National Education Technology Plan

The national education technology plan's main goals are 21st century learning, measuring what matters, improving learning through connected teaching, creating a set infrastructure, increasing productivity, and solving challenging problems. The learning level of the plan involves engaging and empowering our students learning experiences.  The model asks us to teach on a basis of what they need to know; how, when, and where they learn, and who needs to learn.  This type of learning involves using the newest forms of technology to engage students of every level regardless of race, social status, or disability.  It is trying to get us away from the one-size fits all ways of teaching.  Assessment needs to be converted for the 21st century learners as well by requiring new and better ways to assess learners by measuring what matters in order to diagnose strengths and weaknesses.  We need to initiate these assessments early enough in the learning process so that we can help to correctly teach our students before they get "set in their ways" of learning.  Once assessed we can use the data to effectively manage what our students need to learn, and what subject(s) in which they are already profficient.  The national technology plan also calls for a reinvention of the way educators are teaching our students.  Thru the use of technology the plan creates an environment for educators to fully connected within each others classrooms to facilitate more optimal learning.  It wants to strengthen and elevate educators to move into a connected classroom and away from the isolated classroom by using technology.  This idea creates an educator team environment is to use online tools and resources to keep students, educators, libraires, and even administrators together working on a common goal.  Another part of the 21st century technology plan is create a solid infrastructure of to provide students and educators the resources they need to teach and learn successfully.  The principle of the infrastructure model is to include people, processes, learning resources, policies, and substainable models for continuous improvement.  Reaching this objective will help to keep people on every level of education striving to acheive similar goals and educational values.  Improving productivity is the next step in the technology plan for the 21st century.  If education follows the business world of productivity where output meets input we will reach a higher level of learning with our students.  Productivity simply means if we teach our children using a process of "you will get out of this what you put into this" then our students can acheive greater success in learning.  In the business world workers have a goal or quota each day.  During the course of their workday they strive to meet that quota and if they are successful then their day has been productive.  In the classroom if we have a technology learning objective for our classes each day, and we work to meet that objective, then we can strive to be more successful in using technology in the classroom.  The reserach and development part of the plan creates a mission of serving the public good thru the use of research and development in the areas of science, technolgy, and education.  Thru "Grand challenge problems" we can bring together a community of sicentists and researchers to solve bigger problems facing our world.  they can design and validate a system that provides access to learning experiences, desgins and validates assessments, an approach for learning across many different learning platforms, and creates learning systems that are more cost efficient and reaches a broader range of expertise.