It's been nearly 15 months, has anything changed?

It's been nearly 15 months since the US Department of Education released the National Educational Technology Plan: Transforming American Education - Learning Powered by Technology. What has changed? What remains the same?

It comes as something of a surprise to me that since November, 2010 there has been very little written or said about this plan. In fact, I was somewhat shocked to learn that very few people in my University Department of educational technology have even heard of the national educational technology plan. At the school level, the release of this plan by the United States Department of Education seems to have made no difference in the way in which the Hawaii Department of Education goes about the business of educational technology.

This particular document is rather a departure from traditional technology plans. It speaks very little about devices and connections rather it addresses attitudes and beliefs of schools and school leaders as they face the task of educating children to be successful in the world in which they will live and work, the world of the 21st century.

National Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Plan 2010

Pub­lished Online: Novem­ber 9, 2010Includes correction(s): Novem­ber 10, 2010

U.S. Releases National Ed-Tech Action Plan

By Ian Quillen

The U.S. Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion intends to pay for research to study online professional-collaboration com­mu­ni­ties for teach­ers and other edu­ca­tors, accord­ing to the action plan in the final ver­sion of the Obama administration’s National Edu­ca­tion Tech­nol­ogy Plan.

The final ver­sion of the plan, unveiled Tues­day by U.S. Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Arne Dun­can, also pledges to finance devel­op­ment of open-source edu­ca­tional resources and launch an ini­tia­tive ded­i­cated to defin­ing and increas­ing edu­ca­tional pro­duc­tiv­ity. Mr. Dun­can spot­lighted the plan in a speech at a con­fer­ence of the State Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Direc­tors Asso­ci­a­tion, held at the National Har­bor com­plex in Prince George’s County, Md., just out­side Washington.

via Edu­ca­tion Week: U.S. Releases National Ed-Tech Action Plan.

From the U.S. Dept. of Edu­ca­tion… read the Exec­u­tive Summary

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.

It presents five goals with rec­om­men­da­tions for states, dis­tricts, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, and other stake­hold­ers. Each goal addresses one of the five essen­tial com­po­nents of learn­ing pow­ered by tech­nol­ogy: Learn­ing, Assess­ment, Teach­ing, Infra­struc­ture, and Productivity.

11 Novem­ber — Some fur­ther thoughts on the subject:

“There can be infi­nite uses of the com­puter and of new age tech­nol­ogy, but if the teach­ers them­selves are not able to bring it into the class­room and make it work, then it fails.”

Nancy Kasse­baum, U.S. Senator

“Teach­ers need to inte­grate tech­nol­ogy seam­lessly into the cur­ricu­lum instead of view­ing it as an add-on, an after­thought, or an event.”

Heidi-Hayes Jacobs, Edu­ca­tional Con­sul­tant, Cur­ricu­lum Design­ers, Inc.

For many of today’s tech-savvy stu­dents, step­ping into a typ­i­cal school is like tak­ing a time machine back to the days of man­ual type­writ­ers and wall-mounted dial telephones.

Hard­man & Car­pen­ter “Breath­ing Fire into Web 2.0″ Lead­ing &Learn­ing with Tech­nol­ogy, 34 (5), 2007

Per­haps it’s not nice to com­pare but.…

You may read the HIDOE plan for dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy  in the Depart­ment here. Please note, it’s based on 2004 national direc­tions. (eight years in the 21^stcen­tury = about 50 20^th cen­tury years)