National and State Technology Standards

Dayona Evans

Ed tech

Professor Frick

1. 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 National Education Plan is a plan designed to get Americans back to focusing on the importance of education and the benefits of an educated society.  The plan is to get teachers and other adults in student’s life more engaged in supporting learning systems that work properly for each student, also by offering a variety of learning tools and other relevant tools to help students be more successful thinkers. This would affect the way teachers have been taught to teach and the way sttudents have been thought to learn. This new method is aimed to fulfill the student more intellectually, mentally, and meaningfully by keeping them engaged in their education.

2. 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).

What are some concerns administrators, educators, or even students might have with these assumptions?

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.”

The issues people may have with this new system is the fact that the way we teach, the traditional way even though it has been proved to be failing in our societies many people students and teachers just aren’t open to such a big change and we need to do this on a gradual level in order to prevent chaos.

3. 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).

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?

• “Transferring existing and emerging technology innovations from sectors such as business, consumer, and entertainment into education.
• Transferring appropriate developments from the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration to the public education sector.
• Supporting and sustaining the education R&D that is currently happening throughout the National Science Foundation by designing a commercialization strategy.
• Creating a new organization (the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies) with the mission of serving the public good through R&D at the intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education.
• Providing competitive grants for scaling up innovative and evidence-based practices through the Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund.”

21st-century competencies are such expertise as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all content areas.  Technology will support the growth of these competencies by providing the proper tools in order to learn these methods easily. Learning to use technology for education and learning is the tool we need most in the 21^st-centuray because we are in a new world and technology is its map.

4. 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?

I think they both align in the way of focusing and acknowledging that technology is the face of the future of education and making sure that students and teachers will have access to the latest most advanced technology to be used in the classroom to encourage learning. The plans differ in the fact that Ohio’s specific plan focuses more on students while in school whereas the National plan focuses on education in technology for life and as a tool to be used through-out life in all aspects.

5. 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?

They both align in the way that they both focus on ways to overcome technology education barriers. They differ in the fact that the Ohio’s plan focuses on schools only whereas the National plan focuses on other aspects of institutions in our everyday life such as places of business also having the most advanced technology tools.

6. As you read Ohio’s State Educational Technology Plan's "measurements of success" (page 16), what barriers do you see to fulfilling this plan? Provide four reasons why it may not be possible to reach these "measurements of success" in the state of Ohio.

The main barriers I see are;

1.  Getting institutions to get the materials and the  instructors who are educated in the educational technology field to teach the material to the students.

2. I think students and parents may be less inclined to learn classwork online and not in a traditional school, because school is a place children go to be social with their peers and it would be more difficult to achieve this with online classes

3. I think the methods used to grade online work versus traditional classwork may play a role in why online teaching and learning will be less effective. Breaks have to be given to an extent when a person is learning online because not being there to have that one on one direction may lead to a misunderstanding in course work and completion.

4.  I think getting advance technology tools in the class may be a challenge due to many issues. The poorer school districts may not get the most advanced technology their students need in order to learn successfully through education or the supplies may be limited. Also technical tools break easily and it may be discouraged from being used because they are pricey to maintain.