On January 12, 2001 the final report from the U.S. Secretary of Education's Conference on Educational Technology: Measuring the Impacts and Shaping the Future was made available. This is truly a milestone report and a goldmine for current data and ideas. It pulls together the conference plenary sessions, white papers, and the work of conference participants in break out sessions.

Below is core information from the Final Conference Report. For links to additional speeches and testimony, spotlight schools, demonstration projects and evaluation tools, go to the Department of Education website at http://www.ed.gov/Technology/techconf/2000/index.html

The Secretary's Conference on Educational Technology 2000: Measuring the Impacts and Shaping the Future

The Critical Questions:

What constitutes the effective use of technology in learning? What value does technology bring to learning?

Will we recognize effective uses of technology when we see them?

What uses of learning technology does the public value?

What conditions must be in place in schools to ensure effective technology use?

How can we successfully gauge and report progress with technology at the educator proficiency and system-capacity levels, as well as at the student performance level?

What is the policy roadmap that would build the capacity of communities and schools to move toward more effective uses of technology in schools?

What can we learn from business and industry?

Introduction

How should the value of technology to learning be measured?

Can new assessment tools based on emerging technologies provide deeper insight into what a child is learning and how that child's learning might improve?

The Secretaryís Conference on Educational Technology 2000: Measuring the Impacts and Shaping the Future, highlighted a growing sophistication in K-12 schools' use of technology for teaching and learning.

The 1999 Secretaryís Conference: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Technology, acknowledged the quandary before school boards across the country--could it be shown that technology works, that it is making a difference in children's learning? While the press reported that over $7 billion was spent annually on technology in schools, educators were finding it a challenge to document results.

The topic resonated with educators across the country; they attended the conference in record numbers. In many ways, that first conference focused on a crossroads in which to bring together disparate groups--researchers, the evaluators, and the practitioners--to begin the conversation around this important topic.

That first conference established several precedents--it convened the right people around the right topic, in an atmosphere charged with urgency (see). Designed to engage participants in dialogue, it resulted in three advances: new insight into the right questions to be asking, dawning recognition of the team of players required to answer them, and the acknowledgement of the importance of--and lack of progress in--this arena. Important conversations were held at that conference, and while participants left with more questions than answers, they left with a deeper understanding of the complexity of the issue. Many left as members of virtual teams--charging forth to put collective will and wisdom to the pressing questions raised.

In September of 2000, the second national conference was convened to sustain the momentum generated by the first. Today, the nation is more determined than ever to demand accountability from education--and technology is a big-ticket item for most schools and for the nation.

The conference program was designed to build on the question set to the left and the commissioned white papers--engaging participants in facilitated breakout sessions informed by provocative plenary speakers, spotlight schools and exhibitors.

Question 1: What constitutes the effective use of technology in learning? What value does technology bring to learning?

A publication referenced by many speakers during the course of the conference was How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, a 1999 report by the Committee on the Development of Learning Sciences for the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences. The book describes effective learning environments as the integration of four dimensions: learner centered, knowledge-centered, community-centered, and assessment-centered.

Recent neurocognitive research suggests that the richness of early learning experiences affects the physical development of the brain and may be a major cause of intellectual development.

-Margaret Riel, Associate Director of the
Center for Collaborative Education (CCRE)

Real life learning is often characterized as playful, recursive and non-linear, engaging, self-directed, and meaningful from the learner's perspective. Motivation and learning look like the natural processes they are in real life learning - but they rarely seem so in most school settings.

-Barbara McCombs, Director of the Center for
Human Motivation, Learning and Development

Studies did find improvements in student scores on tests closely related to material covered in computer-assisted instructional packages (Kulik & Kulik, 1991).

-Quoted by Margaret Honey, Director of CCT

What it means to be educated for today's digital age is decidedly different from what it was just a decade ago. To succeed today, students need collaboration, online communication, visualization, information literacy, and life-long learning--twenty-first century--skills.

-Cheryl Lemke, Metiri Group

Research has demonstrated that authentic tasks with real audiences have resulted in increased learning, stronger writing, longer retention of learning and even increased performance on standardized tests of writing.

