5253 Week 2 Blog Posting #3

5352 Week 2 Blog Posting #3
The National Educational Technology Plan focuses on five areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The Obama Administrative has set two primary educational goals to be achieved before 2020. First, the number of college graduates holding a two or four year degree should be increased to 60% of the population. The second goal is to close the achievement gap so that all students from all backgrounds will graduate from high school and be prepared to succeed in college or a career. These goals will be hard to achieve in an era of budget cuts. Focus must be placed on finding cost-effective methods of improving learning and increasing graduation rates.

The learning aspect of the report focuses on replacing one-size-fits all education with personalized learning using state-of-the-art technology to motivate and inspire all students. Today’s students are use to 24/7 access to information and multimedia content. They participate is social networks where they share ideas with people all over the world to collaborate and learn new things. The challenge for education is to incorporate this technology from student’s daily lives into the classroom. We have to create student centered lessons that challenge them to take control of their learning based on a core set of standards. The lessons should be individualized and tailored to the individual needs and interests of the students. The report stresses that learning must become individualized, personalized, and differentiated.

Teaching and professional development also needs to change to take advantage of improvements in technology. Today’s teachers need 24/7 internet connections in their classrooms and data analysis tools to identify areas where students need more learning opportunities. Connection replaces teaching in isolation. Classrooms must be fully connected to content, resources, and systems to allow teachers to become facilitators for student directed learning. Another important area of professional development mentioned in this report is the idea of teacher online learning communities to share ideas. Teachers.tv is a collection of multimedia resources for teachers with content specific and general teaching topics and strategies. I had no idea this resource existed before reading this report.

Overall, this report is very similar to the other two reports we read for this week. However, I do think the Obama Administration has set two very difficult goals to achieve during a recession where education budgets are being slashed. It is very hard to increase the use of technology when schools cannot afford to purchase it. My opinion is that this is a great idea that may fail due to a lack of funding.

Citation:

National Educational Technology Plan: Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology by the U.S. Department of Education
http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf