Technology Vision Statement from a Private School in NYC

I was recently going through some emails and noticed that at one of my kid's schools, a private school in NYC, they have a Technology Vision Statement which was crafted in 2004-5.

Here's the statement:

The school's vision is to create a community where students can search, experiment, serve others and grow in an atmosphere of mutual respect, cooperation and trust.  We are committed to educating each student intellectually, aesthetically, spiritually and physically.  Each student is offered a challenging education that develops intellectual abilities, ethical and social values.

The use of technology at "the school" expands these educational aims and values.  Its goal is to help create a learning community in which students work with computers to develop a new ways of learning and thinking.  Technology thus serves as a medium of thought and expression and is broadly integrated into the curriculum to provide students with the ability to:

Explore

• Gain an awareness of the appropriate and ethical use of technology, with an emphasis on intellectual integrity
• Use their curiosity and perceptions to help develop the skills necessary to access, interpret, evaluate diverse educational reference materials and resources
• Internalize their learning by actively working to gather, interpret and process authentic information to solve actual problems
• Participate in many different learning situations in the same classroom: group projects, individual pacing and differentiated instruction

Express

• Become fluent in the use of software applications that encourage the development of their critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities
• Facilitate their development, organization and  presentation of ideas
• Communicate with teachers so that the instructor becomes a facilitator in open-ended learning activities, where students and instructors can learn from each other
• Creatively express themselves verbally, in writing and through the use of multimedia presentation tools

Exchange

• Use diverse modes of collaboration and communication in order to encourage and facilitate peer to peer cooperation rather than competition
• Access appropriate educational and research communities worldwide to sustain an expansion of inquiry beyond the classroom and the school itself, thereby making the world’s resources part of everyday educational activity
• Take advantage of global community resources, become exposed to diverse cultured and have the ability to publish their own accomplishments, projects and thoughts
• Make advance research a part of their daily school life

Technology empowers teacher to meet diverse learning need in a stimulating hand-on approach to learning.  When technology is efficiently integrated into the curriculum, it enables students to meet current learning goals while helping to prepare them for a life in the twenty-first century.

I really like this statement for a variety of reasons.  Even though it was written more than five years ago, it shows that the school was ready to take on the responsibility of incorporating technology into their school curriculum.  I notice that a lot of times my child has to do an assignment at school which consists of, for example, using PPT or using comiclife.com to create a report.  When I watch her work on these assignments, I can tell that there is an enormous amount of pride in her developing computer technology skills.  In fact, I think she tackles these assignments, possibly, with more rigor and creativity than just a regular word document paper.  If I was to add something to the statement for 2011, it would be to cover the use of social media--blogging, RSS, etc. and to write something about students learning to be producers of technology culture, not just consumers.

Overall, I think the committee did a really nice job, years ago! of having a tech vision for the school.  I'm excited to see what they come up with for 2011.