Blog Posting #3 – National Educational Technology Plan

“The National Education Technology Plan, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology, calls for applying the advanced technologies used in our daily personal and professional lives to our entire education system to improve student learning, accelerate and scale up the adoption of effective practices, and use data and information for continuous improvement. “   U.S. Department of Education, (2010). National education technology plan 2010. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

There are goals of the plan focus on five essential areas.  These areas are:  Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure, and Productivity.  Within these areas, let’s focus on the area of teaching and learning.  The learning module emphasizes the words “engage” and “empower”.  This is a passive demand for teachers to develop lessons that are student-centered and involves the use of digital tools.  These lessons should be relevant to student’s lives and meaningful.  Students will not be able to fulfill the above statement with the continued practices of the past.  In the professional world, adults are using blogs, wikis, and digital content to develop and create projects.  It is important to prepare these students for this world by teaching them using these digital tools.

Usually plans look “perfect” on paper.  In order for a written plan to be successful, those implementing the ideas need to be positive and work in a manner that will make the end result beneficial to the educational environment.  With the vast onset of digital tools, funds need to be available to purchase the required equipment for student learning.  If the funds are not available, businesses need to make the commitment to invest in the future workforce of this country by helping to make the funds available.