Digital Standards for Teachers and Students

I consider myself to pretty tech-savvy. I've had the luxury of being exposed to computers for the majority of my life. My father worked at Intel in the early 80s and we had a computer at home to punch away at and play games on. Through my middle school and high school years, there was usually a computer in my house that I could use to wordprocess and type my papers on. That was the extent though of the use of computers in my educational experience. Students today are saturated with technology. Cell phones, computers, laptops, social-networking, digital photography/videography are all mainstream parts of common society and knowledge and mastery of these mediums is becoming increasingly requisite. With the upcoming revisions to the Oregon Diploma, students will be required to have technical literacy in regards to their education.

This literacy doesn't stop with students though, teachers today are required to assist their students into the digital age by being model users and incorporating technology into the classroom. This is going to be a really interesting transition for many existing teachers because there are so many teachers out there who have thought about technology as something that "I don't need to know about."

Well, the law has taken that option out for teachers. NCLB is now requiring that all students "have access to, and be able to develop proficiency in utilizing technology to improve their academic achievement" and the new Oregon Diploma states that students have to be able to use technology to live, learn and work. This puts the education of technology firmly onto the shoulders of teachers. I think that is good though, the same way that I think that "all teachers need to be writing teachers" is a good thing.

Incorporating technology is so much more than just having students type their papers. Students today don't even really get classes on typing anymore (like when I was in school), they are almost expected to know how. Group projects used to involve cutting and pasting copies of pictures onto a poster board and standing in front of class explaining, now group projects can be multimedia masterpieces of video and photo and audio. Students have access to authoring tools on computers that didn't exist even two years ago; these tools allow them to create with technology. Making sure that students are given the opportunity to flourish in this new aspect of educational development is essential for all teachers.

In my class, I hope to be able to use technology to explore different mediums of literature (film, audio, web-based) and hope to be in a school that has adequate resources to allow all my students equal access to the tools necessary to put together technology based group work, to be able to podcast projects, record and post their poetry or performances.

This is the tricky side of these new standards though...not all schools are able to afford the technology necessary to give all students equal "opportunity" towards education. And, despite the popular belief that students have universal home access to tech, not all students have or can get access outside those poor schools. This is almost a new cycle of technological poverty. So, my job as a teacher is to pass along the knowledge that I have, to bring the technology that I use, to do everything in my power to get students using and interacting with technology on any level.