This is one in a series of posts examining the Common Core State Standards and the conversation surrounding their impact on teaching and learning.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the site-crashing interest that schools and educators have in the new Common Core assessments being developed now. It’s widely understood that they will be more rigorous and focus much more on requiring students to apply knowledge and make connections across subject areas.

So there’s a lot of chatter about the yet unknown content of the assessments, and how well kids will do on them when they’re implemented in the 2014-15 school year. Ultimately, this is how most students, teachers and schools will be evaluated, so it’s high-stakes for everyone involved.

The other big bucket of “unknowns” related to the assessments has to do with implementation and infrastructure since the tests supposed to be delivered online. Education Week has a great feature here about the big technology-related questions that are still up in the air.

Do all schools have the right kinds of devices to deliver the assessments? Do they have enough bandwidth to administer them? And if they need upgrades and to make significant purchases, where’s the money going to come from?

Do all students (some of whom grow up surrounded by digital devices at home, and some who don’t) have enough experience with the tools to be assessed fairly?

And it’s not just the schools that need to adapt. The test-makers are wrestling with the need to try to meet schools where they are infrastructure-wise, while still developing assessments that meet their and others’ expectations.

This will all have to be settled in the next couple of years.

Are your schools getting tech-ready for the Common Core?

(Flickr photo by tolomea)