Tranforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology is the draft of the National Educational Technology Plan 2010. The Obama administration believes that “Education is the key to America’s economic growth and prosperity and to our ability to compete in the global economy.” ("Transforming american education:," 2010) The plan presents a model of learning that is powered by technology. It breaks down the goals and recommendations into five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity.
• Learning: The education system must find a way to bring learning and technology together in a way to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences. This must take advantage of the limitless, borderless, and instantaneous technology that students use in their daily lives.
• Assessment: Learning must be assessed, including 21st century competencies such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication. With these assessments, data can be used to drive continuous improvement.
• Teaching: “The expectation of effective teaching and accountability for professional educators is a critical component of transforming our education system, but equally important is recognizing that we need to strengthen and elevate the teaching profession.” ("Transforming american education:," 2010) Technology can help build the capacity of educators by allowing them to connect in new ways. Professional development becomes collaborative, coherent, and continuous.
• Infrastructure: The infrastructure for technology has been dramatically improved over the last forty years.
• Productivity: Basic assumptions about education need to be confronted. We can begin organizing around students’ individual needs rather than traditional academic periods and lockstep pacing. Technology can be an important tool in this advancement.
The National Educational Technology Plan 2010 goes on to make many recommendations for the “improvement” of the American educational system. Many of the suggestions have much merit to them. However, I am not confident that the nation is ready to accept a federalization of our educational system. Public education has been a function of the states and subdivided into local school districts. The recommendations of the NETP may be laudable, but I am quite hesitant to remove the function of public education from the states. This would have the effect of moving the educational bureaucracy even farther away from the citizens it serves.




U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. (2010). Transforming american education: learning powered by technology. Washington, DC: