Department of Education

Three Goals to Spark Innovation and Collaboration

Flickr: Spacepleb

It’s been roughly two months since the launch of the Department of Education’s Digital Promise, and though it’s still very early in the process, a few pointed goals are emerging.

The main premise behind Digital Promise is to serve as a national center for research to spur innovation that will improve learning through technology, said Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Director of Technology.

At this point, the center has three goals:

1. To bring smart ideas based on sound research to those who can bring it to life. More specifically giving entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators who create new learning products a central place to access the vast amount of research that’s already been conducted about how we learn and ways to improve learning.

2. To offer challenges and prizes as an incentive to those who can find ways to vastly improve opportunities to learn.

3. To create an organization where schools and leaders can work together on problems with using technology to improve learning. This group is called the League of Innovative Schools, and at this very early stage, it’s a loosely knit collaboration of people who’ve expressed interest in becoming involved.

Within this group, there are three specific goals.

Making sure that schools and districts are informed and supportive of innovation when investing in new technologies — it’s what Cator refers to as “smart demand.”
Gathering evidence and learning more about what’s already happening in schools and districts with respect to using technology. Harvard professor and Macarthur Fellow Roland Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Tech Tools, Department of Education, Digital Promise, Karen-Cator, League of Innovative Schools, Microsoft

October 19, 2011 | 10:36 AM | By Audrey Watters

Should a New Tech-Innovation Agency Be Created?

Matt Biddulph

Today, most of the education world is focusing on how No Child Left Behind might change with the reauthorization of ESEA — the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

But as the Senate Education committee prepares to mark up ESEA, another under-the-radar amendment is also being considered — one that has historical ties to the Department of Defense.

It’s called ARPA-Ed, and it stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Education, a program President Obama proposed at the beginning of the year. If the name sounds a lot like DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that’s intentional. DARPA was established in the 1950s as a response to the Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik spacecraft and was meant to protect the United States’ technological supremacy. Although it’s a Defense Department agency, DARPA research isn’t tied to specific military missions. But it has been responsible for a number of technological innovations with sweeping implications, including, ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet.

Can the successes of the military’s R&D program be duplicated in ed-tech?

The creation of ARPA-Ed aims to tap into this history and to signal that the country urgently needs to invest in technological research to maintain its educational edge, or be at risk of falling behind.

The legacy of Sputnik and DARPA have been invoked by President Obama many times this year as he’s talked about the importance of technology and education. He talked about Sputnik Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, ARPA-ED, Department of Education, Policy

September 21, 2011 | 2:07 PM | By Tina Barseghian

School Will Change, With or Without Following Rules

Flickr:CrunchyFootsteps

Public education is, by its very nature, tangled with policy, dependent on rules and regulations set by federal, state, and district mandates. What most students do in school at any given moment has been prescribed by legislation passed years before they — or their parents — entered kindergarten.

But things are changing — and quickly. With access to the Internet and learning devices in the hands of kids and teachers, and with technology ever-evolving and becoming ever more affordable and ubiquitous, the school experience will have to change.

“We can create much more dynamic results that will change with time if we’re flexible than if we take the top-down approach from the smartest people in the world.”

This was the big message echoed yesterday by folks like the Department of Education’s Director of Technology Karen Cator, Innosight Institute’s Michael Horn, former Governor Bob Wise who’s now president of the Alliance of Excellent Education, and former Governor Jeb Bush, of the Foundation for Excellent Education. They were gathered to talk to journalists from around the country about how and where these changes are happening.

What’s unusual about this moment in time is the collision between a number of forces at work: a strong-voiced, growing grassroots movement of teachers who object to having their hands tied by Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Bob Wise, Department of Education, Innosight, Jeb Bush, Karen-Cator, Michael Horn

June 28, 2011 | 2:48 PM | By Tina Barseghian

Four New Initiatives from the Department of Education

data.ed.gov

Interactive map on data.ed.gov

“Now is the time,” said Karen Cator, director of education technology at the Department of Education. “We’re at this incredible inflection point as we go from print to digital.”

Cator enumerated the ways in which the D.O.E. is helping to make the shift between the print and digital world at the ISTE conference yesterday.

1. TRANSPARENCY. Data.Ed.Gov is an interactive map that pintpoints which schools in the U.S. have broadband. It’s a collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Inofrmation Administration. “If we can build those kinds of maps that we can layer on what’s happening in all these schools around country, that provides transparency and something that people can aspire to, follow,” Cator told me late last year.

