Facebook Find - Education Week: National Standards Gain Steam

From today’s Facebook, my personal learning network colleague Nicky posted a link.

Education Week: National Standards Gain Steam

Source: www.edweek.org

National standards—once the untouchable "third rail" of American education policy—now have the backing of the nation’s governors, a growing number of education leaders, and the U.S. secretary of education.

I say let's take this a step further. Whether American's like it or not we're moving toward a globalization at lightning speed. Let's jump forward and begin working on International standards. Comparing how students across a City (ie NYC standards) is powerful, comparing how they're doing across a state is more powerful, comparing how they're doing across the nation is even more powerful, but more meaningful than any of that is where we stand globally.

An ISTE Crosswalk by Six Major Categories

The ISTE Crosswalk by Six Major Categories may be helpful for innovative New York City educators who are interested in knowing and sharing how the International Society of Technology for Education’s (ISTE) Technology Learning Standards and Performance Indicators can be associated with suggested New York State Learning Standards and Performance Indicators using ISTE’s six major categories.

The Crosswalk lists each of ISTE’s six categories in the left column and then standards from a variety of content areas in the right column. I find the chart useful, but not extremely user friendly. If I had time I would rework and turn it into four separate charts following ISTE’s standards and break it down by Grades PK - 2, 3 - 5, 6 - 8, 9 -12. I would then put column headings for each area covered: technology, math, literacy, social studies, etc. Then each column would be filled in and clearly aligned with the standards and performance indicators by grade level and content area and educators could quickly identify what they need.

Unfortunately, I don’t see myself doing that anytime soon, so in the meantime, this is a helpful tool to enable innovative educators to start thinking about alignment of the National Education Technology Standards (NETS) and state standards. Along these lines, my assignment for ISTE is to align their standards and performance indicators with international content standards.