-Margaret Riel, Associate Director of the
Center for Collaborative Education (CCRE)

Profound learning happens when models student build to simulate reality meet data students collect. The combination of sophisticated data acquisition from probes and Internet databases with models that can be compared to data, can lead to breakthroughs.

-Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

Technology prompts a higher level of engagement of students in the classroom.

-Participant Comment on Engagement

Technology adds a component of collaboration where learning is not contrived.

-Participant Comment on Collaboration

Technology enables us to be more learner-centered. It reaches all kids--technology can even out the differences.

-Participant Comment on Individualization

These are skills students will need to get a job--and be successful in the world of work.

-Participant Comment on Real-World Skills

Students and teachers both have access to information that they couldn't get from the library.

-Participant Comment on New Access to Information

They (students) need to be able to use technology to solve problems--real-world problems.

-Participant Comment on Thinking Skills

Rather than assessing the benefits of technology, the focus of technology assessment will be to explore how to enhance those benefits by matching them to learner needs combined with information on how learning best occurs.

-Barbara McCombs, Center for Human
Motivation, Learning, and Development

Technology can make assessments of the kinds of skills needed for the 21st century knowledge economy more feasible--providing assessment tasks that mimic the features of real-world problems and providing portable, easy-to-use templates for collecting and storing classroom assessment data.

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel and Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

Conference participants, cognizant of the need for integrated learning environments and the multiple ways in which technology enables educators to create such environments, drew the following conclusions:

Whether doing things differently, or doing different things, the transitions represent significant change for schools. Each of the conclusions is discussed in more depth below:

Advances in imaging by the medical field have opened doors to the study of the way the human brain functions--in essence providing a window on how people think and learn. The convergence of brain research, cognitive learning theory, and technology documents the importance of engagement by the learner in their own learning. This provides strong support for the inclusion of real-world applications, problem-based and project-based learning, higher order thinking, and constructivist learning.

The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory has recently launched their enGauge website with a new list of 21st century skills:

21st Century Skills © NCREL

Digital Age Literacy

Inventive Thinking

Effective Communication

High Productivity

Participants in the breakout groups at the conference emphasized the importance of these skills--and expressed frustration that, while 21st century skills should be included in today's curriculum, high stakes testing was a huge deterrent from doing so (see the discussion below).

Story: Conquering the World with Technology

Imagine 1st and 2nd graders tapping into I*EARN to learn to read, explore mathematics, travel (virtually) around the world, and discover other cultures. The children in Kristi Rennebohm Franz's classroom in Pullman, Washington are innately using language to make sense of their world, to launch their literacy, and to communicate their essential learning (content standards in Washington State).

Emerging technologies should be used to more accurately assess what and why children are (or are not) learning--and how technology can help. Even as teachers are beginning to engage their students in more hands-on discovery, they lack the skills to fully capture what students are learning. In fact, students see the inquiry-based aspects of learning as fun--but not serious learning--since their grades reflect only standardized tests based on the textbook with no recognition of what they might have learned in field experiments.

Story: Hands-On Learning

In an inner-city high school physics class in Chicago, students are examining computer images captured by automated telescopes. Developed at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Berkeley Lab with support from TERC, the Hands-On Universe project involves students in reviewing images from space. Two Hands-On Universe student groups have in fact discovered previously unknown super novas and had their work published in scientific journals. The kinds of complex investigations, deeper understanding, and ability to apply concepts to new situations fostered by technology-supported programs like Hands-On Universe are difficult to capture with conventional test formats.

Question #2: Will we recognize effective uses of technology when we see them?

Five key ways in which technology adds to learning:

-From "How People Learn," John Bransford et al,
as quoted by Barbara Means, SRI

SCANS Three-Part Foundation:

1.    Basic Skills: Reading, writing, arithmetic, listening, speaking

2.    Thinking Skills: Creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, seeing things in the mind's eye, knowing how to learn, reasoning

3.    Personal Qualities: Responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, integrity

...Teachers may feel anxious about devoting precious instructional minutes to technology-based activities that are not preparing students to do well on mandated multiple-choice tests.

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel and Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

Students who use computers regularly see measurable improvements in the quality of their writing...[but] recent research shows that paper and pencil tests severely underestimate the achievement of students accustomed to writing on computers.