2. DIGITAL LITERACY. DigitalLiteracy.gov was recently launched by a group of federal government agencies to help build computer and Internet skills, a free resource for anyone. A description from the site: “To provide librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others a central location to share digital literacy content and best practices. These trusted groups can, in turn, better reach out to their communities in providing them the skills today’s employers need.” Educators have their own dedicated link.

3. BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE ADVICE. For educators who want to find the best way to leverage their students’ devices, whether it’s their mobile phones or home laptops, CoSN’s newly launched Access4ed provides a host of resources about working experiments. From the site: “It will include conversations around key issues, case studies from districts addressing them, discussion of policy issues and how to address them, and opportunities to connect with education leaders in districts similar to and different from yours.”

4. CLEARING HOUSE FOR PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS. Cator described it to me this way: “If I’m a teacher, I maintain a profile, I let others into my professional learning network to see the conversations and the communities I’m a part of. I can follow fellow educators that might be involved in interesting projects and trying new projects in the classroom. So it goes beyond just following people on Twitter, but creating a profile for professional educators.” The idea of this “persistent online profile” is the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Tech Tools, CoSN, Department of Education, ISTE, ISTE11, Karen-Cator

February 16, 2011 | 1:18 PM | By Tina Barseghian

What’s the New Narrative in the Education Revolution?

Flickr:DaehyunPark

To Will Richardson, the word “reform” is inadequate in describing what needs to happen in education. “Transformation” is more accurate, and for years, he’s been actively proselytizing the need for a complete restructuring of the public education system. Richardson is now galvanizing his educator peers to send a loud — and just as importantly, clear — message to parents about “the new faces of learning and change in schools.”

His challenge to his peers: “Can we leverage the networks that we currently have to bring 10,000 (or more) parents together across the country next fall to hold a real conversation about education and change?”

I spoke to Richardson, the author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms about his views as an educator, about information control: adults (teachers and parents) figuring out their changing roles in children’s lives, and what it will take to move the needle. (Part of the conversation is in last week’s post “The Control Shift: A Grassroots Education Revolution Takes Shape.”)

Q. Being an educator yourself and spending so much time with educators, what do you think their perception is of this issue of control?

I talk about this a lot, and I help at least start conversations around why things are changing. The biggest shift that educators have to make is away from content expertise, and it’s a tough one for people to make. At the end of the day, we have to examine what we’re doing in terms of content in the classroom. It should be more about learning, helping kids get content on their own.

The control piece is really big because, if it’s acknowledged, it really leaves teachers and educators with this empty hole. “Well, if we’re not doing that, then what are we doing?” That’s where the conversation needs to be. And that’s not where a lot of people want to go. It’s a hard conversation to have. It’s very difficult for people to see themselves in a decidedly different role in the classroom.

It’s very difficult for people to see themselves in a decidedly different role in the classroom.

But the interesting thing is that all of them will acknowledge that it’s happening. I don’t think there’s anyone fighting really hard for the idea that schools should be the places where we’re the ones who should mete out content, or that because content online is unfiltered and unedited, you can’t trust it. But it’s hard to take that next step, and say, “Okay, so we really do have to change the whole concept of what we do at school, and away from content delivery to learning, and we really do have to change our roles as teachers to co-learners and supporters and mentors?”

And the parent part interests me too.

I don’t think parents really have a clue, in general. I think parents understand that schools need to do something different – but “different” doesn’t equate to anything really different at the end of the day because they want their kids to pass tests, get to college, do all the things that we define as traditionally successful. It’s less on the minds of parents in terms of real change in schools.

[Parents say]: “There are places that are experimenting on that stuff, but don’t experiment on my kid. I want those grades. I want those scores, that diploma.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, assessment, Control Shift, Department of Education, National Education Technology Plan

January 26, 2011 | 10:09 AM | By Tina Barseghian

Teachers: Do You Have a Question for Arne Duncan?

Department of Education

Following last night’s State of the Union address by President Obama, the White House will host a State of the Union Education Roundtable on Thursday, Jan. 27.

PBS Teachers has been asked to solicit questions from teachers about the education issues the President raised. A sampling of popular questions will be posed to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during the livestreamed Education Roundtable event on January 27th at 3:15pm. Submissions and voting for questions will close at 12pm on Thursday, January 27th.

Teachers can submit questions here.

Some samplings indicate this will be be a lively discussion.