Wednesday, 23 May 2012
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Education IT
US: A ‘Digital Promise’ for classroom technology
US President Barack Obama has launched Digital Promise, a national centre and non-profit initiative under the White House promoting technology in the classroom.
The initiative will identify and support the most effective education technology innovations and expose them more broadly to schools across the country. Digital Promise will look into educational software development, helping educators evaluate its suitability and how effective it could be for learning, and digital tutors who can help students better learn subjects like mathematics.
“Digital Promise is a unique partnership that will bring everyone together—educators, entrepreneurs and researchers—to use technology to help students learn and teachers teach,” President Obama said in a statement. “There’s no silver bullet when it comes to education, but technology can be a powerful tool, and Digital Promise will help us make the most of it.”
Digital Promise will receive start-up funding from the Education Department, a cabinet-level department of the United States government, as well as philanthropies and have a board of leaders in education technology appointed by Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, based on Congress recommendation.
“By harnessing the extraordinary work being done by educators, innovators and citizens across this country, Digital Promise can help prepare Americans—and America—to succeed in the 21st century,” Duncan said.
Under the statute that Digital Promise was created under, the centre’s purpose is “to support a comprehensive research and development programme to harness the increasing capacity of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy.”
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3 Comments
On 5 October 2011 Jim Knight wrote:
The White House is taking a step in the right direction with the launch of Digital Promise to support the long overdue movement to digital education technology innovations, resources and state of the art cutting edge eTextbooks for today's digital kids.
Its time we started helping today's digital kids get excited about learning again.
On 6 October 2011 Jerrilyn wrote:
For a moment I was hopeful that this meant there would be more technology coming to schools, but I'm afraid it sounds like more money going to educational publishers and private companies to create products we don't have the hardware to use.
On 11 October 2011 Ryan Winston wrote:
The internet is still in its infancy in terms of the potential for enhancing education. Online learning is just one facet of this, and it too is just beginning to demonstrate its true potential. Having gotten my bachelors and masters the traditional route, I was skeptical about getting involved with online learning. This article: http://educa… was helpful in showing me how online learning can be very beneficial.