TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION/SCHOOL CULTURE, STUDENT MOTIVATION/TRANSFORMING AMERICAN EDUCATION LEARNING POWER

TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION  EXAMPLE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY OFFERS AN ASSORTMENT OF DEGREE AND CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VIDEO NETWORK  THROUGH VIDEOCONFERENCING, VIDEOCASSETTE, STREAMING INTERNET MEDIA, WEB PROGRAMS, VIRTUAL, NONRESIDENTIAL AND RESIDENTIAL



1.0 Learning All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society. To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
1.1 Revise, create, and adopt standards and learning objectives for all content areas that reflect 21st century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.
1.2 Develop and adopt learning resources that use technology to embody design principles from the learning sciences.
1.3 Develop and adopt learning resources that exploit the flexibility and power of technology to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.
1.4 Use advances in the learning sciences and technology to enhance STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and develop, adopt, and evaluate new methodologies with the potential to enable all learners to excel in STEM.

Productivity
To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our K-16 system so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford. Improving productivity is a daily focus of most American organizations in all sectors – both for-profit and nonprofit – and especially so in tight economic times. Education has not, however, incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve productivity and manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. We can learn much from the experience in other sectors.
What education can learn from the experience of business is that we need to make the fundamental structural changes that technology enables if we are to see dramatic improvements in productivity. As we do so, we should recognize that although the fundamental purpose of our public education system is the same, the roles and processes of schools, educators, and the system itself should change to reflect the times we live in and our goals as a world leader. Such rethinking applies to learning, assessment, and teaching processes, and to the infrastructure and operational and financial sides of running schools and school systems. Rethinking Basic Assumptions
One of the most basic assumptions in our education system is time-based or "seat-time" measures of educational attainment. These measures were created in the late 1800s and early 1900s to smooth transitions from K-12 into higher education by translating high school work to college admissions offices (Shedd, 2003) and made their way into higher education when institutions began moving away from standardized curricula.
Another basic assumption is the way we organize students into age-determined groups, structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly equal size with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same pace, and keep these groups in place all year.
The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically redesigned schools, demonstrating the range of possibilities for structuring education. These include schools that organize around competence rather than seat time and others that enable more flexible xi Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary scheduling that fits students’ individual needs rather than traditional academic periods and lockstep curriculum pacing. In addition, schools are beginning to incorporate online learning, which gives us the opportunity to extend the learning day, week, or year.
The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a year of higher education or postsecondary career training. There is no way to achieve this target unless we can dramatically reduce the number of students who leave high school without getting a diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education.
A complex set of personal and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave school or to disengage from learning, but support should start as early as possible, before children enter school, and should become intensified for those students who need it as they move through school. Practices supported with technology can help address the problem, including learning dashboards that keep students on track with their course requirements and earning credits for courses taken online.
Redesigning education in America for improved productivity is a complex challenge that will require all 50 states, the thousands of districts and schools across the country, the federal government, and other education stakeholders in the public and private sector coming together to design and implement innovative solutions. It is a challenge for educators – leaders, teachers, and policymakers committed to learning – as well as technologists, and ideally they will come together to lead the effort.

Student Motivation, School Culture,

and Academic Achievement
TRANSFORMING AMERICAN EDUCATION LEARNING POWER
http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf