Lenny Gonzalez

The promise of technology in the pursuit of learning is vast — and so are the profits. The SIIA valued the ed-tech market at $7.5 billion. With daily launches of new products promising to solve all manner of problems — from managing classrooms to engaging bored students with interactive content to capturing and organizing data, to serving as a one-stop-shop for every necessary service, choosing from the dizzying number of products on the market can be confusing.

But when it comes to the  specific task of helping students, what’s the best app in education? “A web browser,” said Chris Lehmann, Principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a school that’s embraced technology for years. “Or a Google Doc, or anything that gives you the ability to make a film, or to research, to create, to connect or collaborate,” he said.

Lehmann is famous in progressive education circles for his quote: “Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” His point: The best technology allows students to explore and create “artifacts of their own learning.”

“The question is, how will technology allow students and teachers to network their learning, to collaborate with each other, to extend the reach of what kids can learn beyond the walls of the school,” he said. “How can technology be used to unlock what hasn’t even been thought of yet?”

These questions are more difficult to answer, and less tangible to measure, than improving test scores, which is what typically draws the attention of educators. But placing too much emphasis on raising test scores will eventually backfire, according to educator, author, and consultant Will Richardson, whose book Why School, was recently released.

“Technology can be an amazing thing for learning, but the way we’re looking at isn’t amazing at all,” Richardson said. “If all we’re doing is valuing test scores, then we’re just using technology to deliver the same traditional curriculum. We have to be thinking about what’s the goal of using technology. What do we want to have happen?”

The premise for using products and software that claim to raise test scores is appealing to lots of educators: leave the “drudgery” part of learning — drill and practices exercises — to software and games, which will then free up teachers’ time to take on more interesting tasks, like applying the knowledge they’ve gained to projects that can lead to deeper learning.

“But my fear is that we’ll never get to that second part,” Richardson said. “As much as we would like to see the opportunity to spend time with kids, and see learning dispositions, we’re not going to value it as much as test scores, because we’re not assessing for it. It’s not showing up in our comparisons, our scores, our grades.”

Richardson, who has embraced the use of technology for learning for many years, says we must ask the question: What’s the goal of using technology? What do we want to have happen? “I’m not inherently against any use of technology, but want us to really think about where it’s going. If it’s about efficiencies of scale, or something more.”

WHERE TO FIND INFORMATION

Currently, schools and educators can look to the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse for some types of information, though it’s been criticized for not being comprehensive or current enough in its coverage of product reviews. In more recent events, just last week, two economists from the Hamilton Project proposed creating a nonprofit called EDU STAR “that would provide the technology and reporting resources for schools looking to quickly and cheaply test education technology products,” according to an EdWeek article.

For thorough online research, there are sites that offer useful reviews of products, such as EdSurge, which is building up a comprehensive repository of up-to-date product information, including things like how the product works, how it’s used, which school districts use it, what platforms it’s available on, price and more. EdShelf, another excellent product information site in Beta, is also a good source, as is ClassroomWindow.

For schools and educators considering tech purchases, there are guiding questions that can help make sense of the ed-tech market, and get to the heart of what matters: reaching students. Hack Education has created an excellent list of questions for ed-tech entrepreneurs to consider when creating products for educators, as well as a list of concepts and ideas that educators should know about technology. And there are countless news outlets and teachers’ blogs that dig into many of these ideas, too.

DEFINING THE CRITERIA

At the ISTE conference in June, where thousands of ed-tech vendors showcased their products, Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Technology Director, talked to educators and helped create the following list of questions to ask when considering tech purchases.

