Delivering on the Promise of Technology to Accelerate Educational Improvements
Editor's note: This post was scheduled to go up today long before we knew of yesterday's announcement of President Obama's ConnectEd initiative, which calls on the FCC to leverage the E-Rate program to have 99 percent of students connected to the internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless within 5 years, but it is particularly timely in light of it.
By Brian Lewis, CEO, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)
More than three decades since the first computers began to appear in schools around the country, we still seem to be engaged in a national conversation about whether or not they belong there – whether the investments that our communities have made in education technology can be linked to improved student outcomes.
Our collective truth is that today’s students were born into a world where technology has been a part of their lives from the very beginning. As preschoolers, they pick up their parents’ smartphones and seem to intuitively know how to play a game. Ask a first-grader who is a baseball fan to find information on when his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, will be playing next, and there is every possibility he will tell you to go to www.Cubs.com. Ask a high school freshman if there should be technology in schools and you will likely get that look that only a 15-year-old can give, telling you that you are “clueless.”
These same students are graduating into a world where they are competing for jobs on a global level – not only on a local, state, or national level. The days of the reading, writing, and arithmetic being alone at the core of schoolwork are far in the past. As the new Common Core State Standards recognize, students need to master the
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By Brian Lewis, CEO, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)
More than three decades since the first computers began to appear in schools around the country, we still seem to be engaged in a national conversation about whether or not they belong there – whether the investments that our communities have made in education technology can be linked to improved student outcomes.
Our collective truth is that today’s students were born into a world where technology has been a part of their lives from the very beginning. As preschoolers, they pick up their parents’ smartphones and seem to intuitively know how to play a game. Ask a first-grader who is a baseball fan to find information on when his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, will be playing next, and there is every possibility he will tell you to go to www.Cubs.com. Ask a high school freshman if there should be technology in schools and you will likely get that look that only a 15-year-old can give, telling you that you are “clueless.”
These same students are graduating into a world where they are competing for jobs on a global level – not only on a local, state, or national level. The days of the reading, writing, and arithmetic being alone at the core of schoolwork are far in the past. As the new Common Core State Standards recognize, students need to master the
read more