National Educational Technology Plan 2010

The Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology has released its national plan for transforming educational technology, claiming that it is:

"a model of 21st century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching “grand challenge problems” that should be funded and coordinated at a national level."

Here's a capsule of the five essential areas lifted directly from the executive summary:

Learning

The model of 21st century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.

Assessment

The model of 21st century learning requires new and better ways to measure what matters, diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.

Teaching

Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of 21st century learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide.

Infrastructure

An essential component of the 21st century learning model is a comprehensive infrastructure for learning that provides every student, educator, and level of our education system with the resources they need when and where they are needed. The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools. Building this infrastructure is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted and coordinated effort.

Productivity

To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our K-16 system so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decisionmakers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.

Learning Technology is No Worse than Sticking Your Finger in an Electric Outlet

Why is it that Boomers and older Gen-Xers associate so much fear with the simple use of modern digital technology?  After all, we are the generations that:

1.  Grew up without plastic covers to protect us from electric outlets.

2.  Spent our entire weekends and summer days exploring neighboring woods and underground storm sewer systems.

3. Learned to ride a two-wheeled bike without training wheels (and without helmets).

4.  Built our own skateboards that tended to fall apart about the time we were racing down a steep hill (again without helmets or other padding).

5.  Went sledding on hills that didn't include safety fencing to prevent us from streaking out into the adjoining roadway (we learned to stop on our own - most of the time).

6.  Rode city buses on our own as elementary-age kids so we could spend a quarter at the downtown soda fountain.

7.  Walked along the busy tracks of the local C & O railroad depot for hours hunting for road flares.

8.  Chewed on lead paint (it was everywhere, including our cribs) and played in asbestos.

9.  Took showers together after gym classes and sports contests without thinking the kid next to us was a pervert or something.

10.  Walked and road our bikes places without asking mom or dad for a ride all the time, because we relished our simple freedoms and loved striking out on our own to solve the days problems and accomplish new objectives.  And we did it without telephoning our parents every hour or constantly texting our friends.

With this legacy, overcoming the obstacles presented by new and unfamiliar technology should be a cinch!

Teens Gone Mobile

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, millennials are changing their social networking practices as technology becomes more mobile.  A lessor percentage of teens are blogging, instead choosing to micro-blog and communicate in the form of status lines primarily using social-networking sites.  A sort of "fast food" approach to communication.

A brief summary of this latest report shows:

As of September 2009, 93% of American teens between the ages of 12 and 17 went online, a number that has remained stable since November 2006.

• Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens.
• While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.
• Both teen and adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly, yet there are shifts and some drops in the proportion of teens using several social networking site features.
• Teens are not using Twitter in large numbers. While teens are bigger users of almost all other online applications, Twitter is an exception.
• Wireless internet use rates are especially high among young adults, and the laptop has replaced the desktop as the computer of choice among those under thirty.
• Cell phone ownership is nearly ubiquitous among teens and young adults, and much of the growth in teen cell phone ownership has been driven by adoption among the youngest teens.
• Internet use is near‐ubiquitous among teens and young adults. In the last decade, the young adult internet population has remained the most likely to go online.

 You can read the entire report, including an expansion of the key findings summary at http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social‐Media‐and‐Young‐Adults.aspx.

I would be interested in opinions on how these changes may impact schools and the resulting greater use of mobile technology in education.  Specifically:

1. If teens are losing interest in blogging, how will this impact efforts at schools to exploit their use of technology to improve literacy skills?
2. How can schools effectively utilize the growth in social-networking and micro-blogging to develop collaborative, problem-solving skills?
3. Are traditional computer labs in schools going the way of the dinosaur?  Should schools even be investing in computing devices or simply finding ways to open existing networks to a variety of personal digital devices?
4. Given the growing use of mobile technology, once and for all should bans on personal communication devices (aka, cell phones) in schools finally be scrapped in favor of responsibility-based acceptable use policies?