National Educational Technology Plan: Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Technology now impacts every thing we do daily. We must bring the advances made in technology to the classroom. Teachers must teach in new ways. We need to focus on what our students need to know, how they can best learn it, and where and when they will learn. Never before have schools had the resources availalble to them that they have today. They can network with other teacher's other school's or other professionals and bring the world into the classroom. Yet this is not what is happening. We are so afraid of bringing the wrong things in that we bring nothing and ignore the millions of resources right at our fingertips. The largest hindrance according to the study, is that we do not have an integrated web system available showing or networking all of the student data and resources the way health services, telecommunications, or financial systems have done. Ideally curriculum would be integrated with web resources to literally bring the world to the students. This would help all students regardless of socio-economic status to truly be on equal playing fields with the experiences they could have and the learning process. So many students never leave their home towns. With the WEB, all students can travel anywhere they need to. They can also have experts in their fields share first hand knowledge. We just need to work on the technology integration to make this a reality for future educators and students.