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Technology Use Planning Overview
This week we have been formally introduced to technology use planning, I say formally because through my work I have been integrating technology over the last year. We have been following an overall plan of integrating more and more technology into the classroom to enhance learning; our District published and shared their technology use plan several years ago. A technology use plan is the guidelines that will help ensure a greater chance of success when integrating technology into the classroom. I teach Social Studies and our Province embarked on implementing Problem Based Learning (PBL) seven years ago. Over the last several years we have been adding the technology to enhance learning. Our District has been implementing technology use planning for several years and as Al-Weschail states, this provides direction and helps users understand clearly where they are now and imagine where they want to be (Al-Weshail et. al., 1996). So far the results of integrating technology to support student learning have been generally successful. Our plan has been long term in scope, but with short term goals and objectives along the way. I believe that it’s important to have both long term and short term goals.
In the United States the Department of Education has been created a new National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) back in 2010.This plan is designed to bring best practices into use across various states involved in standardizing efforts. The goal is to support the creation of common standards and practices that then can be shared and implemented by teachers in the various districts. The plan lays out specific ways to integrate technology into the classroom. It is a document published by the United States Department of Education Office of Educational Technology with the purpose of setting a plan for technology implementation to reach the goal of increasing the rate of college graduates by 2020. The NETP sets out various goals and objectives, each of these goals is supported through recommendations and with collaboration across states, built in reflection, evaluation and flexibility, goals can be achieved and academic success improved. These goals, challenges and successes can be shared and used as a foundation for districts and schools creating technology use plans. Many of the recommendations are directed at the school level and can be incorporated into a technology use plans.
The National Education Technology Plan 2010 focuses on a 5 year plan, while the John See’s article “Developing Effective Technology Plans” (1992) states that technology should be a short term plan. I understand that the NETP needs to have longer plans as they are attempting to coordinate multiple states and institutions that do not respond to change quickly. Most educators and business leaders would agree that the USA needs to improve the quality of education and to improve the dropout rate. I read on CBS news where there are 3 million jobs unfilled in the USA because they can’t find skilled workers. The education system is failing America. While this is not a top down mandatory program, the NETP tries more to guide, fund, support and share the successes in the integration of technology at the local, district and state level.
I have to agree with See in the sense that technology changes too quickly to plan 5 years out. Right now several students have chosen to use tablets as tool to help them learn in my classroom. These devises are great for interacting with the web, as a vehicle to receive content. But they are not very practical when we demand students to create material for the web. Many tablets cannot function to the level of a laptop without the users having a strong technical background. But as stated earlier, technology changes quickly and so in a few years tablets maybe the smarted choice, maybe with more cloud computing the manipulation and creation of material will be easier.
For many schools and districts, computers have been used to teach technology skills, this was true for our school up until 5 years ago. We used to teach word processing, excel, and PowerPoint. Students now have been exposed to manipulating these programs early on in elementary school. So by the time they come to my school they function well due to the fact that they are familiar with these programs. So we no longer teach the MS Suite, we just expect students to know how to manipulate these and many other productivity programs. Things for our school really began to change when our District began to require teachers to begin implementing technology into the classroom. The process followed a plan to begin with baby steps with simple things like requiring teachers to put their marks and comments and course outline (as a minimum) into an online web platform called Desire to Learn (D2L) , this is similar to Moodle. Then each year our District required more and more of teachers’ course content to be made available to students on this platform. Many teachers initially were reluctant to embrace D2L as they saw it as extra work to move their work into the electronic format. Many teachers have taught the same material and lessons for years and they don’t like change so they stuck with tried and true and electronic copies of their work was not happening. But I very often taught different material and courses, and so I had already put my lessons into flash drives or saved 
electronically. I saw D2L to be transparent with students’ and parents, to enable students to see all of my lessons, activities and reviews. I saw this as a way to help students’ that missed school or had fallen behind to easily catch up and transition back into class or complete missing assignments. D2L allowed for me to make alterations to my lessons and activities from one class to another. After reflection or implementation, if a lesson needed to be tweaked or changed, it was easy to have it ready to go right away. No need to photocopy new material. Our Province has also embraced Problem Based Learning and the entire Social Studies curriculum is geared towards developing higher order of thinking and to develop an independent, strong academic student. Our students continually rank in the top 5 for academic success and will only improve as we continue to use technology to support problem based learning.
