#technology standards

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It's an old saw that teachers hate standards—and I'm not sure it was ever all that true. In my experience, teachers simply hated when administrators yelled out "Well, I'm not sure your lesson was meeting enough standards" every time they were backed into a corner—as if there was some sacred chord you could strike, a perfect lesson, where each and every standard in the entirety of the state curriculum could be met in unison. Me? I like the theoretical concept that we all have at least some cursory agreement about what students should learn. I gives me faith in my profession and a generally warm and pleasant feeling inside. To be fair, not all standards are created equal. Math and science standards are a lot more concrete then their literacy and social studies brethren.[^1] At my school, we like to approach things in a somewhat pragmatic way (most of the time, at least) and we think it's super-important that we have some idea of what technological skills we'd like our students to have after spending three to seven years with us. Sounds simple, right? When you graduate, what skills should you have? It almost sounds like—in the most advanced country in the world, where most of the jobs that will exist in the next decade will be in knowledge work—that there should be some kind of standard set of expectations for what students should be able to do to compete in a digital economy, right? Wrong. There are a number of organizations that have taken it upon themselves to create frameworks of twenty-first century learning standards but for the most part, they make the fading New York State English Language Arts standards sound ultra-precise. I don't want to hurt feelings, so I'll summarize. For the most part, they go something along these lines Students will: * be creative and innovative, * be able to use information and conduct research, * be able to communicate and collaborate, * be able to use technology effectively and productively, * and think critically and solve problems. That sounds good. I think that most teachers who take their jobs seriously can agree that these are all wonderful, but what does that look like?[^2] How does that manifest itself in our curriculums and daily lesson plans? I'm starting to believe that the people who write this stuff only have a very base-level understanding of what modern day technology is all about. They've heard of the cloud and they've gotten pretty good at email (so long as their technician has set up Mail.app on their iPhone for them).[^3] But, they don't have any real understanding about what this all means. They'd be hard pressed to give you a working definition of what an API is or the general framework of how a web application is constructed. They don't actually have a clue about what we should be teaching our students. I'm not saying I know either, but it's taken me about a week to come to that conclusion and I don't run conferences or charge consulting fees for my best guesses. Collectively, We have our students for six hours a day for 12 years and yet, only very few technology (or other) teachers scrape beyond "How to Make a PowerPoint Presentation". Sure, this stuff can get a little hairy at times, but we teach trigonometry and chemistry to everyone under the sun, would some basic programming really hurt? We can do better. [^1]: When I taught eighth-grade science, one of the standards was "Students will understand that the moon orbits the Earth." Can do. When I taught seventh-grade literacy, it was "Students will be able to recognize the point of view of a character in their independent reading novel." Not so cut and dry. [^2]: I'm extremely sympathetic to the argument that anything we teach our students today will be obsolete by the time they hit the workforce. That said: One, that does't excuse people who I can only presume make six-figures from having no plan at all. Two, I learned how to _really_ use spreadsheets 12-or-so years ago and its probably one of the most helpful things I ever learned. [^3]: By really good, what I mean is that they've learned to change their font to Mistral and the color to lavender as well as include both an [impotent confidentiality notice](http://www.economist.com/node/18529895) as well as an annoying note about not printing your one line (before the confidentiality notice) email out. Shucks, I was going to pin it on my fridge.