The National Education Technology Plan (NETP)

In the fall of 2010, the National Education Technology Plan was released by the US Department of Education. The plan provides a road map for the future of technology in US education.  Transforming American education and the ways in which students and teachers collaborate to improve education and provide real world experiences that fit 21st Century life are all goals of the NETP.

The Plan provides goals that state and local educational groups can achieve.  Some of these include:

1. Focusing on what is being taught, but also on how it is being taught. It encourages leveraging the power of technology to differentiate and personalize.
2. Using technology to better measure student skills and then use the data obtained to diagnose strengths and weaknesses to provide an opportunity for students to achieve continuous improvement.

The NETP also points out that technology can be used to improve the quality of education and build the skills of American educators. Technology allows educators to:

• be more connected
• collaborate easier (eliminate teacher isolation)
• access data quickly and easily
• have resources to improve content teaching quality
• have resources to improve reteaching and student involvement

The National Education Technology Plan is a good starting point for American education.  It provides a vision of where we as a nation need to be in order to produce well educated and well-rounded students that are ready to be productive partners in 21st century society. It is a rigorous plan that calls for a new way of thinking for many school districts, administrators and teachers.

Implementing a plan of this magnitude always brings challenges.  Building the physical infrastructure for the new technology takes time and money and in today's educational landscape budget cuts not excess seem to be the norm. It is also a difficult job to bring an older generation of teachers up to speed on new technological innovations. And with the speed that technology changes, it is difficult for both districts and teachers to keep up with the hardware and software changes.

Despite these challenges, the need for improvement in how education uses technology is here.  There is no time to wait. Educators and education systems at the state and local level must act to implement technology and its use in the school and the classroom.