My experience with technology use has been ongoing for several years, but just this past year our school is the 3rd school to begin implementing a District wide program of having each student to have a computing devise every day in school. We are rolling it out with our Grade 9’s and 10’s this year and each year we will add a grade until all of our students will be expected to have and use a Personally Owned device (POD) Students in my classes use cell phones, tablets, iPad’s and laptops. Our school is entirely Wi-Fi enabled and we have a very large bandwidth portal. In fact our school has one the of the highest bandwidth usages in the District and we are the smallest school in our district with only 340 students in grades 7-12. So students and staff have fully embraced this opportunity to integrate technology into the classroom. Personally all of my lessons are PBL and students cannot function without a POD of some sort, we use Google Drive, D2L and others to work and share material. Our school District has a portion of the Google Cloud and every student and staff has a Google based e-mail and access to the entire Google suite of online systems. This roll out of technology integration has meant we have had to plan things out, revise and move forward. We spent time with the first school in our district to roll this program out; we met with staff and some students and received input, suggestions and ideas on how to implement the roll out with minimal glitches and challenges. However, as the technology plans stated, we ran into challenges. But with support and lots of money from our District we have had a successful implementation. Our student and parents have embraced the implementation of technology in to the classroom and look forward to further technology integration.
All of this success could not take place without a Technology Use Plan. Our Province, District and school all have technology use plans and like any good plan we revise and reflect and move forward with our successes.
References
Al-Weshail, A. S., Baxter, A., Cherry, W., Hill, E. W., Jones, II, C. R., Love, L. T., . . . Woods, J. C. (1996, May 7). Guidebook for developing an effective instructional technology plan: Version 2.0.Mississippi State University. Retrieved from http://www.nctp.com/downloads/guidebook.pdf
See, J. (1992). Developing effective technology plans. The Computing Teacher,19(8). Retrieved from http://www.nctp.com/html/john_see.cfm
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. (2010).Transforming American education: Learning powered by technology. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/netp2010.pdf
AECT Standards
Standard 3: Utilization
3.4 Policies and Regulations
In this assignment I read and used the National Education Technology Plan 2010 as well as the Guidebook for Developing an Effective Instructional Technology Plan Version 2.0
Todd Dumais 
Great learning post Todd! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on the US’s education and technology system versus what you are familiar with in Canada. Including links to articles in your introduction and sharing how your school and district employ technology helped me to see more clearly what your background is and what you experience daily. I think your post met almost all of the requirements but I did notice a couple of grammar errors. For example, in the 2nd paragraph “…has been created a new… ” would read better as just “has created a” and in the 3rd paragraph you have “the John See’s article”. It should either be “the John See article” or “John See’s article”. Again, I enjoyed reading about your personal experiences and it made your learning post stand out to me! Great job.
Todd, this is another great post. It is awesome that there are some success stories out there of technology plans working. I agree with your point that you have to have an idea of where you plan to be (long term planning) while meeting goals and objectives along the way (short term).
Were you around in your district when it began the change? We’re currently at that point where we are trying to accumulate resources and meeting the resistance from staff. We are currently fighting the battle against personal devices while other schools like yours are embracing them. My district has a long way to go, but just reading about the work that has gone on in yours, I think that I have a few ideas of where it needs to go.
Do you think that using personal devices in the classroom would be effective without moving to problem based learning? (I went to the learnalberta.ca site and there are some awesome math resources I picked up right away, thank you very much for this!) I could see where implementing personal devices without a set reasoning for them could be an issue.
Finally, I agree with your point that it can be difficult when an individual attempts to use an improper tool for a job. Tablets are great for consuming media, not so much for producing work. Even if a keyboard is added it is a very limited tool. Do many of your students decide to bring in laptops over other devices to get work done?
Sorry for all of the questions, it is just that your district really intrigues me with the work it has accomplished. Overall great post and very insightful. I think you accomplished everything in the rubric. Keep up the great work.
Hi
I think cell phones can be used for a variety of learning opportunities – use it to twitter a lesson – use it for connecting student to students on in school discussion boards.
Regarding tablets – only 3 students are sticking it out on tablets, all of the rest have gone to laptops. Our demographics allow students the economic opportunity to have access to many computing devises. But i will certainly be telling admin to tell new students to purchase a net book or laptop and not a tablet for school.
T
Great post Todd! I think it is interesting to hear your thoughts on the US vs. Canada on technology. It is obvious that you have a lot of experience in technology use planning. I believe that you have met the requirements of this assignment based on the rubric provided.