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Recently I was looking through old paper files in the Learning First Alliance (LFA) office and happened upon a successful grant application that LFA had received some years ago to gather, record, and disseminate the knowledge, skills, and approaches successful school districts use to ensure their students achieve to their highest abilities.  The project resulted in a publication called Beyond Islands of Excellence that, indeed did chronicle what goes into an effective public school system and profiled districts whose students had benefited from their wise, effective leadership.   I was struck by how much the scope of work described in the successful grant application articulated the concepts and big ideas that LFA organizations and their leaders still work diligently to implement today.

I was also reminded that we’ve known the answers and approaches that drive innovation and school success for some time when I attended a core partner meeting earlier this month for Digital Learning Day at the Alliance for Excellent Education.    Digital Learning Day (DLD) is planned for February 1, 2012, and invites everyone who cares about effective K-12 public schooling to celebrate the bold, innovative educators who are embedding digital resources into their teaching and learning activities on a daily basis.  DLD aims to launch, with a series of Town Hall Meetings, a yearlong push to incorporate new technologies and the resources they support into teaching and learning activities across the nation.  This high-profile, ambitious project is one I support personally and LFA supports corporately, which is why we signed on as a core partner. 

Having said this, I’m still mystified as to why it’s so difficult for us, both professional educators and interested community members and parents, to understand, visualize and support the inclusion of modern digital technologies and resources into schools.  Since the late 1980’s my career in education has focused on the appropriate and effective use of new and emerging technologies in the learning environment.  My colleagues and I in the education technology arena acknowledge that we’ve been great at communicating about innovative practices, dynamic teachers, forward-thinking administrators, and technology-rich schools and districts to each other and those who have been concentrating on this aspect of schooling for some time.  And, while we support Digital Learning Day and other such efforts to help a wider audience understand the work we’ve been immersed in for years, it is my fervent hope that this “launch” will be the last and that what we now plan to showcase, and one more time, explain will become so routine in the K-12 teaching and learning environment, a special day and/or year will no longer be necessary.