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 Fryer is heading up the effort of figuring out how to gather new and different kinds of evidence, Cator said.

• Finding ways to learn from each other through collaboration.

For the most part, this is being headed up by Mark Edwards, superintendent of Moorseville Graded School District in North Carolina. Edwards is organizing the first meeting for the League of Innovative Schools on Nov. 28-29, with superintendents from around the country, as well as education consultants and service providers. (See more about Edwards’ views on learning technologies in this PBS Newshour video.)

At the moment, the Digital Promise Web site is very much a work in progress — a repository of comments and input from educators and school officials. Under the Grand Challenges tab, the site asks: What challenges in teaching and learning can technology help us solve? Comments include things like quality professional development for all, how to use video games for learning, how to best support innovators, how to implement flipped teaching in class, and using technology for performance assessment.

Under the League tab, the site asks: “How are you using technology to advance teaching and learning in innovative ways?” People have offered up things like offline and online mobile learning, software that tests and trains reading, and online assessments. Some of the ideas here seem to be written by those who have created educational products, but there’s also feedback from those who want to share their own experience and ideas.

Other recent initiatives from the DOE:

• The Learning Registry, a central repository of online education portals where those who create education content can collaborate and share resources. What does this mean for educators? They can find a list of resources like PBS Learning Media, a trove of 16,000-plus educational digital assets and resources organized by grade and subject area, and Smithsonian Education, which provides free access to almost everything under the Smithsonian umbrella.
• Microsoft will take over the DOE’s TEACH campaign, the online advocacy and recruitment program, which includes the Teach.gov site. As Edweek’s Ian Quillen points out, Microsoft has been involved with the Federal Communications Commission’s “Connect to Compete” program to bring broadband to low-income communities, “as well as launching programs to offer discounted hardware and software to educators and digital literacy training to the public.”

Read more about the DOE’s plans here.

This post was updated to clarify the number of digital assets on PBS Learning Media.

Flickr:Tsakshaug

By Sara Nolan

A few weeks ago, the Department of Education introduced its Digital Promise, an initiative to invest in “breakthrough technologies” aimed at transforming the way teachers teach and students learn. Though the message from the top about the importance of leveraging technology seems to be clear, it’s a different story on a local level.

A recent SIIA study indicates a decline in what had been steady progress toward schools and universities building technology and e-learning into their frameworks. Karen Billings, vice president for Education for the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), links this change in part to the economic climate. She notes that it’s not just budget cuts, but also the emotional impact of those cuts — and of prolonged economic hardship in general — that’s affecting how schools buy and integrate technology.

“I liken it to the situation that many companies are finding themselves in,” she says. “Even if they find themselves with some money in the bank, they’re waiting longer before making any decisions about what to do with it. They are too nervous about the future.” Particularly when it comes to bringing in new technology, she says, schools are taking a longer time to evaluate the products and their potential impact and long-term viability because they think “they can’t afford to make the wrong decision.”

In this highly charged context, however, sometimes even the right decision can seem like the wrong one. “There is definitely a problem in communication of those programs,” Billings says. She’s referring to the flack that schools face when community concerns – and media headlines – focus on issues like budget cuts, layoffs, and overcrowding. “Computers in the classroom might be right for one school in a district while at the same time they’re needing to close another school because it’s under-performing or under-enrolled. But once it hits the papers, it’s ‘They’re closing schools and adding computers.’”

As the PTO co-president from tech-rich, budget-embattled Kyrene recently put it in the New York Times article, “You don’t go buy a new outfit when you don’t have enough dinner to eat.” This is recession psychology, and it has a powerful hold on the way we will fund technology in education going forward.

These aspects of recession psychology at work speak to the current state of our “animal spirits” – the human emotions and outlooks that drive economic action. In the book Animal Spirits:
How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, authors George Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller address “the sense of trust we have in each other, our sense of fairness in economic dealings, and our sense of the extent of corruption and bad faith.” What those animal spirits seem to need now — if they are to be boosted in this or any other area of the economy — are equal parts hope and hard facts.

In Billings’ analysis, this means that educational technology companies need to be prepared to speak to current and potential users in terms of long-term value for their investment – especially in terms of instructional and administrative efficiencies. “Some schools might choose to switch to a virtual field trip, for example” she says. “They save money on gas, buses. But that needs a lot of bandwidth, so that’s where the investment is.”

Take, for example, the cost of iPads. Last year, Presidio Middle School in San Francisco piloted an algebra class using the iPad, funded by the publisher of the algebra curriculum, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Pam Clisham, the principal, knows well that the devices are costly.

“They’re expensive, but so are textbooks,” she says. “If you had one iPad and all of your textbooks were on your iPad, it would be the same cost. Right now textbooks are running $50 or $60 dollars a piece, plus supplementary materials.” Once you add the cost of each textbook per student per year, the investment in the devices are more than justified.

But it’s more than just about buying the devices. It’s about the mindset around change. When it comes to deciding on priorities, former Governor Bob Wise, president of the Alliance of Excellent Education, said recently: “By the time you get to a consensus, that technology has leapfrogged over you. What you have to do is to provide flexibility that allows systems to move. It’s recognizing that technology is like water, it finds its levels, it moves.”