We provide links to government resources that provide information about educational reform, various other education reform sites , and a list of web sites that explore diversity in one form or another. The diversity sites provide useful resources for dealing with issues of race, culture, and gender and explore the social conditions that strongly impact all efforts at educational reform. The best role for technology is to make community-centered constructivist classrooms sustainable for the teachers. Technology is a powerful tool that can congruently support those emphases. Yet, it is far from an isolated cure-all for those intent on mending schools.
Technology is a necessary component of broad systemic educational reform.
Systemic reform begins with examining underlying beliefs and assumptions so that all students will be successful learners and achievers. It involves long-range assessment of what students need to know and be able to do when they enter the world as adults. For many it means developing the student learning outcomes and standards commensurate with that assessment, designing the instructional approaches, strategies and curricula for attainment of those long-range student learning outcomes and standards, and determining the comprehensive services which support the students and their families. In that process, many educators and parents identify accessing, analyzing and evaluating information as some of the essential skills needed by the 21st century worker as critical thinkers and collaborators in a multicultural and multilingual global world. These are skills learned and developed through the use of technology.