Name: How to Bridge the Tech Gap in Education
Uploaded: 2016-07-12
Duration: 10 min 11 s
Description: Educators discuss.

How to Bridge the Tech Gap in Education

We took the brainstorm idea for brainstorm Tech quite seriously this year and organized a 2.5 hour brainstorm with some of the finest lines and education to talk about the singular problem we've seen in edtech, which is wide scale adoption in all American schools of education technology that actually works. So we had educators, entrepreneurs, center capitalists, activists all in one room for 2.5 hours, and we came up with 34 recommendations. We got 24 and here to talk about them. Walter Isaacson, who, among many other things that the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute our host way told me how far back we go. Walter. I was Walter's intern at Time magazine in the early 19 eighties. Before he was an editor. You were a writer, was just a writer. I used to bring copy on this stuff called Paper printing right is to deliver the copy of the news engineer's office, and one of your jobs was later on. One of my jobs was getting credentials for the political conditions changing the ribbon. Oh, yeah, I changed the ribbon on the a P printer. I especially how old were all? Yeah. I just want you to know that we were talking about digital things here, but we've come a long way interrupting the show. Uh, well, Walter actually started. Time inks first digital, uh, experience, I guess. The website Pathfinder, which is the beginning of all the websites that now host 120 million people on a time timing. And, uh so, yes, he's done all that. And he's also the chair emeritus of Teach for America, which is relevant to our discussion right now. And we're also lucky to have Barbara Jenkins, who is the superintendent of Orange County public schools in Florida. She's only been there for, what, four years? 55 years. And in that time, I'm trying to count how many awards your district has one. Um, including the broad prize for education in 2014 and a bunch of other things that got you some money for the kids. So welcome. I think Walter is going to just go into a little bit of the philosophy behind the brain storm. And then Barb was going to do the big reveal of the recommendations. Last year after brainstorm, we talked about things we could, you know, uh, deep dive, I think. John Needham, Alan Murray myself knowing Pearlstein's few others. So I talked about the importance of education technology. Uh, concurrently, things kept hitting me. Kaya Henderson asked to come by. She was then chancellor of Washington schools. And she said, You know, my biggest problem is all sorts of entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, business entre was creating great products for education technology. And they want to come to my office and pitch it. And I have no idea whether it's supposed to be sold at the teacher level. The school level, the district level, you know, for me is the superintendent how to pick them out. And it occurred to us that there really is neither a process nor a way to turn this into an industry. There are a whole lot of nonprofits doing really good stuff there a whole lot of startups trying to get traction and their big companies like Pearson. But the surprising thing is, after eight or nine years of us thinking that MOOCs and digital curriculum would change everything and one of the last things Steve Jobs told me when I was writing a biography of him was if he were going to, you know, one of the things he wanted to still do was to get rid of the textbook industry, destroy them, and to create this digital curriculum to the schools. He even hired Eo Wilson to do a thing, and then Steve passed away. So what surprises me is that five years later, if you go into a classroom, it hasn't really disrupted things quite as much as we thought. Even though a lot of people are very successful in their things. So we tried to figure out, How do we make this bigger? How do we take it to scale? And, as importantly, how do we make sure it's not just do good feel good philanthropic stuff, But people who are real entrepreneurs like you, all who are building new companies don't just say Okay, let me build a new company. That's a better dating app. You say. Let me build on Khan Academy as a platform and build a better company that can actually make a profit. But has been, Franklin would say, do well by doing good. So that was our charge. And now, with a small drum roll over to Barbara for the four recommendations we made. Thank you, Walter. I would agree the talent in that room was just incredible. And for anyone who then is to be commended for actually corralling that talent and that think tank to narrow it down to four recommendations, we had about a dozen to start with. So I want to go over briefly. Those four recommendations, I think they set a wonderful platform, a foundation for what is to come. And Walter will say more about that just shortly. Let's take a look at the four recommendations. It will happen. Here we go. So I'm gonna start with technology. Yes. I'm going to start with four. We really want to teach computer science broadly defined. That includes coding, data analytics, computational thinking. We want to see that taught at every grade span starting in kindergarten so that integration is going to be critical. Starting with kindergarten, students are exposed to the fundamentals early on, and then we took it a step further. In high school, we want every high school to offer a funded credited course in computer coding or computer science. It has to have a focus so that every student understands the future of their career opportunities, and there needs to be some, uh, specific focus on those underserved populations, including girls and students of color. Number three. We want to radically re imagine the classroom to enable personalized learning that is, to transform our classrooms so that students are moving at an individual pace and through adaptive learning spaces. Now we understand this kind of transformation will require some investment in R and D. That's an investment that we should be willing to make because we know it will have great risk results for our students. Those investments include training for our teachers. That is the most critical component you can have technology available. If teachers are not trained and comfortable, they will not use it. And they certainly won't have effective outcomes for our student. We also Barbara one of the things The top thing, that everybody who came said what the problem was teacher training for technology. That was the number one is. Your training is critical, and I want to be clear to We have teachers in different categories. Some teachers are very new. They are digital natives themselves. They're millennials, They're very comfortable with it. Some of our veteran teachers are not as comfortable, but we have teachers in all of those categories that are certainly ready to take on technology for our students. And I also want to be very clear. Technology doesn't mean good instruction doesn't cure all in our classrooms. Technology is a tool that can be used effectively by good teachers, and that's what we're looking to develop more of. Number two, We want to start a national campaign. This is exciting. We want to showcase and expand excellence and learning and innovation. We'd like to inspire, motivate, activate both communities, parents, policymakers, educators and industry to take action. We know there are good practices going on there, some in my district and other district and charter schools. We want to highlight those good practices and move forward so that they can be replicated because the real frustration is not being able to move to scale. If we know they're good practices, we have to have them replicated at a faster pace. And number one we'd like to ensure that all public school students have high speed Internet access devices and tech support both at school and at home previously referred to as the digital divide. Sometimes people describe this as a real issue. It's not only the cost of connectivity, it's also the support that's needed for Children who need to have connectivity in their home and in school in some schools. Um, in fact, Suzanne mentioned in her community, she can, uh, certainly point out schools that either have the technology or they don't because the PCA raises half million dollars. So we have to have some means that we need to partner with both governmental and NGOs and private sector to make sure both schools and homes have Internet access. It's almost a civil rights issue. We can't have Children who have no connectivity competing and in the same classroom to Children who have excellent connectivity. And so we're very excited about the possibility of of increasing this access for all families for all schools and then we wanted to add there has to be a safeguard good citizenship on the Internet so that poor families in particular, who are distrusting of connectivity, understand how to protect and safeguard their Children and their homes from those who would do harm to them digitally and, uh, the main thing is for you not to just look at this as a report out, but it's really a challenge for you to do something. I think you should look at each of these four things and say, What am I gonna actually dedicate myself to do? Over the next 12 months, you'll get a report on this whole session from the Fortune in time. People At the end of that report, it will tell you how to click on it and sign up and do something. In fact, right after our meeting, we started with Number two, which was James Timon from Khan Academy with Us Susanna Sometime and Fortune and Kitty Boom from the aspirin issued public programs to say, We're going to start working on something called Learn Storm, which is a national campaign to showcase, expand excellence, see what works have contests, bring them up and then convene them, either here, at some convening in a year to say, Here's what people have done. Thank you all very much. Mm