• WHAT DOES IT PROMISE TO DO? Is the main purpose to build students’ knowledge of content, or is it to develop skills and dispositions? Are there meta-cognitive strategies or learning strategies associated with the product?
• WHAT DO YOU EXPECT IT TO DO? Do you expect the product to raise students’ test scores? To grab students’ attention? To flip your classroom? To open up dialogue? To help students’ inquiry process? Be clear about your goals.
• WHAT CRITERIA WAS THE PRODUCT DEVELOPED AGAINST? How was the product conceived and who designed and built the product? What classroom experience does the designer/entrepreneur have? What research was done during the designing process? Was it piloted in schools? Is this a rapid prototype with the flexibility to change and improve?
• HOW WILL IT HELP OR CHANGE TEACHERS’ ROLES? Will the product keep the teacher in the center of the action in class, or will it give more control to students? Does it help the teacher meet the needs of the students, and if so, how? Does it augment teachers’ performance?
• HOW WILL IT CHANGE WHAT HAPPENS IN CLASS? What kind of class environment does it create? Does it encourage collaboration, risk-taking, and student control? If the product is software that allows kids to do practice exercises, how will classroom time be spent on that subject? Will a different kind of curriculum be created, and who will create it? Can hands-on projects be incorporated into class time that build on what students have practiced on computers?

• HOW DO OTHERS RATE THE PRODUCT? Just as you would do with a personal purchase, checking Amazon reviews, Consumer Reports, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter recommendations, asking friends, do your due diligence and research to find out what other educators like and don’t like about the product. For example, some schools have already experimented with certain kinds of software that’s billed as adaptive, or encouraging critical thinking skills, and found that some are much better than others, and have switched. Sharing this knowledge can help educators root through the overwhelming number of choices, and find products that deliver what they promise.
• HOW WILL IT SCALE AND GROW IN THE FUTURE? If the product is going to be used systemically, how sustainable is it? What are the chances that the company will stop providing this service, or start charging or raising fees? What’s the ease of adoption and use? Are there built-in ongoing improvement processes?
• IS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT NEEDED TO USE IT? If so, how much does it cost, and how much time will it take? Too often new technologies are not used to their maximum potential, or are left completely unused. Educators should make sure they have the time and budget allotted to ensure smooth transitions, and that the principal will make professional development a priority.
• IS IT A NATURAL FIT? This question is also quite subjective. The best product should be like electricity, Kator said — there’s no question whether you should or should not use it. There should be an intuitive need that the product fulfills, rather than having teachers tangle themselves into knots trying to find ways to use it.
• IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT? This is the most complex question to answer. How much is the cost compared to the amount of time and effort it takes to train staff to use it and to implement it system-wide? Based on what other educators have said, is it worth the time and effort?

What other questions are important to ask?

Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning.

The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school. Each of these issues plays an important part in the equation that influences school policy around filtering websites. For example, do students and teachers use social media sites like Edmodo or even Facebook for class purposes? Are educational videos on YouTube part of teachers’ curriculum? In large school districts, does it make sense to have individual school policies? Are students allowed to use their cell phones?

Part of the investigation into what filtering policies to put in place revolves around understanding current rules and regulations — and that’s the problem, according to Michelle Luhtala, a librarian at New Cannan High School and one of the primary organizers of Banned Websites Awareness Day.

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are,” she said. “Most people are working off of policies that predate 2003, and so much has happened since then, and continues to happen.”

In a recent survey of nearly 700 teachers, principals, and school librarians, conducted by MMS Education and co-sponsored by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data, 55% of respondents said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access to Web 2.0 tools (social media sites) for teachers, and 23% said they had very restrictive policies. And when it came to students, 44% said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access, and 47% said they had very restrictive policies.

Most of the blocked sites are either social media sites, or have some element of public sharing of information, and that’s where school administrators need to be more flexible, Luhtala said. “Administration more than teachers need to open their minds to the value and potential of social networking for educational use,” wrote a survey respondent. “CIPA needs to be spelled out more specifically or made clearer to IT in education so that filters are not blocking sites unnecessarily.”

In the meantime, what should educators do when they try to access a site in school that’s blocked by the school’s filter? Luhtala offers the following advice.

