Technology Use Planning Overview

A Working Definition of Technology Use Planning

Technology use planning in education includes the acquisition and effective implementation of technology with the goals of increasing student engagement, meeting student learning outcomes, applying accurate assessment, improving current pedagogy, and developing cutting-edge pedagogy while ensuring that all aspects of student diversity is taken into account.

The National Educational Technology Plan 2010

The National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) 2010 has two goals as its guiding principles: (1) to increase the proportion of college graduates in the United States from 41 percent to 60 percent within the next decade (only 7 years now) and (2) to prepare all high school students for an smooth transition into college. In addition, it outlines where education in the U.S. needs to progress towards in order to remain competitive in the global community. The plan includes five major areas of concern under its Goals and Recommendations: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. Each area explains the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the issues that the NETP, if implemented effectively, will address.

Although the ten-year timeline for meeting these goals seems a bit over-optimistic, the plan itself can be used as an overarching, basic reference for all technology use planning and decisions for all institutions and all who are involved in education including educators, technology specialists, school boards, deans, presidents, and legislators.  Institutional technology plans in particular should be designed around or informed by the NETP and the NETP itself can act as a gauge to measure the progress in meeting the outlined goals.    

The plan for the future of the educational system in the U.S. is the primary focus of the report; however, it is also important to note the research and development section, which describes a new approach to procuring the resources educators need to implement the NETP successfully where research and development is focused solely on education from the outset. This is particularly important because it does not only involve education but also the fields of business and entertainment in collaboration with educational technologists.

Response to Developing Effective Technology Plans

John See claims that long term technology plans might be ineffective because innovations in technology are changing so quickly that plans based on current technology will be outdated before they are even put into action. However, while it may be true that innovations in technology have a higher turnover rate than high school students employed at fast food restaurants, it does not necessarily follow that it is impossible or ineffective to plan for the long term (1-5 years ahead, let us say).   

Institutions can implement a long term technology plan as long as, as See himself implies in his discussion, the plan itself is flexible. A long term plan should be modified during the course of its implementation. These modifications should be based on educational technological innovations that have shown tried and true results which align with the goals set by the institution, which are backed by research, and which have been informed by the National Educational Technology Plan.   

See also argues that in order for a technology plan to be effective, the focus should be on what specific technology and how that specific technology will help in achieving institutional goals rather than on procuring technology and then reflecting on its value to the institution.

I agree with See's point. The idea of being a cutting-edge institution often seems to trump the concern for actual applicability of the technology in achieving goals. I have had conversations with colleagues in which there is agreement that, for example, our students need iPads, but how they fit into even the small scale goals of our department remain unclear. If having iPads would clearly contribute to achieving the college's goal of having all students become global citizens or contributed to developing critical thinking and communication skills, then iPads might be warranted. However, if discovering and developing innovative uses of technology in education is an institutional goal, perhaps the goal itself requires that the technology come before application.

Experience in Technology Use Planning

Presently, I have no experience in technology use planning. In fact, my only real experience with technology in education is creating an occasional power point presentation for a mini-lesson and showing an occasional YouTube or Vimeo video as a supplement to traditional classroom activities. However, I do plan to use some of the technology skills I acquired in the course of EDTECH 501, specifically Feedly, Camtasia, GoAnimate, and Voicethread. There is a lot of potential for using these programs/applications as supplementary material for both my students and colleagues.  

  

Digital Inequality

I have to admit that this week's assignment was quite difficult.  After reading the ITU's reports, viewing the Youtube videos, and reading several of the recommended readings, I had a clear understanding of what digital divide and digital inequality were, but it was not apparent how it affected the students at Santa Monica College.  It is true that many of our classrooms are in the stone age of technology but much of the student population for the most part is from middle-class to outright wealthy families, so access to technology is not an issue.  You would be hard pressed to find a student at SMC who doesn't have a laptop and a smartphone at their fingertips.  In addition, the entire campus is wi-fi enabled.

