Transforming American Education #3

The U.S. Department of Education has proposed a model for education that “brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve” (vi). This model desires to make decisions based on available and relevant data.

In the area of teaching, the model proposes the idea of connected teaching as a team-building activity. Collaboration with teachers, students, and the online community would provide more opportunities for students to learn. The plan describes teaching as “Individualized, Personalized, and Differentiated Instruction.”(12)

The plan requires a large amount of infrastructure. The term infrastructure is vast and is described as”the resources they need when and where they are needed. The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.” (ix) The National Education Technology Plan requires that adequate infrastructure be present in US schools for advances in education and the suggested change to learner directed education.

Funding sources for providing the technology to meet these goals were not delineated, except to say that the federal government would fund education just as it does defense and energy. (5) But the report did go one to say that “Education has long relied on the contributions of organizations in both the private and not-for-profit sectors, and this will not change.”(xii)

In setting goals for the future, the plan sets out to define the educational best practices that take full advantage of technology in education to improve achievement.

References
http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf