A seminar held in Washington D.C, by the National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training (NCTET ) entitled, 21^st Century Educators; Using Technology to Improve Student Achievement, discussed how technology can help create an exciting, productive classroom for teachers and students alike. They brought in a fifth grade teacher, Kristen Orndoff, and a high school principal, Eric Sheninger, to talk about how they use technology in their schools. Concluding remarks from Tom Carroll, the President of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) provided perspective.

The National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training is a nonpartisan organization that examines and supports the use of technology to improve education and training in America.

Kristen Orndoff talked about how technology is utilized by her fifth grade students. She feels, however, that across the country students are still powering down before they come into their neighborhood school. The schools can’t keep up with the students. One of Kristen’s main points was that with No Child Left Behind, there has been an emphasis on testing. She does not feel that students learn a great deal through testing. Students need to be producers of information, not test takers. She also spoke in favor of project-based learning, as it encourages students to grow through collaboration and discovery. She read a letter from two second grade students who recognized that their school could not provide the technology that they realized they needed to exceed in school. The students noted with some dismay that the computers in the computer lab were older than they were.

Kristen finished her presentation with three main suggestions: (1) Teachers need to have proper training materials and support to help them utilize technology, (2) students should be producers of information, not takers of tests, and (3) curriculum needs to adopt project based learning as the main model.

Eric Sheninger is principal of New Milford High School in Milford, New Jersey. His goal is to establish learning environments that are student-centered, collaborative, flexible, and will help prepare students for the 21^st century. Eric has also been named as one of Twenty to Watch by the National School Board Association in 2010.

Eric benefits from the partnership he has with many of his students. When he had ideas of how technology could help his school, he was able to consult with various students and get some good ideas on how to proceed. He has been able to utilize Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Poll Everywhere in his attempt to communicate with his students, their parents, and with the rest of the school community. His challenge is to communicate while spending the least amount of money.

His students do not have enough space to store all their digital documents on school equipment so they are accessing GoogleDocs to utilize their Cloud technology. Poll Everywhere provides a low cost way for teachers to get instant feedback from students in the form of quizzes and polls.

Eric wants to inspire and empower educators with support, modeling, and flexibility. Teachers need to have more support from their school community, modeling needs to be present so teachers can see the types of teaching that work well with 21^st century students, and everything needs to be more flexible.

Tom Carroll, of NCTAF, summed up the event by suggesting that we are now in the Learning Age. For a period of time we were part of the Information Age but we now understand that we need to be learning from the information that we have. And to paraphrase John Dewey, learning is no longer the preparation for the job, but rather learning is the job. But in order to make a successful school environment, we need to transform teaching. Within the next five years 1.8 million teachers are preparing for retirement. At the same time many new teachers teach only between 1 and 3 years. It is hard to develop a good school environment if teachers are preparing to leave the job.

We need to develop an open learning environment that acknowledges that the distinction between teacher and student is blurring. A truly productive 21^st century learning environment has everyone learning together.