The energy-efficient light bulb in my head started to flicker to life, however, when I thought about my night students.  As I mention in my presentation, night students are different from traditional day students.  Day students, specifically in the ESL department, are between the ages of 18 and 25, are from some of the most wired countries on the planet (South Korea, Japan, China/Hong Kong), and literally have 24 hour access to the internet.  On the other hand, night students are usually older, work full time jobs during the day, have access to the internet but are usually limited in their ability to effectively use the technology available to them, and are from technologically developing countries.  Many of my night students, for example, are from Mexico and Iran with a few from various African nations.  Many of these factors contribute to the limited technological skills of these night students.  Therefore, I decided to focus my presentation on digital inequality rather than digital divide, more specifically, digital inequality rooted in a lack of skills among night students.

In my presentation, I propose four fairly simple solutions to increase technological competence in this specific population of students: implementing a technology tutoring program, using all available computer equipped classrooms (a no-brainer), devoting a portion of classes to technology, and requiring mandatory faculty professional development in the area of classroom technology.

Here is my VoiceThread presentation: Digital Divide VoiceThread Presentation

    

EDTECH Challenges

The NMC Horizon Report 2013 Higher Education Edition outlines six challenges that higher ed is facing with regards to technology implementation and institutionalization.  The challenge that I addressed was that of educators not utilizing new technology in their instruction or their research.  I chose this issue for several reasons.  First, I had been fighting the need for implementing novel educational technology in my classroom, before I enrolled in this M.E.T. program.  Second, I see that only about 2-3 out of the forty or so faculty members whom I directly work with have actually integrated technology into their classrooms.  My final reason for choosing this challenge stems from a series of e-mails regarding a technology workshop that was presented at the college I teach at as part of a series of faculty development workshops and student success initiatives.  A colleague of mine developed and was to present the workshop, which was about the use of Google Voice and Cel.ly as a possible alternative to using e-mail to keep in contact with students.  Weeks before the workshop was presented, an invitation and RSVP e-mail was sent out to all faculty.  The responses to the invitation were a little disconcerting.  Faculty members from all across campus reprimanded my colleague for attacking and belittling the use of traditional e-mail, while others proposed hypothetical scenarios just short of smartphones destroying all of academia.  This response made it clear to me that there was at least some resistance to technology on campus.

As the Horizon Report explains, this issue is pervasive in higher education.  At my campus, there are technology workshops presented monthly and which faculty may voluntarily attend for professional development and those all-important flex hours.  The two workshops (Camtasia and Google Voice) that I attended this past semester had in attendance an audience of about a half a dozen instructors.  Granted there are constant schedule conflicts and other more immediate issues like lesson planning and grading that may take precedence over a professional development workshop; however, this might be an indicator of how far down a teacher's to do list learning about technology is.  In my department, only a few instructors use new technology in their teaching.  I shamefully admit that I was not one of those few.  

To remedy the current state of technology use on my campus, several solutions might be implemented.  Offering more than one technology workshop every month and at varied hours during the week may give busy educators more flexibility in choosing a date to attend a workshop.  Devoting a portion of all departmental and campus-wide flex days meetings to the introduction and implementation of technology in the classroom  would ensure that all faculty have at least some exposure to educational technology.  This could be made mandatory if necessary.  A requirement that a certain fraction of faculty flex hours be derived from educational technology workshops could be implemented.  At the departmental level, faculty need to see the immediate benefits of implementing technology.  With that in mind, field/content specific materials could be created for demonstration at departmental meetings.   

In my video, I focus on the more immediate challenge of "selling" educational technology to the department chair.  As only a small fraction of instructors in my department use  technology I thought that it would be most beneficial to go to the chair to suggest departmental level technology workshops and possibly to get immediate feedback about implementing technology.  I also very briefly cover the idea of individualized learning (Challenge #4).

Below is my video.  I apologize for the corny dialogue.  Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.  I used Go!Animate to create this video: