Progress Report for TLRPT

This week I was asked to read and review the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology. For those of you who don't know just what this is, it's a movement and a plan to prepare our students to be technologically literate by the eighth grade. We want our students to be able to compete globally in a world that is constantly changing. The plan focuses on different aspects of education to help achieve this goal. Texas seems to be developing in the majority of the areas of the plan. A lot of things influence this trend. First the plan is still fairly new, and it needs some time to work out all of the kinks. Another thing is the fact that the majority of the teachers are being pushed to prepare students for a test that is paper based. There is a lot of professional development out there that shows teachers how to use technology, and they sometimes even show how to integrate technology in the classroom, but a lot of times, it's not activities that will directly help the students to pass the paper based state assessment(which seems to be all that administrators care about). Administrators want to see technology used in the classroom, but they more so want to see good scores at the end of the year. We seem to have a balance of support staff in Texas when it comes to technology according to the report, but that support staff does in a way have its hands tied. I think teachers will feel more comfortable with using technology more often, and in more inventive ways, when the pressure for getting the students to pass tests is lowered. It's a little too soon to see just how much Texas is progressing in each of the indicators in the plan, but if it is followed through, it could produce technology literate students who are ready to take on the world.