My Blog My Vision 4/24

Throughout the textbook Romano has showed us his great vision for education and his ultimate goal of technology dependent curriculum. In these last three chapters he discusses several potential problems with the implementation of this curriculum as well as ways he thinks we can overcome these problems and an intermediate he called the technology enhanced curriculum.

What stands out to me the most is his discussion about standardized curriculum. How is it that something fairly standard in most other major countries is so foreign and terrifying for our educational system? Is it really that terrible to expect students to learn certain materials in a specific grade? Do our teachers not already do this in an informal aspect? I know my teachers always have. Nothing was set in stone, but they usually expected you to have learned certain things the previous year. More than likely they interact with the other teachers and know what you should have learned, but in my mind this is the start of standardization. If teachers can communicate within a school and know what is expected from year to year is it really that horrible and scary for them to group together among a school district, county, state, or even country? We are seeing a start with this with the current state testing systems, but as one of my classmates pointed out in her blog its difficult for the teachers when students transfer from a different state just before the big test. How can that student be expected to do well and is it fair that that students scores (which may or may not be good) are counted in the school's performance numbers?

Is Romano realistic in his ideas? I believe so. No one can argue that things change. There is no stopping change, it happens every day around us in nature and culture and schools, etc. The key thing I looked at when deciding if his ideals are realistic was time line and implementation. First, Romano talks about an intermediate plan of technology enhanced. He understands that most changes must happen in small increments. The other main point for me was that he does not place a time limit on how quickly he believes this will happen. I guess my point is that it will happen we just do not know when. It may be in our lifetime it may not, but I do believe eventually we will be a technology dependent education system.