s Washington, D.C. prepares for a changing of the
guard later this month, a mood of both assessment and agenda
setting is in the air, and the realm of educational technology
policy is no exception.
Though not necessarily timed to coincide with the end of the
Clinton administration, the Department of Education's Office of
Educational Technology released a report in mid-December that
serves as a summary of what has been accomplished since the
department released the first national educational technology
plan in 1996. The new plan, titled "e-Learning: Putting a
World-Class Education at the Fingertips of All Children," also
updates the original goals outlined in the 1996 report with new
goals moving forward.
"The biggest difference in our new national plan is that the
old plan was very much focused on getting the infrastructure in
place," said Linda Roberts, director of the Office of
Educational Technology. "The new plan is much more focused on
using this technology to transform teaching and learning."
Two other differences, Ms. Roberts said, are that the new
goals put more emphasis on making sure students develop
technology and information literacy skills, and also focus on
the need for more evaluation and research to determine the
effectiveness of various technology applications used for
teaching and learning.
Over the past several years, questions have been raised by
groups such as Learning in the Real World and Alliance for
Childhood over the effectiveness of using technology in K-12
classrooms, but Ms. Roberts said the emphasis on more research
and evaluation in the new plan is "really in response to the
level of investment we've now made."
"When I came on board, we had less than $30 million in the
budget," she said, adding that the amount of money allocated to
educational technology programs has grown to over $3 billion
this year, including more than $2 billion for the E-rate
program, which provides discounts on telecommunications services
to schools and libraries.
In assessing how the nation's investment in educational
technology has been spent over the past several years, the
e-Learning report points to the significant progress that has
been made in connecting K-12 schools and classrooms to the
Internet. Citing figures collected by the National Center for
Education Statistics, the report notes that only 35 percent of
public elementary and secondary schools and 3 percent of public
school classrooms had access to the Internet in 1994; by 1999,
95 percent of schools and 63 percent of classrooms had Internet
access.
Even so, the report acknowledges there are still many
challenges ahead, such as increasing the number of computers in
schools that can simultaneously connect to the Internet,
upgrading Internet connections to broadband, addressing
disparities in access to technology in poor vs. wealthy
communities and improving teacher training.
"Ensuring that the nation has effective 21st century teachers
requires more than just providing sufficient access to
technology for teaching and learning," the report states. "We
should improve the preparation of new teachers, including their
knowledge of how to use technology for effective teaching and
learning; increase the quantity, quality and coherence of
technology-focused activities aimed at the professional
development of teachers; and, improve the instructional support
available to teachers who use technology."
Keith Krueger, executive director of the Consortium for
School Networking, an organization that promotes the use of
telecommunications to improve K-12 learning, said he believes
the e-Learning report accurately represents the achievements of
the past five years, while recognizing areas that still need to
be addressed.
"There's been incredible progress, particularly in the area
of infrastructure," Mr. Krueger said. "The next challenge is
leadership. How do we train teachers in order to make it work?"
Besides teacher training, Mr. Krueger pointed to the need for
more research into what technologies provide the most benefit to
students and teachers, and the need to re-align priorities to
allocate more money to providing technical support in the
schools -- an issue he felt the e-Learning report "doesn't
highlight enough."
The conclusions reached in the e-Learning report echo another
report released in December by the Web-based Education
Commission, a Congressional commission that spent a year
examining how the Internet could be used better in educational
settings. The primary difference between the two reports, Ms.
Roberts said, is that the Congressional report also focused on
higher education. Taken together, she said, the two documents
should help the next administration set its own agenda for
improving the use of technology in education.
