Week 2, Assisgnment, part 3-Blog Posting #3-National Educational Technology Plan

The National Educational Technology Plan was released by the U.S. Department of Education on November 9, 2010.  Under the Obama administration education has become an urgent priority and it is driven by 2 goals: to raise the proportion of college graduates from about 41% to 60% so that our population holds a 2-year or 4-year degree by 2020 and to close the achievement gap so that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and careers.  These aggressive goals were designed keeping in mind that we need cost effective and cost saving strategies that improve graduation rates for millions of Americans. 

America has finally heard the alarm and we are waking up to the fact that we are no longer on the forefront of education and technology.  Other countries are beating us in engineering programs, graduation rates and technical programs.  So the NETP calls for revolutionary transformation.

The NETP has goals in five essential areas: Learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The learning focus is to engage and empower the learner.  Leveraging the power of technology to provide personalized learning and to enable continuous and lifelong learning. The assessment focus is not just to assess but to assess what matters.  We want to point out strengths to grow them more but identify weaknesses while there is still time to improve student performance while involving the stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting and using assessment.  Technology driven data can drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each student which will lead to continuos improvement in our entire education system.  The teaching focus is to prepare and connect.  Technology helps to build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching.  Teams of connected educators replace solo teachers, classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools with access to resources to help them act on the data provided. The focus of infrastructure is to have access and to enable.  An essential component is a comprehensive infrastructure that provides every student, educator, and level of our education system with the resources needed when and where they are needed.  This of course in relation to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.  The last focus is productivity to redesign and transform our education system.  It calls to apply technology to implement personalized learning and ensure that students are making progress so that they graduate.  Technology must be used to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels.  

Most campuses and states mirror the NETP and are very much alike.  I like that the government realizes that we need change in our education system and that they have devised a plan to help attain the goals needed for us to succeed as a nation. I'm starting to "get it"!! LOL

National Education Technology Plan Executive Summary, Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010