, we must turn ideas into action.
The NETP presents five goals that address the key components of this
plan—learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity—along
with recommendations for states, districts, the federal government, and other
stakeholders in our education system for achieving these goals.
1.0 Learning: Engage and Empower
All learners will have engaging and empowering learning
experiences both in and out of school that prepare them to be active, creative,
knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following:
1.1 States should continue to revise, create, and implement
standards and learning objectives using technology for all content areas that
reflect 21st-century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.
Our education system relies on core sets of standards-based
concepts and competencies that form the basis of what all students should know
and should be able to do. Whether the domain is English language arts,
mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, states should
continue to consider the integration of 21st-century competencies and
expertise, such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration,
multimedia communication, and technological competencies demonstrated by professionals
in various disciplines.
1.2 States, districts, and others should develop and implement
learning resources that use technology to embody design principles from the
learning sciences.
Advances in learning sciences, including cognitive science,
neuroscience, education, and social sciences, give us greater understanding of
three connected types of human learning—factual knowledge, procedural
knowledge, and motivational engagement. Technology has increased our ability to
both study and enhance all three types. Today's learning environments should
reflect what we have learned about how people learn and take advantage of
technology to optimize learning.
1.3 States, districts, and others should develop and implement
learning resources that exploit the flexibility and power of technology to
reach all learners anytime and anywhere.
The always-on nature of the Internet and mobile access devices
provides our education system with the opportunity to create learning
experiences that are available anytime and anywhere. When combined with design
principles for personalized learning and Universal Design for Learning, these
experiences also can be accessed by learners who have been marginalized in many
educational settings: students from low-income communities and minorities,
English language learners, students with disabilities, students who are gifted
and talented, students from diverse cultures and linguistic backgrounds, and
students in rural areas.
1.4 Use advances in learning sciences and technology to enhance
STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and develop,
adopt, and evaluate new methodologies with the potential to inspire and enable
all learners to excel in STEM.
New technologies for representing, manipulating, and communicating
data, information, and ideas have changed professional practices in STEM fields
and what students need to learn to be prepared for STEM professions. Technology
should be used to support student interaction with STEM content in ways that
promote deeper understanding of complex ideas, engage students in solving
complex problems, and create new opportunities for STEM learning throughout our
education system.
2.0 Assessment: Measure What Matters
Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of
technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous
improvement.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
2.1 States, districts, and others should design, develop, and
implement assessments that give students, educators, and other stakeholders
timely and actionable feedback about student learning to improve achievement
and instructional practices.
Learning science and technology combined with assessment theory
can provide a foundation for new and better ways to assess students in the
course of learning, which is the ideal time to improve performance. This will
require involving experts from all three disciplines in the process of
designing, developing, and using new technology-based assessments that can
increase the quality and quantity of feedback to learners.
2.2 Build the capacity of educators, education institutions, and
developers to use technology to improve assessment materials and processes for
both formative and summative uses.
Technology can support measuring performances that cannot be
assessed with conventional testing formats, providing our education system with
opportunities to design, develop, and validate new and more effective
assessment materials. Building this capacity can be accelerated through
knowledge exchange, collaboration, and better alignment between educators
(practitioners) and experts.
2.3 Conduct research and development that explores how embedded
assessment technologies, such as simulations, collaboration environments,
virtual worlds, games, and cognitive tutors, can be used to engage and motivate
learners while assessing complex skills.
Interactive technologies, especially games, provide immediate
performance feedback so that players always know how they are doing. As a
result, they are highly engaging to students and have the potential to motivate
students to learn. They also enable educators to assess important competencies
and aspects of thinking in contexts and through activities that students care
about in everyday life. Because interactive technologies hold this promise,
assessment and interactive technology experts should collaborate on research to
determine ways to use them effectively for assessment.
2.4 Conduct research and development that explores how Universal
Design for Learning can enable the best accommodations for all students to
ensure we are assessing what we intend to measure rather than extraneous
abilities a student needs to respond to the assessment task.
To be valid, an assessment must measure those qualities it is
intended to measure and scores should not be influenced by extraneous factors.
An assessment of science, for example, should measure understanding of science
concepts and their application, not the ability to see print, to respond to
items using a mouse, or to use word processing skills. Assessment and
technology experts should collaborate to create assessment design tools and
processes that make it possible to develop assessment systems with appropriate
features (not just accommodations) so that assessments capture examinees'
strengths in terms of the qualities that the assessment is intended to measure.
2.5 Revise practices, policies, and regulations to ensure privacy
and information protection while enabling a model of assessment that includes
ongoing gathering and sharing of data on student learning for continuous
improvement.
