Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020: Teaching and Learning

While reading about this area I remembered one of this week's readings, where Richardson states that "if the bulk of what we ask our students to do centers around paper passed back and forth in the classroom, we are doing our students a grave disservice" (Richardson, 2007, p.97).

As I stated in this week's discussion board, I believe that the days of worksheets and paper based assignments and assessments are long gone. We are in a different era. We now serve 21st century students. We are teaching kids that will work in jobs we still have no clue they will exist in a short future, and they will need to be proficient in as much technology as possible. Surely those practices involving worksheets and paper assignments and assessments were fine when we were growing up, and they helped us to become who we are now. But as Richardson stated, we are doing our students a grave disservice if nowadays we base our teaching on passing paper around the classroom.

Thanks to technology, the world as we know it is rapidly changing. As teachers, we are obliged to prepare our students for the demands of this global and digital world. Therefore, I believe that including this area in the Long Range Technology Plan has been vital to the achievement of our students.

My recommendation for growth in the area of Teaching and Learning is to promote more job-embedded opportunities to use technology, to keep up with the technology staff development offerings, especially those that are online trainings, and to promote more visits from the technology facilitators who could help more to integrate technology in the classrooms.