With over 400 educators, parents, interested community members, and business leaders present in a Department of Education forum in 1995, a vision for education was cultivated to guide districts and school systems. This section will show you their conclusions.

Learning in the 21^st Century

The following requirements were identified for learning in the 21^st Century:

• A greater dependence on new communication and computing technologies that support new levels of student creativity and research.
• A change in the role of teachers from "sages on the stage" to mentors, researchers, publishers, technology users, knowledge producers, risk takers and lifelong learners.
• Involvement of parents to play a major role in the education of their children and to work actively with teachers to connect formal and informal education.
• Partnering of local businesses and other community organizations so they become actively involved in the schools.
• Collaborations that bring students, teachers, and researchers together to create new curriculum for K-12 learners and adult learners.

Building Schools of the Future

The following conditions were recognized as critical elements of future schools:

• Schools of the future must be open and flexible.
• New communication should promote new collaborations and a higher level of cooperation and creative problem-solving.
• Teachers must be supported in their use of new technologies for learning and also in their use of technology for professional development and collaboration.
• Learners must be able to use technology to achieve new levels of learning and to acquire new information age skills and abilities.
• Educational managers need to use technology as a tool for managing schools and learner communities.
• Free from one geographic location.
• Supportive of all learning styles.
• Teachers must be researchers and mentors (Maryland Virtual High School WEBSITE)
• New skills required in info-society: abilities to quickly adapt to new situations and new technologies and to be able to process bast amounts of information
• "’The only way a school or district will get sustained support for quality professional development in technology is when the line administrators and top administrators are active technology users’" Van Wilinson
• Administrators and managers need professional development as much as their staff.
• Principals, superintendents and school boards must provide teachers with adequate training and support to effectively use the technology in their classrooms. They need to understand how the current structure of a teacher’s and learner’s day impact on their effective use of the technology. In effect, managers must provide the vision of change that includes empowering teachers and learners in new ways and then must learn how to effectively manage these empowered teachers and learners."
• New on-line communities
• "’Education needs to SELL its beliefs to industry and start a cooperative partnership.’" Perry Brown, Anderson County Schools Office of Technology in Clinton, Tennessee. "’If we can make students life-long learners, then industries would not have to pay 20% of their manpower budget on retaining! The point is, if we can do the job right, then industry would be SMART to help fund us – we would be saving them money in several ways."
• Give to the community as well as asking from it. Create a vision and a reality in which the school is creating value for the community and the technology is enabling the technology to be created.

In this section:

In the Toolkit: