7B - UNESCO ICT Standards

The approved educational technology plan for Williamsburg James City Schools sets out a five year plan to meet the educational technology goals for the division. The primary focus of the plan “is to ensure educational excellence and equity, providing all teachers and students with the resources, knowledge, and skills to thrive in technology intensive, ever changing, global society in which we live.” The division plans to meet this goal using a strategy that addresses infrastructure, an instructional technology standard, student computing, administrative computing, support and training, and curriculum integration. The plan describes an incorporation of numerous technology tools into the educational environment and then the training and support component necessary to make them effective.

The vision laid out in this plan is very similar to the technology literacy model found in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) ICT Competency Standards for Teachers. The technology literacy model’s approach “is to prepare learners, citizens, and a workforce that is capable of taking up new technologies so as to support social development and improve economic productivity.” The UNESCO model also mentions making resources available and finding ways to incorporate them into the curriculum.

WJCC is currently in the process of revising the educational technology plan and that plan seems to focus more on the knowledge deepening model of UNESCO. The idea that students have more control over their own education by engaging with significant problems or questions of various subjects and then attempting to solve those problems or questions. This plan has not yet been approved and I don’t see WJCC making strides to meet the goals of that idea just yet.

Currently I am involved in the WJCC vision as an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT). My role as an ITRT is to assist in the integration process. I teach the teachers how to use technologies to effectively instruct the students. My fellow ITRTs and I are on the front lines of technology integration. We are the ones providing the training and support to the teachers. We do this through division wide, school wide, team or curriculum, or one on one training sessions where we review and demonstrate appropriate uses of technology for instruction. Currently we are working to shift from basic instruction on how to use tools to greater integration of tools into instructional practice. We are in effective working to shift from the technology literacy model to the knowledge deepening model.