Teaching and Learning in the Texas Long Range Plan for Technolgoy

I feel the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology 2006-2020, has done a tremendous amount in ensuring our students are receiving the technological education that is necessary to be successful in the 21st century and beyond. Because we are in the ‘digital age’, teachers must cultivate not only Math and Reading skills, but also technology skills. These skills are required for students to work efficiently in today’s global economy. In order for teachers to be effective in today’s classroom, they need to be able to use media resources in order to create the real life situations students are interested in. I feel the Long Range Plan has helped us accomplish this because we are now being held accountable for making certain learning is not “one-size fits all”, but rather individualized using variety of digital resources in a variety of learning environments. There are four key areas to the Long Range Plan that assist us in assessing our progress towards the end goal; Teaching and Learning, Educator Preparation and Development, Leadership, Administration and Instructional Support, and Infrastructure for Technology. The key area that draws my attention is Teaching and Learning because it focuses on both teachers and students becoming proficient in utilizing technology. Teachers have to be able to use technology to create a student-centered environment where 86-100% of students are able to master the objectives in the TA TEKS. While this was not our schools lowest scoring area, we are still considered Developing Tech, according to the STaR Chart. This tells me that we must continuously work, not only use technology to support our lessons, but integrate the technology into our lessons to create learner-centered environments. Through technology, we can bring people from the other side of the world into our classrooms for students to collaborate with and talk to. In order to guarantee our students meeting expectations laid out in the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, we must step up to the challenge, and embrace technology and everything that goes along with it.