Do We Need National Technology Standards?

One of the more exciting ideas to surface at the ISTE Board meeting on September 24th was that ISTE should consider developing a set of “technology standards” that might serve as goals that E-Rate and other federal monies might help schools meet.

The original goals of E-Rate – that all schools be connected to the Internet – has by and large been accomplished nationally. But as we all know, connectivity alone does not an effective school make.

I believe it will be up to ISTE to create new national infrastructure goals if they are going to be created at all. The chance for creating a strong vision by the federal government was fumbled by the Department of Education with its National Education Technology Plan – a largely worthless document. See my ”Directionless Dictates” column from the May 2005 Teacher Magazine.

Well written national standards are both useful and necessary for a number of reasons, and given ISTE’s success with its student, teacher and administrative NETS standards, it is the logical organization to tackle this job.

From experience, I have found the ALA/AASL library program standards useful in helping educate other administrators about good library programs. (Actually our state affliate organization used the AASL goals as a model for writing state library program standards .) We have used ISTE’s NETS Standards for Students as a guide to writing both our state information literacy and technology student guidelines and our own local guidelines. In other words, good national standards for technology infrastructure would do more than simply provide a rationale for continued E-rate funding.

My experience is that few districts: 1) know how they compare to other districts in their technology implementation efforts; 2) can determine the direction they should be moving to improve technology utilization; or 3) can visualize a technology infrastructure that fully supports learning, teaching and managing. A good set of technology standards - simple, quantitative, and research-supported - could be an authoritative voice that would help remedy these shortcomings.

The standards I most appreciate tend to take a rubric-like approach. In multiple categories, a district might judge itself as minimum, standard or exemplary in each category. And if the rubrics are concretely written, it would be readily apparent how a district could move from, say, a minimum to standard level in any category.

I would find standards (after five minutes of thought) in the following areas extremely helpful as I try to evaluate our district’s technology infrastructure and plan for improvement :

1. Connectivity (LAN, WAN, and Internet I & II capacities)
2. Security (firewalls, filters, policies)
3. Tech support (technicians per computer, tech support response time, reliability rates, policies about technology replacement,)
4. Administrative applications (student information systems, transportation, personnel systems, payroll systems, data mining systems, home-school communication systems, online testing)
5. Information resources (e-mail, listservs, blogging software, online learning software, commercial databases, library automation systems)
6. Staff training resources, requirements and opportunities
7. Staff/computer rations and student/computer ratios (exemplary here might be the one-to-one initiatives)
8. Technology/content area curricula integration (articulated student technology skills embedded in the content areas, assessments)

Each rubric, of course, would need to be accompanied by the research/rationale that supports its inclusion.

What do you think ISTE? Are you up to the challenge? In what other areas might standards be written to help guide districts and power the argument for continued E-rate funding?