Along with fine arts and foreign language, the Ohio State Board of Education announced in December 2003 the adoption of the Ohio K-12 Technology Academic Content Standards.
Click here for a PDF of the Ohio K-12 Technology Academic Content Standards.
According to the document, the standards are an integral component of an aligned system to ensure no child is left behind. The standards should also be able to clear delineate what students should know and be able to do in technology, arts and foreign language.
However, experts disagree the standards established by the state can be easily followed when teaching technology. According to them, standards are neither clear, nor specific about what students should learn and how teachers show go about inserting technology as a tool in their lessons.
“There’s a whole book about two inches thick of technology standards K-12 they are supposed to be getting by the time they leave school in the state of Ohio but there’s no way, near, anyone comes close to that,” said Chris Fahey, teacher at Archbishop Hoban.
Fahey teaches several technology classes at Hoban and was also in the committee for the Summit County board of technology education. In the past, he taught technology classes on the Barberton School District.
Click here to read more about technology in the classrooms.
“If there was a more direct requirement on the schools all the way along to teach the standards when it comes to technology I think the kids would be a lot better off, but they are very nebulous,” Fahey said. “You can go almost 20 million directions with mosts of those standards. I don’t think anybody is really teaching them.”
Nebulous standards, lack of time from teachers and students, and an overdue update that doesn’t come since 2003 have preempted teachers to give students the technology education they need.
“We found that the standards written at Ohio State by professors and teachers from across the state are getting pretty old, said Chris Pashke, technology coordinator at Firestone High School. “They were written in 1999 and revised in 2005, but now the terminology, equipment and software has changed.”
Pashke is working on updating the standards to what teachers are teaching now. He doesn’t want to throw out the standards in place now. He just mostly wants to update the terminology and software used. He and a group of teachers wrote questions and sent them to the state.
“What they’ll probably end up doing is putting a committee together and they’ll revise them again,” he said.
Pashke was told that the state is currently revising math and other conventional standards and will hopefully get to IT standards by 2013.
Andy Emanuele, head of the instructional technology department of the Akron Public Schools, helped put together the technology standards available today, and knows well that teachers across the district are not following the established standards.
He knows teachers don’t have time to teach all the content required by the standards. To him the standards available now are more like guidelines to show teachers how they could use technology in the classroom.
“The deal is to get the teachers to do it and then come back to tell you how they did,” said Emanuele, who trains Akron Public Schools teachers on how to use technology.
Emanuele himself is a former teacher and employed technological tools in his math classes.
Through those classes, he said he taught students how to use Microsoft, Excel and PowerPoint.
“Instead of going through here saying, ‘OK, we need to teach Microsoft Word and now we need to teach this,’ the standards are a tool,” Emanuele said.
“We could [use the standards] and say, now let’s have technology class, but first of all: there is no time for it,” Emanuele said. “I don’t want to pull students from math, English, science classes to have them sit down and say: ‘you push this button, now you push this button and here is what the program does.’”
Emanuele gives the example of teaching students Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Word during a math class.
He explained he would take a concept such as interest rates when buying a car and show students how to do it in an Excel spreadsheet. Students would get in group and then use either Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to give a presentation to class on how they solved a problem involving interest rates.
“It’s funny to watch them because once you teach them how to use Excel they get all excited because they think ‘look, it does the arithmetic for me,’” Emanuele said. “It takes them about December to figure out ‘we have to write the formula, though, so he tricked us into doing the hard part.’ Excel does the easy part, it does all the calculations.”
That, Emanuele explained, is a way to use the state standards in the classroom. However, he recognizes not all teachers do what he does when it comes to including computer skills when teaching high schoolers, which is what the standards propose.
Click here to read more about the obstacles of teaching and learning technology education.
For Fahey, what students learn, or not learn during elementary school will reflect on what technology teachers can go over when these students get to high school.
“If they are on elementary school, they may get to go to a computer lab with a ‘computer teacher,’ half an hour a week, so how can you teach a whole grade worth of standards in half an hour a week? Is just not going to happen,” Fahey said.
But teaching technology to high school students also becomes a problem when some of them received the standards, but others didn’t and students leave middle school to high school with different levels of background.
“In the high school level if you get them to a technology class, many times you are doing catch up from the stuff they should have got all along but they haven’t,” Fahey said. “Plus the regular classroom teacher has only so much technology knowledge along with their regular discipline.”
Fahey said ordinary technology skills are often left to regular teachers to give, and that they are not always a priority when there is so much that needs to be done, as for example, concentrate on standardized testing.
Despite the difficulty of teaching loose standards, Fahey that being allowed a certain flexibility to deal with them may offer benefits as well because it leaves room for teachers to teach what they would like to focus.
As now, Fahey said there is not enough time for learning technology when most classes this type are electives or taken once a week with another subject such as English or Math. To keep up with current standards he believes students should take a technology class every year.
“So, no. I don’t think any student in the state of Ohio meets the standards set in technology,” Fahey said. “The only way to ensure that, is to make sure everybody gets the class every year by the time they enter school.”