Jen's Journal

I’m in an afternoon plenary session listening to Karen Cator who is here from the U.S. Department of Education as New Director for Office of Educational Technology. She has provided an overview of a plan that was developed over the past year in consultation with stakeholders across the education sector recently launched titled “National Education Technology Plan 2010”. The plan looks at learning, teaching, assessment, infrastructure and productivity. To review the draft online, you can visit: http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

In her presentation, Karen talks about how we are all interconnected and dependent on each other yet we often don’t realize it. We need to build a world much more knowledgeable about interconnectedness. Information is ubiquitous and the student experience is increasingly based on mobility. There are a lot of places for online learning and interaction that can be leveraged for learning in-school and for education.

The reason that we ‘don’t have time’ in education is that we have everybody doing the same thing every day. Teachers are supposed to follow along in the order of operations. If we can create systems that are more efficient and effective where students can learn in half the time, would that be a good thing?

Karen has highlighted our need to move to a competency based model and to think more deeply about universal design for learning, so that all accommodations are made to build diverse resources and materials to help many more students.

What excites me most about the insights and recommendations from this plan is the overall focus and direction on creating engaging, inspiring and empowering experiences for students! Thank you Karen for sharing your passion – we look forward to seeing these ideas pick up momentum.