1. PRESENT FACTS. Direct people to the Department of Education’s suggestions in this article (posted below). “This is a really valuable resource for tech directors who aren’t well informed about the details of legal aspects,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes IT directors tell other IT directors who say, ‘Just do what the lawyers say,’ and it becomes a giant case of the game Telephone. The DOE is the ultimate authority, so this article forces them to look at their agenda and policies.”
2. CONSIDER SMART POLICIES. Study CoSN’s Guide for Acceptable Use Policies for filtering and other issues, and their recent report Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, which clearly states, “Before steps are taken to impose limits on the use of social media and mobile technologies in schools, policymakers and educators need to consider the consequences for learning that such restrictions would produce… Such action should carefully consider the advantages of social media for learning and that these guidelines for responsible use bring media into mentored environments where they can be safely explored and shared.”
3. CREATE A DIALOGUE. Start a conversation with people who manage the filtering system. “A lot of policies have been in place for 10 years or more,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes they assume products are inherently bad, but if they understand that they can be tools for learning, they can see constructive purposes.”
4. GET AN EARLY ADOPTER ON BOARD AND TAKE BABY STEPS. Collaborate with an innovator, and see if you can work on a project that includes a site you want unblocked. Get parent and school authorization to try out the pilot project and document the process along the way in order to share best practices. Try it out for five weeks and see how it goes.
5. USE AND SHARE RESOURCES. Read the American Association of School Librarian’s Essential Resources site and add your own resources to help others spread the message and educate other educators.
6. WADE INTO SOCIAL MEDIA. For those who have yet to start using social media with students, Luhtala suggests “take steps to try to understand what all the fuss is about.” But that will take time and training, as one survey respondent pointed out. “I believe it offers us potential opportunities to further engage our students. However, in order to maximize this potential we must provide teachers and students with additional trainings,” the anonymous respondent wrote in the survey.

When you’re ready to take action, here are the list of myths dispelled directly by the Department of Education’s Technology Director Karen Cator:

• Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
• Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
• Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
• Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
• Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
• Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

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: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.

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 an obsolete testing system, a hungry tech industry eager to jump into the education sector, a receptive Secretary of Education who wants to provide incentives for innovations, and successful examples of school models that are showing signs of high student achievement AND engagement.

But these changes will happen whether or not government on any level or the entrenched public education system mandates them.

“My recommendation is not to try to prescribe anything,” Bush said in reply to my question about schools’ trepidation in using fast-changing technology and the disruption of bring-your-own-devices models. “I think we should not do what public education has done for over 100 years — to prescribe how it needs to be. We need to make sure that we don’t pick winners and losers. We need to assume that technology will change, assume that there will be adaptive software, assume that there will be demand and there will be supply fulfilled.”

He continued: “I think we have a tendency to try to take our core beliefs and prescribe rules around how it will work. But 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.”

Wise added another important point: “Legislators cannot legislate technology,” he said. “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.”

By far more important than waiting for rules to be created is to jump in. “The alternative is not to, and that’s a fatal mistake,” Wise said.

Mistakes will be made, no question. As a new testing system is created, how we measure learning will change, but all the steps to get to that ideal will go through lots of iterations, too. Whether we’ll go to competency-based rather than age-based assessments (at the moment it’s comparing apples to oranges), whether the textbook industry will crumble in the wake of free, open-source content or if it will adapt, how teachers will respond to new blended-learning models, whether the majority of online schools will prove to provide high-quality education — none of these issues will be resolved cleanly.

But from what I’m seeing, the momentum has been set in motion.

Larry Gonzalez

I’m at a small gathering of education journalists, policymakers and school leaders today, and in attendance is the Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator.

Cator told me that teachers continue to thank her for outlining these important clarifications about schools blocking access to Web sites. For those who haven’t seen the original article, which followed an article about surprising blocked Web sites, here it is again.

Cator parsed the rules of the Childrens Internet Protection Act, and provided guidance for teachers on how to proceed when it comes to interpreting the rules. To that end, here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools.

1. Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
2. Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
3. Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
4. Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
5. Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
6. Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Here’s the full transcript of my Q&A with Karen Cator.

Q. Please describe what CIPA does and does not mandate.

A. CIPA does require that any school that funds Internet access or their internal network connections with E-rate has to implement filters to block students’ access to content that could be harmful to minors.

