Chris O’Neal will join us this Monday for the SOS podcast. We will 

discuss the Essential Question of whether or not we need standards for technology as a subject area. If technology integration is the process of finding ways where technology can help teachers of math, science, music, etc., reach their subject area standards, then the answer seems pretty straightforward.

Thus, it doesn’t seem that we need standards for technology. Yet, we need to ask ourselves where we hope the technology will take us. As discussed in the SOS podcast, we want our schools to shift from a 20th-century learning focus to what EduBloggers term “21st Century Learning”.

These 21st-century learning skills need standards and benchmarks that, just like the technology, need to be integrated into all curriculum areas of our schools.

Three years ago, we went through the process of reviewing and refining our technology standards at my old school, HKIS. From the start, a team of teachers, instructional technologists, librarians, and administrators looked at learning rather than technology tools to drive our committee work. After months of research and discussion, we came up with the “Information and Communication Literacy” standards and benchmarks that focused, as the name implies, totally on the handling and communication of various forms of information.

What drove home the point that technology is just a tool to support learning is that we spent only one moment in standard creation or the dreaded wordsmithing. We adopted the forward-thinking “Academic” standards and benchmark another committee had created! They already had begun bringing 21st-century thinking skills into our curriculum by making them the learning outcomes for all our academic efforts.