Blog Posting #3 – National Educational Technology Plan

The National Educational Technology Plan, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, provides guidelines and recommendations that they (the NETP) believe will move American education forward in the technology domain. There are five areas addressed in the document - learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity—that they say must be addressed if America is to have any chance of competing with other countries in the professional and technological world.

The NETP says that, first and foremost, we must use technology. We must also use the scientific information we have on brain function to guide us as we change the way we approach education. It states that the time has come to “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.” It recommends the use of technology based assessments that provide faster more achievement based feedback. The document also encourages more distance learning and open source instructional material. It, also, suggests that teachers have online access to professional development resources.

My favorite recommendation is found in section 3.5 “Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction”.  I would ask also that they be skilled in not putting students to sleep! Not only are technology skills required to conduct an online class; but, there is a need for a great deal of presentation talent as well. I teach 8th grade US History. My students say they do not get as much out of my recorded lectures as they do from being in the classroom even if they were in the room when the recording was made. The personal interaction makes a great deal of difference. To compensate for that personal touch, an online teacher, especially of younger students, must possess a great deal of “stage appeal.”

The recommendations go on to say that all students must have access to the Internet and Wi-Fi (in and out of school) and to the hardware and software that go with it.

Every one of these items brings me back to the same two questions. Where is the money coming from and how can we expect teachers to take on one, or twenty, more responsibilities? Perhaps the answer is to find one really good, animated teacher in each subject area and video them. Students could sit in their living rooms and “watch” school.