The best way of thinking about this whole topic is in terms of “rules, tools and schools.”
There are rules in place for a good reason. CIPA does require that we block or filter inappropriate sites, but if sites are found that are deemed appropriate they can be unblocked. So having the process in place for unblocking sites is definitely important.

Q. Is it illegal for teachers to access these sites, too?

A. These sites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites. They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.

Rules are in place to attempt to protect minors form inappropriate materials. We also need school-based rules –  usually in the form of acceptable use policies that students sign that say, “I will use this computer or access the Internet, and I agree to abide by rules in my school.” Sometimes it will say that if you come across something inappropriate that you shut it down immediately and tell an adult.

The second way to address this topic is by thinking about tools. These are technology tools that are put in place to filter sites that are inappropriate. These filters are getting better and better. What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game. These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering. Better filters would be incredibly helpful.

The third way to address the topic is at school or home in the form of education.
How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space. We also want students to be nice to each other, and not to engage in bullying, in an online space where their voice is amplified and persistent. We want students to grow up to be good digital citizen.

So there are rules that are in place, the technology tools in the form of more intelligent filters, and then it is an absolute necessity to provide good digital education for this generation of students. And that requires providing professional development for adults working with these students.

Q. Just to be clear, are schools or teachers circumventing rules if they show YouTube videos or other blocked sites to students?

A. Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules. The rule is to block inappropriate sites. If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it. Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.

All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.

If a filtering system is not intelligent enough to sort sites out, then the teacher is the next best one to do so. If a site is blocked for a teacher, then the I.T. person can unblock it if that’s the way the network is set up.

From the DOE’s National Education Technology Plan:

Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety on the Internet

E-Rate is a federal program that supports connectivity in elementary and secondary schools and libraries by providing discounts on Internet access, telecommunications services, internal network connections, and basic maintenance. Schools, school districts, and consortia can receive discounts on these services ranging from 20 to 90 percent depending on their level of poverty and geographic location.

Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on compliance with several federal laws designed to ensure student privacy and safety on the Internet. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet access or internal network connections with E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ access to content that may be harmful to minors, including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities.

Ensuring student safety on the Internet is a critical concern, but many filters designed to protect students also block access to legitimate learning content and such tools as blogs, wikis, and social networks that have the potential to support student learning and engagement. More flexible, intelligent filtering systems can give teachers (to whom CIPA restrictions do not apply) access to educationally valuable content. On the other end of the spectrum, some schools and districts filter students’ online activities with proxy servers that meet CIPA requirements but are easy to get around, minimizing their utility for managing and monitoring students’ online activity.

CIPA also has posed challenges to accessing school networks through students’ own cell phones, laptop computers, and other Internet access devices to support learning activities when schools cannot afford to purchase devices for each student. Applying CIPA-required network filters to a variety of student-owned devices is a technical challenge that may take schools months or years to implement. However, districts such as Florida’s Escambia County Schools have created technical solutions and accompanying acceptable use policies (AUPs) that comply with CIPA regulations, allowing Web-based learning on student devices to run on networks supported by federal E-Rate funding.

Source: Universal Service Administrative Company 2008.

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 premise behind  Connected Online Communities of Practice, a directory of professional teachers networks created by the D.O.E. and the American Institutes for Research. The organization aims to launch new online communities of practice, conduct design experiments, undertake case studies, and develop ideas about new designs and infrastructure. After reviewing all the nominated online professional networks, the organization’s technical working group, a who’s who of innovative education thinkers, will produce a report about best practices.

Other goals on the horizon for the D.O.E.:

• Equity of access to all Americans. If schools are able to provide access to technology, Cator said the goal is provide the same access at home, as well as teach them how to use the technology so they can “fully participate.”
• Connect basic research to the marketplace. With all the research and development that’s being done in government agencies, the goal is to connect that knowledge to those who create products.
• Connect entrepreneurs to investors. Through organizations like Startup America, a way for smart ideas to find their way to those who can bring it to life.