Every parent of a student under 18 and every student 18 or over
should have the right to access the student's own assessment data in the form
of an electronic learning record that the student can take with them throughout
his or her educational career. At the same time, appropriate safeguards,
including stripping records of identifiable information and aggregating data
across students, classrooms, and schools, should be used to make it possible to
supply education data derived from student records to other legitimate users
without compromising student privacy.
3.0 Teaching: Prepare and Connect
Professional educators will be supported individually and in
teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise,
and learning experiences that enable and inspire more effective teaching for
all learners.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
3.1 Expand opportunities for educators to have access to
technology-based content, resources, and tools where and when they need them.
Today's technology enables educators to tap into resources and
orchestrate expertise across a school district or university, a state, the
nation, and even around the world. Educators can discuss solutions to problems
and exchange information about best practices in minutes, not weeks or months.
Today's educators should have access to technology-based resources that inspire
them to provide more engaging and effective learning opportunities for each and
every student.
3.2 Leverage social networking technologies and platforms to
create communities of practice that provide career-long personal learning
opportunities for educators within and across schools, preservice preparation
and in-service education institutions, and professional organizations.
Social networks can be used to provide educators with career-long
personal learning tools and resources that make professional learning timely
and relevant as well as an ongoing activity that continually improves practice
and evolves their skills over time. Online communities should enable educators
to take online courses, tap into experts and best practices for just-in-time
problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to design and
develop resources with and for their colleagues.
3.3 Use technology to provide all learners with online access to
effective teaching and better learning opportunities and options especially in
places where they are not otherwise available.
Many education institutions, particularly those serving the most
vulnerable students and those in rural areas, lack educators with competencies
in reaching students with special needs and educators with content knowledge
and expertise in specialized areas, including STEM. Even in areas where
effective teaching is available, students often lack options for high-quality
courses in particular disciplines or opportunities for learning that prepare
them for the modern world. Online learning options should be provided to enable
leveraging the best teaching and make high-quality course options available to
all learners.
3.4 Provide preservice and in-service educators with professional
learning experiences powered by technology to increase their digital literacy
and enable them to create compelling assignments for students that improve
learning, assessment, and instructional practices.
Just as technology helps us engage and motivate students to learn,
technology should be used in the preparation and ongoing learning of educators
to engage and motivate them in what and how they teach. This will require synthesizing
core principles and adopting best practices for the use of technology in
preparing educators. Technology also should be an integral component of
teaching methods courses and field experiences rather than treated as a
discrete skill distinct from pedagogical application.
3.5 Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction.
As online learning becomes an increasingly important part of our
education system, we need to provide online and blended learning experiences
that are more participatory and personalized and that embody best practices for
engaging all students. This creates both the need and opportunity for educators
who are skilled in instructional design and knowledgeable about emerging
technologies. Crucial to filling this need while ensuring effective teaching
are appropriate standards for online courses and teaching and a new way of
approaching online teacher certification.
4.0 Infrastructure: Access and Enable
All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive
infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
4.1 Ensure students and educators have broadband access to the
Internet and adequate wireless connectivity both in and out of school.
Students and educators need adequate broadband bandwidth for
accessing the Internet and technology-based learning resources.
"Adequate" should be defined as the ability to use the Internet in
school, on the surrounding campus, throughout the community, and at home. It
should also include simultaneous use of high-bandwidth resources, such as
multimedia, communication and collaboration environments, and communities.
Crucial to providing such access are the broadband initiatives being
individually and jointly managed by various federal agencies.
4.2 Ensure that every student and educator has at least one
Internet access device and appropriate software and resources for research,
communication, multimedia content creation, and collaboration for use in and
out of school.
Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and
technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement,
student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the
ways this plan proposes. The form of these devices, software, and resources may
or may not be standardized and will evolve over time. In addition, these
devices may be owned by the student or family, owned by the school, or some
combination of the two. The use of devices owned by students will require
advances in network filtering and improved support systems.
4.3 Support the development and use of open educational resources
to promote innovative and creative opportunities for all learners and
accelerate the development and adoption of new open technology-based learning
tools and courses.
The value of open educational resources is now recognized around
the world, leading to the availability of a vast array of learning, teaching,
and research resources that learners of any age can use across all content
areas. Realizing this value will require new policies concerning the evaluation
and selection of instructional materials so that digital resources are
considered and processes are established for keeping educational resource
content up to date, appropriate, and tagged according to identified content
interoperability standards.
4.4 Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving
an infrastructure for learning.
Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project
that will demand concerted and coordinated effort. The effort should start with
implementing the next generation of computing system architectures and include
transitioning computer systems, software, and services from in-house
datacenters to professionally managed data centers in the cloud for greater
efficiency and flexibility. This will require leveraging and scaling up the
human talent to build such an infrastructure, which should ultimately save
money and enable education IT professionals to focus more on maintaining the
local infrastructure and supporting teachers, students, and administrators.
