Department of Education Announces National Education Technology Plan and Open Innovation Portal
On March 5 the U.S. Department of Education unveiled a draft of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP). According to secretary of education Arne Duncan, "This plan was prepared for the Office of Educational Technology by leading researchers and practitioners. It represents their best ideas about how we can bring forward our schools—making them centers of learning designed to close the gap between the technology-rich and exciting experiences that dominate students' lives outside of school while preparing them for success in today's competitive global marketplace."
The plan calls for "revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering" and addresses five key goals:
Learning: The model of 21st century learning brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire students to achieve, and to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. The goal is for all learners to have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.
Assessment: The idea is to leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment to diagnose strengths and weaknesses when there is still time to improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions and lead to continuous improvement.
Teaching: The goal here is to support professional educators with technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable and inspire more effective teaching for all learners. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide.
Infrastructure: The fourth essential component of this 21st century learning model is a comprehensive infrastructure for learning that includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement as well as technology infrastructure including broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.
Productivity: The goal is to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff. With tight economic times requiring communities to get more out of each dollar spent, the idea is to leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending in order to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels.
Each goal in the draft technology plan includes recommendations for federal, state, district, and other partners, as well as key research questions that could be funded and coordinated at a national level. The plan also contains examples of schools and districts that are leading the way—with a special emphasis schools serving high-poverty populations that are making significant increases in student achievement.
In a separate announcement a few weeks before NETP was released, the Department of Education introduced its new Open Innovation Portal, designed as "an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality." Available at https://innovation.ed.gov, the Open Education Portal invites funders, innovators and practitioners to "spotlight areas of need, propose and suggest improvements to solutions, and fund, implement, and improve these solutions in and outside of the classroom."
The Web 2.0 tools at the innovation portal create a social network for those interested in education. Portal users are asked to register for the site, create online profiles, and then post their solutions using a form that captures detailed information about the problem being addressed, the merits of the approach, the scalability of the idea, and the resources required to succeed. Users can also upload supporting materials including videos and web links. Once ideas are posted, members of the community collaborate and rate, rank, comment, or ask questions about what has been posted.
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