What is needed in Michigan is more private-public partnerships, modeled after the New Schools Project in North Carolina (www.
newschoolsproject.org) that can help focus public policy and resources on building the infrastructure and support necessary for schools to deliver on the promise of 21st
Century learning.
Such a partnership between state officials, schools, college, and universities, foundations, and a committed core of technology- focused corporate partners is the essential missing ingredient. This is the type of partnership we have modeled with MACUL in designing and implementing the MI Champions, MI Champions Project-Based Learning, and MI Champions STEM professional programs that provides more than a thousand educators and hundreds of schools with effective models for classroom technology integration.
But a broader partnership is needed to focus on achieving five broad, technology-based innovations over the next five years that would transform Michigan’s education system, placing it on a sustainable trajectory towards long term success.
The five innovations include: 5. One:One Access and Connectivity: one-to-one computing is a given in any knowledge-based, global economy and yet we send our students to schools with outdated, inferior quantities of computers. If Michigan wants individualized, personalized learning that gives every student a chance at success, providing a device for every student is required. With the cost of Internet- capable devices plummeting, now is the time to address the real inequity in 21st Century Learning: the lack of Internet-ready devices in our schools.
What’s more, because Michigan lacks an integrated statewide network, Internet connectivity of our schools is spotty at best. In one county, for example, you will find two high schools 30 miles apart, one with 100mbps to the high school and the other with 3mbps for the entire district. Shared networking is progressing in the state and holds great promise for lowering cost while boosting connectivity, but the current effort will leave schools behind. Thanks to large-scale federal investments, Michigan will have a premier Internet backbone in place within 5 years. What our state needs now is effective policy and an executable plan to connect every school building and library to this network at connectivity speeds of 1gbps or greater. We also need to look at creating financial incentives for school-age family discounts for broadband to the home.
4. Consolidation of Business, Data, and Technology Services: There is hidden potential to fund our push for one:one for every student by reducing the cost of schooling in Michigan by consolidating “back office” operations, including student information systems, instructional data systems, and business accounting software. The lack of consistent Internet connectivity has slowed this progress, but we lack clear state-level policy and incentives for moving this consolidation forward. By consolidating business, data, and technology services to a regional level, Michigan will increase the quality of services while reducing cost and increasing the use of data in making decisions.
MACULJOURNAL |
3. Teacher Capacity. If every student walked into their classrooms tomorrow with an internet-ready device with unencumbered access to the Internet, by and large, their teachers would not know how to utilize the powerful technology in their students’ hands. I fear most teachers would ask their students to put the distracting device under their seats and take out their dated textbook. We would be wasting taxpayer funds if we bought devices ahead of providing high quality training and professional development for every teacher, even those teachers that score well on the use of technology in our current, technology-starved schools. We have to make the investment in our human capital if we want to leverage a large-scale technology investment.
2. Digital Content and Assessments: A device in every kid’s hands and surplus broadband will free schools to think digitally, to stop pouring money into antiquated resources like textbooks, and to start using and producing rich, mobile education media that will truly transform education. Digital content will energize and enable anywhere, anytime, any way learning in schools and create the next generation of knowledge workers that are both consuming and producing content and leveraging “Crowd Accelerated Innovation” for their own education. On the assessment side, much is being done on the national level to develop and drive online assessments, but Michigan can do more. With smart investments, we can and should move all assessments into some format for electronic delivery. This will lower annual development and delivery costs and add instructional value by returning results to schools within weeks, not months.
1. 21st
Century workforce. There are more opportunities than ever to create authentic learning environments where students can analyze, discover, debate, explore, solve, and understand. Engaged, lifelong learners are the types of employees every employer wants to hire; that is what our schools should be producing. By focusing on this learning outcome, we believe student achievement will increase for all students and a world class workforce will result.
Century Learning Environments: Michigan must declare that the era of drill-and-kill assessments and sit-and- click software substitutes is over. We need to refocus education on engaging each and every learner through rich, meaningful, rigorous learning opportunities with the goal of producing a 21st
I hope you will join me in advocating a total solution to the challenges facing Michigan’s education system. Let’s get excited and enthusiastically embrace “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” learning and at the same time, call for the technological and human capital investments needed to make our excitement a reality.
Bruce Umpstead is the State Director of Educational Technology and Data Coordination, Office of Education Improvement and Innovation, Michigan Department of Education.
umpsteadb@michigan.gov
Conference 2012
9
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32