4.5 Develop and use interoperability standards for content and
student-learning data to enable collecting and sharing resources and
collecting, sharing, and analyzing data to improve decision making at all
levels of our education system.
Fragmented content and resources and student-learning data siloed
in different proprietary platforms and systems, along with a lack of common
standards for collecting and sharing data, are formidable barriers to
leveraging resources for teaching and learning. These barriers exist because we
lack common content interoperability standards and tools to enable use of such
standards. The lack of common standards affects the quality of tools because
developers limit their R&D investments into narrow markets and are not able
to leverage overall market advancements in research and development.
Interoperability standards are essential to resolving these issues.
4.6 Develop and use interoperability standards for financial data
to enable data-driven decision making, productivity advances, and continuous
improvement at all levels of our education system.
Just as content, resources, and student learning data are
fragmented in disconnected technology systems and throughout our education
system, the same is true for financial data. Therefore, we also need financial
data interoperability standards and tools that enable the use of these
standards.
5.0 Productivity: Redesign and Transform
Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and
structures to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning
outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
5.1 Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in
education and more relevant and meaningful measures of outcomes, along with
improved policies and technologies for managing costs, including those for
procurement.
Education has not incorporated many of the practices other sectors
regularly use to measure outcomes, manage costs, and improve productivity, a
number of which are enabled or enhanced by technology. As other sectors have
learned, we are unlikely to improve outcomes and productivity until we define
and start measuring them. This starts with identifying what we seek to measure.
It also requires identifying costs associated with components of our education
system and with individual resources and activities so that the ratio of
outcomes to costs can be tracked over time.
5.2 Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit
leveraging technology to improve learning, starting with our current practice
of organizing student and educator learning around seat time instead of the
demonstration of competencies.
To realize the full potential of technology for improving
performance and increasing productivity, we must remove the process and
structural barriers to broad adoption. The education system must work to
identify and rethink basic assumptions of the education system. Some of these
include measurement of educational attainment through seat time, organization
of students into age-determined groups, the structure of separate academic
disciplines, the organization of learning into classes of roughly equal size,
and the use of time blocks.
5.3 Develop useful metrics for the educational use of technology
in states and districts.
Current data on the use of educational and information technology
in our system consist of records of purchases and numbers of computers and
Internet connections. Very little information on how technology is actually
used to support teaching, learning, and assessment is collected and
communicated systematically. Only by shifting our focus to collecting data on
how and when technology is used will we be able to determine the difference it
makes and use that knowledge to improve outcomes and the productivity of our
education system.
5.4 Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs
and interventions to ensure that students progress seamlessly through our P–16
education system and emerge prepared for college and careers.
The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every
student complete at least a year of higher education or postsecondary career
training. Achieving this target will require dramatically reducing the number
of students who leave high school without getting a diploma and/or who are
unprepared for postsecondary education. A complex set of personal and academic
factors underlie students' decisions to leave school or to disengage from
learning, and no one strategy will prevent every separation from the education
system. Collaboration between P–12 and higher education institutions and
practices supported with technology are crucial to addressing the problem.
What are the “21st century
competencies” - see the section titled “what and how people need to learn”-
listed in the summary? How will technology support the growth of these
competencies?
The 21st century
competencies include: critical thinking skills, problem solving, working
together, and multimedia communication. I would agree these are all critical
components of learning and must be fostered in order to be competitive in the
world as we know it. Technology can be used in order to grow these skills in
students by using different technologies that are used in many different
professional disciplines. Not only does using “real world tools” help students
by giving them new skills, they also are given inspiration and many students
will likely develop an interest through these forms of technology.
As you read The State of Ohio's Educational Technology Plan's "purpose and mission" (page 6), how do you believe it aligns with the National Education
Technology Plan? In which respects are the two
plans perhaps not aligned? Why?
Both the National plan and Ohio’s
state plan address the need for all students to have an understanding and
competency of technology in not only our country but the entire world. These
plans both have the purpose of making students competitive in this economy and
workforce. The state of Ohio differs from the National plan because, it seems
more realistic. It outlines that it is flexible and willing to improve and
change with each technology advancements. Ohio states that there are certain
organizations that it will work with to better the educational technology and
pledges to partner with other organizations as well.
As you read Ohio’n w s State Educational Technology Plan outlined on page 8, how do you believe
this outline aligns with the "model of learning powered by
technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas"
proposed by the National Education Technology Plan? In which areas are
the two plans perhaps not aligned? Why?
The technology plans on the national level compared with the plan
at the state level ( Ohio), align in many ways concerning the 5 essential areas
but also differ in some ways too. The 5 essential areas involve learning, assessment, teaching,
infrastructure and productivity. First, these plans are
aligned because both have an emphasis on learning, assessment and
infrastructure. I think these plans tend to be on a different time line
however.
.png)
