The Texas Long Range Plan for Technology

Having been out of the classroom for several years now, I have to admit that I knew very little about the technonlogy expectations for classrooms, campuses, districts, and the state as a whole before beginning this class.  Working through these assignments has truly opened my eyes to where we should be and where we actually are.  The area of Teaching and Learning has been of particular interest to me.  There are six areas of focus: Patterns of Classroom Use, Frequency/Design of Instructional Setting, Content Area Connections, TEKS Implementation, Student Mastery of TEKS, and Online Learning.  The state overall, as well as my campus specifically, is in the Developing Tech stage of this area.  While this is stage indicates that there is still a great deal of room to grow, there are still high expectations of this area.  I had the opportunity today to meet with the Career and Technology Counselor for our district.  She was making a presentation to middle and high school counselors concerning the CTE courses that would be offered next year and what some of the specific courses entailed.  During this presentation she made a comment that students had no idea how to use technology for professional purposes.  She said that while they can text, surf the internet, game, and find their way around firewalls, they cannot create simple Word or Excel documents.  Based on my study in this course, I stopped her later and asked her how that could be with the expectations of and mandates from the state.  Her response was that there is a serious disconnect between what the district officials believe is happening in k-8 classrooms and what is actually occurring.  In analyzing STaR chart data, I would take this theory a step farther and say that teachers across the state are either giving misleading information in their surveys or there is not a clear understanding of what the expectation is.  Either way, students are the ones losing out because they are not being prepared for success in high school, college, or the professional world.  We are using our technology to create a dog and pony show for our students, but we are not really teaching them anything of value regarding technology.