Dive Brief:

• “Future Ready Learning: Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education,” a new federal 21-point guide to tech use in the classroom released on December 10, states that digital learning is best used to advance “a vision of equity, active use, and collaborative leadership to make everywhere, all-the-time learning possible.”
• According to eSchoolNews, the new guide is unique in that it “includes a mix of examples from education institutions, recommendations and commentary on what education institutions should do to change learning with technology over the next five years.”
• Recommendations include suggestions on how to make better assessments, provide equal access to online resources, and even draft device and wireless infrastructure funding plans. 

Dive Insight:

With the simple steps outlined in the new guide, teachers and administrators now have a blueprint of sorts when it comes to thinking about, purchasing, utilizing, and evaluating modern education technology in the classroom. The recommendations are also aligned with goals previously articulated by the Innovative Technology Expands Children’s Horizons (ITECH) program.

Yet the new federal guide offers little in the way of concrete suggestions to help districts and educators visualize how each point could be actualized. This vague open-endedness might be intentional, given the new focus on state control over education policy.

Further, the guide’s top suggestion of creating “an anywhere, anytime learning environment that’s equally accessible to all students” is a tall order. Many impoverished schools lack a computer lab, let alone anything at the scale of the 1:1 device initiatives currnetly underway in some wealthier districts.