A recent article at the Huffington Post has recalled attention to the issue of the too-slow integration of technology into K-12 education in the United States of America. It is a refrain that we have been hearing for years. Parents and politicians want the education system to reflect the different ways in which we acquire and utilize information in the 21st century, but the system lacks the proper investments in either infrastructure or teacher training.
Huffington Post specifies that schools overwhelmingly refuse to free up teacher time to address the deficit, which exists in the first place because of the inadequacy of teacher preparation programs when it comes to information technology.
By all means, we should continue advocating for policies and practices that lead to the rectification of this problem. But in the meantime the unfortunate situation is that teachers, parents, and other individual stakeholders are stuck doing what they have had to do in so many situations in the past: take it upon themselves to compensate for some of the shortfalls of the system as a whole.
Providers of IT training products and online IT training consultancy are clearly prepared to respond to such individual demands. And that surely reflects the fact that those demands are already in place. Huffington Post notes that of all the products created by educational technology companies, only about one fifth of them are geared toward K-12 classrooms, while the rest are spread out among higher education, leisure, and corporate training.
If about a quarter of the users of these technologies are willingness to use them outside of formal circumstances, presumably a similar proportion could make the same personal investment in USA online IT training courses and development. The skills taught through an online IT training consultancy will be increasingly important to young students as they grow, and especially as they move into careers where they will need to utilize business analyst training and other skills that are closely connected to IT know-how. As such, it is valuable in the short term for teachers and parents to be information technology experts to the greatest extent possible.
The USA education system on the whole may be unwilling to create this situation for the time being, but I know that many educators and policymakers are not. For this reason, online IT training consultancy exists as an alternative source of tech training for certain committed and industrious educators, parents, mentors, or any others who might be able to use what they learn there in order to help young children in the development of tech skills that they will need later in life.
It also exists for school administrators, including the administrators of tech-conscious charter schools, to utilize on-site and online software training courses and similar resources for the sake or providing their instructors with the training that the USA education system as a whole cannot yet provide.