If we believe that all students can learn, we must overcome barriers to all students using technology. For schools with high populations at risk, policymakers must:
1. give teachers permission and time to explore and experiment with new learning and instructional methods; and
2. provide ongoing professional development to develop new learner outcomes, curricula, and assessment that use the best technologies and programs.
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The second policy issue involves making sure that there are high standards for all children and that students have opportunities to complete challenging tasks using technology.
Major barriers exist, however, to implementing such policies at the local level, including:
1. Local assessments that focus on low-level and conventional objectives;
2. Technology initiatives that are divorced from curriculum, instruction, and
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3. Assessment;
4. Tracking systems that separate students and technology into low and high-level applications.
Policies need to integrate curriculum, instruction, assessment, and technology. These policies will ensure that, in practice, a school’s curriculum, instruction, assessment, and technology seamlessly support engaged learning.
We also need national standards for what constitutes high-performance technologies that promote learning.
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Finance :
School funding formulae that depend on residential property taxes have long impeded school reform in the cities. If education is to change, the tax and funding structures of schooling must be part of that change. This issue raises questions about funding technology for specific settings (e.g., urban and rural); specific populations of users (e.g., poor and minority, children with special needs); and specific states (e.g., those economically depressed). Policymakers will need to consider designing and financing state and multistate technology infrastructures for these special circumstances.
Also, today’s educational system centralizes the purchase and distribution of textbooks, equipment, supplies, and services. Such a top-down approach permits cost- effective, high-volume purchasing. But, it is also terribly out of step with today’s needs. The new technology-driven organization must address this issue.
Technology legislation in progress may alleviate some of the funding crisis and go some distance toward helping poor schools provide ongoing professional development. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that richer schools – which are able to access and use information and research resources – will get “information richer,” while poor schools, by comparison, will become significantly “information poorer.”
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Familiarizing students with workplace technologies – by ensuring coordination of technology choices and uses from K-12 to postsecondary education and to work – can greatly strengthen the transition from school to work. Employability is an important concern for all students, and experience with a technology that has high transferability to the community and workplace is crucial.
By extending our efforts, we could provide students with many basic workplace technologies such as word processing, multimedia formats for presentations, and spreadsheets. Vital also is how we can expose students to and give them practice with expensive, context-specific technologies.
The present strategy for purchasing and using technology in K-12, postsecondary, and school-to-work programs is not coordinated. Coordination involves many different policy players and many different configurations of technology and telecommunications. Private and public sector planning could facilitate shared financing and improve technology access and use in school-to-work programs.