Second Life, Policy Front: What’s in Store for Ed Tech
The Second Life session about getting administration involved in SL was pretty good. It was mostly what we can all think out. SL is a good, free alternate meeting space, but we need to educate administrators and promote its use: identify the advantages, structure a learning experience for newbies, cover SL extensively in your magazine to promote and make SL seem more valid, partner with administrative organizations, prepare a learning kit, work with Linden (the company that produces SL) to promote your group/activity, and connect SL to what the administrators are already doing. I think these tips could apply to any group you want to get using SL.
In the Ed Tech policy session I attended after that, David Byer from Apple’s education policy division gave us some numbers:
35 Senate seats up this year
435 representative seats up for election
11 gubernatorial seats up for election
$262 million for Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT)
- down from $700 million in FY02
- there may be a small gain this year
- president recommends $0 funding
10,000 Ed Tech Action Network members (he seemed to think was impressive, and it is for a volunteer advocacy activity, but it’s a drop in comparison to stakeholders in ed tech, I’d think)
Then Hilary Goldmann presented. She mentioned something that I didn’t know, which is that in many states ed tech is local or federal, not state. She showed a pie chart of federal spending, pointing out all that is mandatory and the vulnerability of discretionary funds for education such as ed tech. And she said that the next administration will reauthorize NCLB and it may go back to being ESEA.
She talked about ATTAIN (Achievement Through Technology and Innovation), the new proposed EETT. ISTE voices were included in legislation, which includes more teacher professional development and improves support for disadvantaged schools. The House and Senate have released draft legislation and ATTAIN is included in both.
What does this mean? Widespread technology in the classroom must be more difficult to implement every year with this waning funding. Luckily technology is getting cheaper, especially smaller and one-item or one-service solutions. And for the brave school systems, there is open source.
ATTAIN sounds pretty good. Improved support for teacher professional development is going to be a great boon. But there was an exchange that I didn’t quite catch, in which it sounded like federally mandated professional development may not be effective or provide much choice to the individual school systems. Can anyone validate this?
Onto a discussion in NECC Unplugged (Bloggers’ Cafe) about the problems between IT departments and teachers, then one on strategic tech ed thinking wtih ISTE presidents and business leaders, then a Classroom 2.0 gathering back at the NECC Unplugged area.
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