The Bytes & Books ball last night was full of high spirits for the Obama administration and the prospects for greater investment in education technology for the nation’s schools.
“I think there are very good times ahead for ed tech,” said Mark A. Schneiderman, a lobbyist for the Software & Information Industry Association. “President Obama believes very much in what teaching and learning can look like if technology is used efficiently.”
Schneiderman is also the treasurer of the National Coalition for Technology in Education and Training (NCTET), which hosted the event. He brushed aside a suggestion that a flood of federal stimulus money—including $1 billion for ed tech in the current House Democrats’ version of the economic stimulus plan—would lead to careless spending.
The House proposal guards priorities such as training teachers, he added, by directing the money through the federal “Enhancing Education Through Technology” law—which has a “strong professional development set-aside [requirement].”
While optimistic, another ed-tech lobbyist nonetheless was concerned about the toll that local budget cutting might take on ed tech in schools. In the grip of fiscal difficulty, school districts tend to make cuts across the board, said Keith R. Krueger, the chief executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking, which represents school technology leaders. CoSN is preparing a “toolkit” on how to make budget cuts without restricting innovative uses of technology.
For example, by investing in computer “virtualization,” which allows one piece of technology to be split or cloned for a wide range of uses, schools can lower energy costs.
In these difficult times, Krueger said, ed-tech leaders should be asking: “Are there new and better ways to do things we’re already doing?”
He added that if the last eight years were about accountability, the next four should be about accountability and innovation.
Former U.S. Ed-Tech Directors in Attendance
Two former directors of the U.S. Department of Education’s office of educational technology were there, in flowing ball gowns.
Susan D. Patrick, who had a stint in the middle years of the George W. Bush administration, is the president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (formerly the North American Council for Online Learning), which has members that include all the major providers of online K-12 schools.
Linda G. Roberts, who was ed-tech director in the Clinton administration and the first person to occupy the job, has spent the last eight years advising companies and serving on the boards of Wireless Generation Inc. and Sesame Workshop and on advisory councils of education organizations.
In an e-mail after the event, she wrote that the economic stimulus package provided a long-awaited opportunity to do things that have not been possible before.
“I hope that this new investment in technology will be tied to what we now know about learning with technology (the conditions under which technology is used effectively) and focused on 21st- century skills, active engaged learning, critical thinking, and knowledge creation.”
Many in the ed-tech community view Roberts as something of a prophet, and she said that with the arrival of the Obama administration, she did feel like she was returning from “eight years in the wilderness.”
Yet she was not seeking job offers, she said. “The way I think I could be most helpful would be in an advisory capacity.”
Award for Innovation
Marco A. Torres
(Photo by Jeanne McCann)
NCTET presented awards recognizing contributions to education technology. The recipients included filmmaker and philanthropist George Lucas; Barbara Stein, formerly an ed-tech policy expert for the National Education Association who is now working for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills; Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was represented by a member of his staff; and Linda Darling-Hammond, the education adviser to the Obama campaign.
Another awardee, Marco A. Torres, the recipient of NCTET’s Innovator Award, is a teacher at San Fernando High School, north of Los Angeles. He was recognized for his groundbreaking work in helping local students make documentary films as a way to learn social studies, language arts, and other subjects.
Torres told the group gathered at the ball that the Internet and modern software tools can now provide every student with a studio for producing content, a stage for displaying their creations to others, and a community of peers for sharing ideas, such as through online social networks. But to use these tools, teachers had to reexamine their traditional methods, he said.
“The challenge now is for teachers to ask questions, not just do it the way they have done it before,” he said afterward, in an interview.
Torres said that when he leads professional development programs at his school, which he describes as “rough,” he tells teachers, “You have three options: quit, complain, or innovate.”
