NETP 2010: In Favor...

Blog Pro Post (Pulley): (Sorry in advance, I got carried away)

The goals of the National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) for 2010 of transforming education in America in the areas of learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity are far reaching and necessary, not only if we wish to address the inequity in American education, but also aspire to making our country once again a leader in education in the world. Learning and teaching need to change to become collaborative situations where students becoming constructors of new knowledge based on scaffolding, to support and build upon prior knowledge (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005, p. 106). Assessment need to move from reforms of standardization and high stakes testing to a new way of thinking with a focus on, “change but not measurement, on the social, and not simply the technical, [that] allows us to identify the ways technology may help disrupt the traditional relationships: between schools and knowledge; knowledge and children; children and teachers; and learners and communities” (Rowen & Bigum, 2012, p. 26).

For any of this to take place, change must happen, not only in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of equity. Rowen & Bigum (2012) assert that despite all the decades of technological innovation in the world, and the adaptation of that technology to schools, equity issues have not changed much:

The children at risk of educational alienation and failure in 2011 are the same groups of children at risk more that four decades ago: kids from rural and isolated areas, indigenous communities, language backgrounds other than English. Kids from low-socioeconomic families, single parent households. Kids with physical and intellectual disabilities. Kids who don’t match their world’s “mythical norm” (p. 47).

            As the report acknowledges, in today’s world finances are tight and monies need to be reallocated, but that reallocation needs to consider first the schools that are furthest behind by improving their infrastructures (including technology), not to punish them because they are behind and rewarding those already ahead. One byproduct of the new call to renew, update, and jump onto each new technological change is that the amount of time and money invested has resulted in calls to measure the results, something Rowen & Bigum (2012) call a distraction because of the domestication of technology that takes place, that is, “schools often use those technologies in old and familiar ways: integrating them into existing routines, deploying them to meet existing goals and, generally, failing to engage with technologies in ways consistent with the world beyond the classroom” (p. 22).

Much more important is to help teachers engage in collaboration to become 21^st Century educators because they are a more important part of the solution than technology. Cummings, Brown & Sayers (2007), note that the failure of educational technology to achieve change, “has much more to do with pedagogy than with the technology itself” (p. 91).

Cummings, J., Brown, K., & Sayers, D. (2007). Literacy, technology, and diversity. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Darling-Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teacher should learn about and be able to do. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rowen, L., & Bigum, C. (Eds.), (2012). Transformative approaches to new technology and student diversity in futures oriented classrooms: Future proofing education. Dordrecht, Germany: Springer.