Solutions: K-12 - Digital Learning
Improve Education through Digital Learning
GOAL: Improve access to online education opportunities and empower students and educators with comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.
DESCRIPTION: To meet this goal, the U.S. Department of Education recommends the following:
Ensure students and educators have broadband access to the Internet and adequate wireless connectivity both in and out of school.
Ensure that every student and educator has at least one Internet access device and appropriate software and resources for research, communication, multimedia content creation, and collaboration for use in and out of school.
Support the development and use of open educational resources to promote innovative and creative opportunities for all learners, and accelerate the development and adoption of new open technology-based learning tools and courses. Open education resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing, and collaborating with others.
Build and support state and local education capacity for an evolving educational technology infrastructure. The effort should start with implementing the next generation of computing system architectures and include transitioning computer systems, software, and services from in-house datacenters to professionally managed datacenters in the cloud for greater efficiency and flexibility.
ACTIONS:
Improving access and transitioning curriculums to include online learning necessitates policies and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administrative tools.
e-Rate provisions and CIPA requirements should be examined, and schools and districts should explore the ways that student-owned devices can aid in learning. The use of devices owned by students will require advances in network filtering and improved support systems.
Local school districts should develop new policies concerning the evaluation and selection of instructional materials so that digital resources are considered and processes are established for keeping education resource content current, appropriate, and tagged according to identified content interoperability standards.
Identify a professional educator who can engage with educators on leveraging technology for improving their professional practice. School technology coordinators, librarians, and media specialists may play this important role.
Work with the school district to identify options for reducing the number of servers they run through consolidation using virtualization. Virtualization allows a single server to run multiple applications safely and reliably, so that districts can dramatically reduce the number of servers on their networks which leads to cutting costs and making the networks less complex and easier to manage.
RESPONSIBLE PARTIES:
School district curriculum directors; Principals and superintendents; State education departments; Higher education; Teachers; Parents and related organizations; Students; Libraries
RESOURCES:
Power My Learning: http://powermylearning.org.
Use of Technology in Teaching and Learning: http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/use-technology-teaching-and-learning.
Universal Service Administrative Company: http://www.usac.org/sl/
Office of Educational Technology: https://tech.ed.gov/#.