-Michael Russell, Center for the Study of
Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy

Technology can make assessments of the kinds of skills needed for the 21st century knowledge economy more feasible--providing assessment tasks that mimic the features of real-world problems

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel and Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

The indicators of effective uses of technology have yet to be determined.

There is a growing sentiment that the assessment of the impact of technology on learning involves more than just a look at changes in test scores--unless those test scores reflect the 21st century skills students need to succeed today. Content standards are still important, but they are no longer (if ever they did) represent the full profile of what students need to know and be able to do to succeed in a digital age.

The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Labor to outline the skills students need to succeed in the working world. As outlined in the report, high-performance learning organizations require workers who are well grounded in:

Schools are struggling to find common ground between the traditional and the new.

On the one hand, they acknowledge the necessity of immersing students in learning within the context of contemporary technology tools. On the other, most current assessments do not address 21st century skills--and thus provide disincentives to teachers devoting learning time toward that end.

Schools need to become high performance, high technology systems.

In order to use technology effectively, the school has to evolve into a learning system that embraces the effective use of technology. That translates into learning cultures that are open to innovation--systems that judge the merit of an idea not by its fit with rules and regulations, but its usefulness to advancing the mission of schools, learning.

Four technology and assessment projects launched at the 1999 Conference were back this year to report their progress:

Question #3: What uses of learning technology does the public value?

Currently, report cards are the most important reporting program. If a report card states that math, reading, science, music, etc. are the areas of focus and emphasis, versus a focus on critical learning, problem solving, etc., when report cards go home the parent thinks math, science, etc. is the most important learned skill. We need to make a paradigm shift. How do you translate student problem solving skills into the report card at the end of the term?

-Conference Participant

Margaret Riel set the stage for this answer in her white paper. "Educational goals are tied to learning environments; as one changes so must the other. Literacy goals 100 years ago for many students were to be able to read and write names, copy and read texts, and generate lists of merchandise. Literacy goals of today require mastery over many different genres of writing: persuasive, expressive, expository, procedural and expect students to be able to interpret, compare, contrast, and analyze complex texts. These differences in learning goals also hold for mathematics. Students learn the mathematical foundations necessary for careers that did not exist 100 years ago. There has been exponential growth in the amount of recorded knowledge so that memorization of factual information is no longer an effective approach to mastery of a field."

Even as participants at this conference were espousing the importance of the 21st century skills listed above, they were at the same time lamenting the fact that the public has not fully embraced those skills as being as important as reading, writing, science, and mathematics. In part, it is the responsibility of educators to educate and inform the public as to what should be emphasized in schools.

Question #4: What conditions must be in place in schools to ensure effective technology use?

We need to change the culture. Teaching needs to become a profession.

-Lynn Schrum, Conference Participant, University of Georgia

We need an enabling and capacity-building culture...[that is] learner-driven and research-based.

-Cheryl Lemke, Metiri Group

If teachers can see how technology impacts what they teach and are provided with the right tools, they will use the technology.

-Conference Participant

To move toward this vision will require new concepts defining the learning process and the evolving purpose of education. It will also require rethinking current directions and practices.

-Barbara McCombs, Director of the Center for Human Motivation, Learning and Development

It's not so much proving that we're doing something as having good communication and filling up the screens with the kinds of benefits and results that the community says ìthat's worth the money.î

- Bernajean Porter, Education Technology Planners

We can ask administrators to create environments where technology can be used for learning, as well as for teaching, and where both learners and teachers have sufficient access to computers and telecommunications to do their work.

-Saul Rockman, Rockman et al

Education is a human enterprise. It is dependent on the relationship between teachers and learners in a specific social, political, and historical context.

-Margaret Riel, Associate Director of the
Center for Collaborative Education (CCRE)

[We should be focused on] building heterogeneous groups of individuals who are all looking at the same kind of project but who bring different skills to the mix.

-Jim Nazworthy, High Plains R*TEC

The personal connections are very important. It's not just about the technology. In fact, it's not about the technology at all; it's about hooking up people to concentrate on common problems or cases.

-Robert McNergney, University of Virginia

One major advantage of embedding assessment within learning activities is the heightened focus on learning outcomes...Teachers must think about the kinds of skills and knowledge they are trying to impart through learning activities, and this reflection in turn supports better activity design and better articulation of learning goals to students.

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel and Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

The vanishing of the digital divide defined as access to technology in the U.S. will not, of course, rectify the deplorable inequities in U.S. schools.

-Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

Teaching is an emergent, interactive constructed activity that requires a complex blend of knowledge of the students and knowledge of the curriculum.

-Margaret Riel, Associate Director of the
Center for Collaborative Education (CCRE)

While much of the funding for the e-rate has gone to high poverty schools, the poorest of the poor are not yet benefiting as much as they should.

-Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley

There appears to be a policy disconnect between those who fund technology and establish rules and regulations for its use, and those who actually work in the districts and schools and classrooms.

-Saul Rockman, Rockman et al

Lacking familiarity with ways to test deeper understandings or higher-order skills...teachers often implement [an] activity without assessing what students are learning from it.

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel and Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

We are hitting the same group of teachers every time. I need to know how to reach the next group, the non-innovators.

-Conference Participant

If students and teachers are to take full advantage of what technology makes possible in teaching and learning, schools must change. They must become more student-centered, more focused on 21st century skills, more open to innovation through technology, more willing to fully support and grow the infrastructure they install, and they must be lead by educators who recognize the critical role technology plays in defining an excellent education in this digital age. This won't happen without changes in the K-12 assessment.

The top five Conditions for a high-performance, high-tech school
(as reported by conference participants):

1. Shared Vision is:

and involves:

2. Communication among all stakeholders is:

and provides for:

3. Leadership is:

and it:

Recognizes the ongoing need for meaningful professional development among all staff

4. Community Connections are:

5. Assessments are:

Two additional essential conditions must be in place to facilitate effective use of technology as well: equitable, robust access and educator proficiency.

Equity is more than access. A first step toward equity is equal access to up-to-date equipment and high-speed access to the Internet, both during and outside the school day and in all schools. Nevertheless, such access, while critically important, is only as good as the students' ability to use it toward meaningful goals.

Think Box: Literacy Equity

...Technology will greatly reduce the amount of teacher time required for literacy instruction...resulting in huge technology breakthroughs. This could result in literacy gains worldwide, while decreasing the advantage families have that can find the time to read to their children extensively.

-Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

Teacher proficiency is key. Educators are waking up to the fact that this movement is not about technology--this is about extending children's intellectual capacity through the use of contemporary tools. It is up to teachers to create the powerful learning situations where technology can enrich and extend the experience of students.

The most serious Barriers to significant, effective uses of technology for learning (as reported by participants) are:

Age of:

Lack of:

School Culture:

Voters and Policymakers:

Question #5: How can we successfully gauge and report progress with technology at the educator proficiency and system-capacity levels, as well as at the student performance level?

The question is: Can we work smarter, not harder? What does it really take to build the capacity of our system?

-Cheryl Lemke, Metiri Group

People are being assessed on technology using paper and pencil, multiple choice tests.

-Karen Brumley, Conference Participant and teacher:
Pickerington Junior High School, Pickerington OH

Until tests that measure the types of learning enabled by computers are developed, it is likely that the public and policymakers will under-value the types of learning influenced by computers. In turn, the public and policymakers will continue to underestimate the impact computers have on student learning.

-Michael Russell, Center for the Study of
Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy

EnGauge, presented by Cheryl Lemke, Metiri Group

Four Cornerstones, presented by Bernajean Porter, Education Technology Planners

Profiler, presented by Jim Nazworthy, High Plains R*TEC

CEO Forum STaR Chart, presented by Cheryl Williams, National School Board Association

SEIR*TEC, SouthEast and Islands Regional Technology in Education Consortium

New ways of assessing and reporting progress are needed.

Despite advances made in the effective integration of technology into instructional settings, a key barrier remains: the need for a quality gauge of student, educator, and systems progress.

Barbara Reeves, state technology director in Maryland, spoke on two key elements to school reform efforts:

Accountability: setting very specific standards and targets and measuring progress toward those targets...also making our progress very visible.

and

Data-driven decision-making: using the data we're collecting to make key decisions, all the way from the shape of instructional programs in a classroom or school [to] the forming of state budgets.

New evaluation tools are needed.

On day one of the conference, Margaret Honey, Director of the Center for Children and Technology, moderated a panel of experts who discussed several evaluation tools for educators. Developed by both for-profit and not-for-profit groups, as well as a consortium of business and industry leaders, these tools are designed to help schools:

Cooperate and collaborate Share expertise and assistance Use technology effectively for teaching, learning and managing Assess and track their progress in relation to established, research-based benchmarks.

Miles to go before we sleep--much yet to be accomplished.

Educators, researchers, business leaders, and other stakeholders are working hard to develop comprehensive ways to gauge and report progress on all three levels. More work is needed and many questions remain unanswered. Conference participants took a major step by delving into these questions and the complex issues behind them, but the process is ongoing.

Question #6: What is the policy roadmap that would build the capacity of communities and schools to move toward more effective uses of technology in schools?

We often talk about school board members and other policymakers as them and us. They are us, and we need to educate them. They are not the enemy.

-Conference Participant

Thirty second sound bites aren't really improving the discourse on education.

-Conference Participant

Schools need to undertake major changes to fully exploit technology.

-Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

While these assessment prototypes are still under development, they do offer illustrations of the way that technology can make classroom assessment of complex skills more feasible.

-Barbara Means, Bill Penuel, Edys Quellmalz,
SRI International

More recent research, however, shows that young people who are accustomed to writing with computers perform significantly worse on open-ended questions (that is, not multiple choice) questions administered on paper as compared with the same questions administered via computer (Russell & Haney, 1997; Russell, 1999; Russell & Plati, 2000).

-Michael Russell

The possibilities:

…      For teachers:

The rapid changes in standards, assessment, content, curricula, and educational technologies create a massive need for ongoing professional development. Effective online courses can revolutionize professional development. But a set of economic, political, and practical problems must be solved.

-Robert Tinker, Concord Consortium

Participants spoke positively about the need to develop deeper relationships with policymakers. There is a prevailing belief that keeping the lines of communication open is the key to satisfying everyone's needs. At the same time, there were two distinct notes of caution sounded. The first is that policymakers should not expect short-term results of incredible magnitude. They must acknowledge that investment in educational technology is an investment in the future. Second, educators and administrators acknowledged that they can and should play a more active and honest role in keeping policymakers informed of real gains.

Participants recommended showcasing student successes directly to board members and other policymakers, going to their offices, inviting them into classrooms, and keeping community and business partners informed at the local level so that knowledge can "move up the system."

They recommended policy actions to enable the education community to:

Question #7: What can we learn from business and industry?

There are no multiple choice questions in business.

-David Polashek, Conference Participant, Superintendent,
Oconto Falls Public School District, Oconto Falls WI

Creativity, being able to stay on task is critical. The state capital of Vermont is not, as long as students know how to get the information when they need it...[When hiring] I want to get a sense of how people think through issues. Imagination is more important than knowledge. So how do you make the connection between the two?

-Jeffrey Orloff, Conference Participant, Apple Computer, Inc.

[The best community partners] see that it's in their best interest to help strengthen schools and to give frameworks and support for school districts to be able to make change happen.

-Cheryl Williams, National School Board Association

There is a growing sense that business models have a lot to offer schools.

Despite differences in culture and patterns of technology use, increasing numbers of school partnerships with businesses have revealed some important common threads. Several of this year's participants mentioned the valuable experience of "being on both sides of the fence," having worked in education and moved to business or vice versa. In addition, business and industry leaders often have a solid sense of critical 21st century skills and can offer educators key connections to the real world environment in which they are used.

Robust and equitable access to technology, conference participants agreed, goes beyond school and district buildings. Many suggested that good business partnerships were necessary for ensuring after-hours access.

Story: Kinko's for Kids

Lorin Somerlot, a teacher at New Albany High School in Ohio, spoke of the success of her school's partnership with a local Kinko's. The copy center, located on the school campus and run as a Kinko's franchise (in partnership with the Columbus Metropolitan Library), is known as Kinko's for Kids. Lorin proudly points out that the center is entirely self-funded. With its many computer workstations, students have ample opportunity to access technology even when they can't at home.

According to Eric Benhamou, a keynote speaker from 3Com, educational stakeholders would be wise to mirror industry trends to increase access to technology. Benhamou sees these trends as involving the following: