The new Obama administration has promised a package of €142 billion for education and €1 billion has been earmarked for ICT. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan plan promises to enable students of all ages to learn in 21st-century classrooms, labs, and libraries to help US students compete with any worker in the world. Time will tell if this is indeed the case but ICT is back on the US agenda. It will be interesting to see if other countries will take a similar lead in these challenging times.
The new administration will create a $500 million matching fund to ensure technology is fully integrated throughout schools. The new administration plans to invest in developing better student assessments and they see technology as being a key component of this objective. They also stress the need to create a new “technology-based curriculum” and to place an emphasis on authentic learning. Finally they want to use technology to allow teachers to collaborate in sharing best practice and in continuing to create a new model of teacher, one of coach and not the primary source of facts!
This is very much 21st century learning with an emphasis on using technology as a catalyst for change in terms of how we teach and assess in the future.
It will be interesting to see how the Obama/Biden administration implement these objectives and we look forward to seeing more detail in the weeks ahead.