Blog Post #3: Reflection on National Educational Technology Plan: Transforming American Education :Learning Powered By Technology

The National Educational Technology Plan outlines the goals and recommendations for the integration of technology in education in five essential areas; learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The goals for the plan were comprehensive enough to their purpose but I feel there could have been more practical applications listed to meet these goals. The recommendations were pretty broad and could encompass several interpretations of its meaning to the scope of teaching and learning and meeting the needs of the 21st Century Learner.

The learning goal was to provide engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners through focusing on what and how we teach and how to match it to what people need to know, how they will learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. In conjunction with the use of technology, this process will personalize the learning experience for the learner through appropriate selection of curriculum, teaching pace, and instructional practices. The assessment goal was to use technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement. The process will involve the the input of multiple stakeholders in order to provide a system that is comprehensive enough to give adequate feedback to those who employ its use. The goal in teaching involved establishing teams of connected educators to provide them with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools and resources to assist them in making a plan to act on the data they receive from the initial inquiries. A key aspect of this plan is to move learners to be increasingly self- directed by providing them with the appropriate tools and assistance to seek out knowledge on their own and connect them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences within a community of learners. The infrastructure goal was to provide all students and educators access to the people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement through connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administrative tools. The implication that this makes for educators is that a community of learners must be developed that can coordinate their efforts to make the systems work to enrich the learning environment. The final goal in productivity requires that the education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes. Involved in this is making more efficient use of time, money, and staff to accomplish this goal. The technology must be effective enough to assist educators and leaders in planning, monitoring, and reporting spending of resources to decision makers who will be able to use the data to plan individualized learning experiences, reorganize grouping of students, schedules etc, and plan teams of learners to collaborate and support initiatives to improve the educational environment. Each area of the plan addressed the need for focused, collaborative, and continuous staff development for stakeholders at all levels of the educational community for technology initiatives to be effectively used to stimulate and engage self directed learners for the 21st Century.