National, International, NGO, & Corporate Reports on Technology in School

• 21st Century Skills: Education and Competitivenes (pdf)
  Released in September, 2008, this report makes the case that the U.S. will fail as a competitive economy and as a nation unless it's educational system is changed to develop 21st Century Skills in its students. This is a "must-read" for educators, technologists, decisionmakers, and everybody else. It provides the rationale for their conclusion and recommendations for action. Many more reports are available from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills on their resource page.
• Toward a New Golden Age in American Education
  U.S. National Technology Plan (2004)
• Reading First Impact Study
  2008 Report of the U.S. Department of Education's multi-year study on it's Billion Dollar "Reading First" program to improve reading acheivement in schools. From the main page, you can download a PDF of the entire report (214 pp) or the executive summary (11 pp) (I highly recommend the executive summary). While this project did not have a strong technology component, it used the concept of "research-validated" teaching materials and methods.
• Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products
  2007 Report of the U.S. Department of Education's multi-year study on the effectiveness of the best reading and mathematics software on student achievement. Only software that met the department's guideline for "research-validated" effectiveness was included. From the main page, you can download a PDF of the entire report or the executive summary (16 pp) (I recommend that you start with the executive summary). Many, many millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on grant programs that were required to use software such as the packages evaluated in this study.
• 2009 K-12 Horizon Report from The New Media Consortium
  This annual report presents a three-year forecast of the application of emerging technologies to K-12 education. This is a perceptive analysis that can add to our vision of education in the near future.

Reports & Major Articles on Science, Technology, & the Future

• The State of the Future 2009 (published Aug. 1, 2009)
  Annual report of the respected Millenium Project. Here's the Executive Summary (10 pp) (recommended); the detailed full report with CD costs $49.95. This is the clearest view of the future by an established institution.
• IT in 2018: From Turing's Machine to the Computing Cloud (free subscription required)
  This 2008 8-page PDF report by former Harvard Business Review editor, Nicholas Carr, presents a vision of IT management ten years from now. By extrapolating current behind-the-scenes trends, he presents a highly likely scenario that will dramatically change traditional IT infrastructures, impacting costs, staffing, infrastructure, purchasing, and more. It's as applicable to schools as it is to businesses. Nicholas Carr is the author of the 2008 IT management bookThe Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. You'll need to register on the website to download their free whitepaper reports. Other reports of interest on the site include an Adobe whitepaper Delivering on the Promise of e-Learning.

 

About this site

This is a supplementary website for TLT 471, a graduate course in the Lehigh University College of Education. It is designed to remain permanently accessible to students and their colleagues long after the course is over.

U.S. Capitol photo by slonecker

~photo by acurerightnow