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Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of "highly effective" teaching

Home Advocacy Top Ten in '10: ISTE's Education Technology Priorities for 2010 Through a common focus on boosting student achievement and closing the achievement gap, policymakers and educators alike are now reiterating their commitment to the sorts of programs and instructional efforts that can have maximum effect on instruction and student outcomes. This commitment requires a keen understanding of both past accomplishment and strategies for future success. Regardless of the specific improvement paths a state or school district may chart, the use of technology in teaching and learning is non-negotiable if we are to make real and lasting change.  With growing anticipation for Race to the Top (RttT) and Investing in Innovation (i3) awards in 2010, states and school districts are seeing increased attention on educational improvement, backed by financial support through these grants. As we think about plans for the future, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has identified 10 priorities essential for making good on this commitment in 2010: 1. Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement . To truly improve our schools for the long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must permeate every corner of the learning process. From years of research, we know that technology can serve as a primary driver for systemic school improvement, including school leadership, an improved learning culture and excellence in professional practice. We must ensure that technology is at the foundation of current education reform efforts, and is explicit and clear in its role, mission, and expected impact. 2. Leverage education technology as a gateway for college and career readiness . Last year, President Obama established a national goal of producing the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by the year 2020. To achieve this goal in the next 10 years, we must embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous, interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education. 3. Ensure technology expertise is infused throughout our schools and classrooms.  In addition to providing all teachers with digital tools and content we must ensure technology experts are integrated throughout all schools, particularly as we increase focus and priority on STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) instruction and expand distance and online learning opportunities for students. Just as we prioritize reading and math experts, so too must we place a premium on technology experts who can help the entire school maximize its resources and opportunities. To support these experts, as well as all educators who integrate technology into the overall curriculum, we must substantially increase our support for the federal Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program.  EETT provides critical support for on-going professional development, implementation of data-driven decision-making, personalized learning opportunities, and increased parental involvement. EETT should be increased to $500 million in FY2011. 4. Continuously upgrade educators' classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of "highly effective" teaching . As part of our nation's continued push to ensure every classroom is led by a qualified, highly effective teacher, we must commit that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition, technologically savvy teachers. 5. Invest in pre-service education technology

Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.

It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.

As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.

Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.

Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.

It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.

Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.

Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.

Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.

Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.

funded

where all the new teachers might come from

where all the new teachers might come from.

If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.

Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.

Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.

say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.

hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.

will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.

will help.

we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.

Students who walked in another experiment doubled their number of novel responses compared with when they were sitting.

Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar,

. You can improve your learning by expecting to share it with others.

Findings suggest that simply telling learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a test.

Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.

some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.

First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills

Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained

inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks

Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.

In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.

At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.

if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.

The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges

first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training

Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.

But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.

We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.

education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.

teachers don't use them.

Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method

these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.

These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.

constant juggling act

greater collaboration among teachers.

But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?

professional development is a massive undertaking.

Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.

The first challenge is the cost.

measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.