My opinion will be concerning the Educator Prep and Development area. I believe it is a must that teachers know at least as much about technology and the developing ways as the students. I say as this because students spend much more time than educators due to the ever changing/made easier field of technology. In the not too distant past computers were only for the people with extra money, they were extremely large and cumbersome and were not user friendly at all. Today anything that can be done on a computer can also be done on a cell phone. This can be viewed as good or not so good. It is a huge boost in technology that almost any application one can think of is available in the palm of your hand. This is forcing younger students to learn how to use it, but are they taking full advantage of what is available to them? Are we as adults taking advantage of this? I say all of this because the first three statements are essentially to provide professional development in the area of Technology Applications for educators. EP01 states: Provide professional development for teaching and integrating Technology Applications into the foundation and enrichment TEKS through multiple delivery methods. In some ways this is done but more for the benefit of the teacher than the student. EP02 states: Provide professional development for Technology Applications courses as identified in Technology Applications Educator Standards VI - XI. I don’t even think a teacher knows what this is let alone to be involved with professional development. And EP03 states: Provide training on the use of electronic tools and information to support sound, data-driven decision-making. This is one area that we have been trained on ad nausea. There are only so many ways to skin a cat and we have been shown them all. With the emphasis on the tests and not the curriculum teachers are currently being overwhelmed by speaker after speaker telling us the same thing about retrieving information. I believe we can put 03 to rest. As for the rest of the Correlate ID’s, I agree that they are all important. However we must remember the time constraints of our teachers. Our district is behind the times as far as where we could/should be. I am not aware of too many districts that are on top of the technology curve like they may want, but then again budgetary constraints make it impossible to do so. The technology trend statewide and world wide will continue to grow, as the field is ever changing. Improving our district can only come with an increase in funds. However there are many other uses for the funds and may put technology on the back burner once again.
