Sunday, March 11, 2012

ET8050 Week 2 Assignment, Part 3: Blog Posting # 3 National Educational Technology Plan

        The National Educational Technology Plan will make a huge impact on our students and their education if we can get the plan enacted in the educational system.  It covers five essential areas:  Learning:  Engage and Empower, Assessment:  Measure What Matters, Teaching:  Prepare and Connect, Infrastructure:  Access and Enable, and Productivity:  Redesign and Transform.       
          In Learning:  Engage and Empower the provide experiences that mirror their daily life and the reality of their future.  Students will gain these learning experiences both in and out of school.  Assessment:  Measure What Matters suggests that we begin moving away from assessments that use print, mouse clicks, or word processing/writing to assessments that “capture examinees’ strengths in terms of the qualities that the assessment is intended to measure.”  (Transforming American Education:  Learning Powered by Technology-Executive Summary, p. 15) Then use this data for continuous improvement with the skills and subject matter.  Teaching:  Prepare and Connect suggests educators, working individual and in teams, will be supported by technology to enable and inspire effective teaching methods.  Infrastructure:  Access and Enable will be designed to allow learning when and wherever it is needed for both educators and students.   Productivity:  Redesign and Transform’s goal is to improve learning by coming up with more efficient uses of time, money and staff.
          Employing these essential areas into the school system will cause a shift from traditional teaching methods to a 21st Century model that will allow “critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication to be woven into all content areas.”  (Transforming American Education:  Learning Powered by Technology-Executive Summary, p. 9) The major issue I see with incorporating these into education now is funding.  There will need a way to provide students and teachers (as well as other educational stakeholders) with access to the information and data 24/7.  The infrastructure needs personnel to make sure everything is there that is needed and that it is working correctly, and professional development will need to be worked for everyone.

National Education Technology Plan Executive Summary, Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

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