STaR Chart

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Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020: Educator Preparation and Development

Today Texas faces a critical urgency for all professional educators, both current and those who will enter the education system in the future, to have the skills needed to change instruction to meet the needs of this generation of Texas students.

- Texas Long Range Plan for Technology

As educators, we have entered a profession that should be radically changing to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world. We have moved from the industrial age to the communication age, where our informational base is expanding exponentially, and our skills are in need of rapid transformation. But has our educational system risen to the occasion; have we progressed, responded, or even noticed? Are we doing things the same old way?

The Texas Long Range Plan for Technology (TLRPT) addresses this need to not merely update our instructional methods, but instead transform the way we educate our students. In its Educator Preparation and Development section, it outlines the need for this shift, and lists recommendations to assist in the accomplishment of this dramatic overhaul. Preparing educators with the necessary technology and tools is vital to our students’ success.

In an attempt to gauge progress, the School Technology and Readiness (STaR) Chart has been developed. Since 2006 data have been collected in four areas of the TLRPT, including Educator Preparation and Development. Progress is identified by movement through categories of Early, Developing, Advanced, and Target. In the area of Educator Preparation and Development my campus has been at a “Developing” rating, which is in line with state averages. The U.S. National Education in Technology Plan, http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/plan/2004/site/edlite-default.html also outlines action steps and success stories to influence progress.

Since the 2002-2003 school year, the Texas Education Agency has recorded data and posted findings on the STaR Chart site http://starchart.esc12.net/statistics.html. Statewide summaries show that the trend in Educator Preparation and Development has been fluctuating between Developing and Advanced. The last two years have shown most schools placing themselves in the developing category, when in previous years, many were positioned in Advanced. It is unclear why data shows this. Are the schools new to participate since inception pulling the scores lower? Are teachers statewide having difficulty keeping up with all demands with technology suffering? These are questions that campuses and districts must review to keep progressing.

My recommendations would be for every campus to revisit the TLRPT and view the suggestions in the plan. Technology committees need to reinvigorate their membership, and make reasonable plans with measurable outcomes. As Marc Prensky states in his article, Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom: Twenty-first-century schools need twenty-first-century technology http://www.edutopia.org/adopt-and-adapt, we need to “do new things in new ways” in order to meet the needs of our students. Too often we approach the changes in our world with old things in old ways. Our approaches and actions need to go through the shift quickly, as technology has already moved well beyond.