Introduction

The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) standards include five areas:


 * AECT Standard 1 (Content Knowledge): Candidates demonstrate the knowledge necessary to create, use, assess, and manage theoretical and practitioner applications of educational technologies.
 * AECT Standard 2 (Content Pedagogy): Candidates will be encouraged to grow as practitioners within a supportive community of practice that enables them to demonstrate effective implementation of educational technologies based on content pedagogy.
 * AECT Standards 3 (Learning Environments): In 1999, the National Research Council released its canonical synthesis of How People Learn, which was followed in 2006 by the more detailed Handbook of the Learning Sciences. These books are rich in their portrayals and examples of researched best practices. As noted in the Definitions (pp. 8, 243-245, 246), it is important for candidates to study these effective practices and use this research to inform the design of 21st century learning environments. This is important not only in creating new learning environments, but also in using educational technologies created by others. Candidates need to inform their adoptions by the principles, theories, and effective practices documented in the scholarly literature. (pp. 8-9, 168-169, 246) These findings help candidates understand why they need to use multiple forms of assessment (p. 53), including metacognitive supports that make visible the learner’s reflections and enable an instructor to provide scaffolding and guide revisions to improve student learning and reasoning. Managing such a learning environment requires that candidates know how to establish mechanisms (p. 190) for maintaining the technology infrastructure (p. 234) that learners interact with to improve learning and performance. (p. 238) Use of the technology needs to be ethical (p. 246). By teaching about copyright and fair use (p. 297), candidates need to help users understand that everything found on the Internet is not free. Learning environments need to value diversity (p. 10) by creating a community that values cultural differences (p. 296, 309), promotes caring for other people, and discourages use of the Internet for bullying, discrimination, or hateful practices that hurt individuals and harm society overall.
 * AECT Standard 4 (Professional Knowledge and Skills): Candidates will be able to design, develop, implement and evaluate technology-rich learning environments.
 * AECT Standard 5 (Research): Candidates explore, evaluate, synthesize and apply systematic methods of inquiry (p. 13) to enhance learning (p. 4) and improve performance (pp. 6-7).

The Duquesne University Instructional Technology Program recommended the use of these standards in designing a comprehensive professional portfolio.

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