- Home
- Agencies
- Department of Agriculture
- Department of Housing and Urban Development
- General Services Administration
- Department of Commerce
- Department of the Interior
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Department of Defense
- Department of Justice
- National Science Foundation
- Department of Education
- Department of Labor
- Office of Personnel Management
- Department of Energy
- Department of State
- Small Business Administration
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Department of Transportation
- Social Security Administration
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Department of the Treasury
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Department of Homeland Security
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Goals
- Initiatives
- Programs
Primary tabs
Strategic Objective
Technology and Innovation
Strategic Objective
Overview
To achieve the president’s 2020 college attainment goal, the nation’s education system will need to graduate many more college-ready students from high school, ensure they have access to postsecondary education, and support them as they complete their degrees—all while facing resource constraints. When other sectors of the economy need to become better, faster, or more productive, they innovate, often relying on technology for help. The education sector is no different, and the need for innovation—and its benefits—spans grade levels, curricular areas, and student needs.
A 21st-century infrastructure that harnesses modern technological advances and provides easy access to high-speed Internet can serve as a platform for greater innovation in education. Accordingly, the Department will continue to focus on ways to improve schools’ technology infrastructure and effective use of technology. It will also continue to work with Congress to establish a new advanced research projects agency for education that will use directed research and development activities to pursue breakthrough technological innovations in teaching and learning.
Technology holds the potential to expand all students’ opportunities to learn, including by supporting personalized learning experiences, providing dynamic digital content, and delivering more meaningful assessments. Technology can also help districts and schools support teachers in becoming more effective and better connected to the tools, resources, and expertise students need and help them meet more rigorous college- and career-ready standards. Technology can also help schools by providing students and school library media specialists with increased access to academic tools and other resource-sharing networks. Technology can also help schools by providing students and school library media specialists with increased access to academic tools and other resource-sharing networks. Technology-enabled instructional and assessment systems will be pivotal to improving student learning and generating data that can be used to continuously improve the education system at all levels. Innovative technology must be matched by innovative educational practices to maximize its potential to improve learning and instruction for all students, and it must be accessible to all students, including students with disabilities. Leadership is essential to ensure that innovative applications are disseminated and brought to scale.
Read Less...Progress Update
The Department, in consultation with OMB, has determined that performance toward this objective is making noteworthy progress. The Department made many successes during FY 2015, including a call to the country’s 16,000 superintendents who lead district, charter, and private schools to join the Department in taking the Future Ready District Pledge. By taking this pledge, superintendents commit to develop, implement, and share technology plans with other districts so they can learn from successes and challenges along the way. The Future Ready District Pledge offers a roadmap to achieve successful personalized digital learning for every student and affirms a commitment by districts to move as quickly as possible toward the shared vision of preparing students for success in college, careers, and citizenship.
To support the work of the superintendents, the Department collected a series of best practices for connecting schools, providing devices, and preparing teachers to use technology effectively. These practices were published in guides released at the “ConnectED to the Future” superintendent summit: Future Ready Schools: Empowering Educators through Professional Learning and Future Ready Schools: Building Technology Infrastructure for Learning. The Department also issued a Dear Colleague letter to state and local superintendents to clarify that technology and digital learning can be an allowable use of more than $27 billion in federal funds under the ESEA and IDEA. Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) modernized School and Libraries (E-rate) program, raising the E-rate cap an additional $1.5 billion per year and reprioritizing internal connectivity. With that added funding, E-rate will now provide up to $3.9 billion per year to schools and libraries for both connectivity to and bandwidth within these institutions.
In April 2015, former Secretary Duncan announced the release of the Ed Tech Developer’s Guide: A Primer for Developers, Startups and Entrepreneurs—the first guidance from the Department specifically for developers of educational software. This guide addresses key questions about the education ecosystem and highlights critical needs and opportunities to develop digital tools and apps for learning that will help close equity gaps in our schools. Written with input from knowledgeable educators, developers, and researchers who were willing to share what they have learned, the guide is designed to help entrepreneurs apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education. The release was followed by a national Ed Tech Developers Tour, spawning more than twenty events around the country to promote the guide and highlight administration priorities regarding the creation and use of educational technology in schools. This guide is now the most downloaded publication from the Department’s Office of Educational Technology.
In September 2015, the Department announced the hiring of the first ever open education adviser to lead a national effort to expand schools’ access to high-quality, openly licensed learning resources. In support of the President’s ConnectED goal for high-quality, low-cost digital learning resources, the open education advisor will focus on helping both P–12 and higher education connect with teaching, learning and research resources in the public domain that are freely available to anyone over the web. With this position filled, the Department is able to work with tool providers and developers, district and state leaders, and educators to expand the use of openly licensed educational resources at scale in districts and states. Open educational resources are an important element of an infrastructure for learning and ranges from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks and games.
Also in September, the Department awarded a contract to develop approaches for evaluating educational apps to help schools and parents make evidence-based decisions when choosing which apps to use with their students. This project will establish a standard for low-cost, quick turnaround evaluations of apps, and field test rapid-cycle evaluations to understand how to improve outcomes of ESEA and now ESSA programs. In addition to generating evidence on specific apps, the project will help develop protocol tools for conducting rapid cycle evaluations of apps that practitioners, developers, and researchers can use beyond the scope of this evaluation.
