Transforming American Education

National Education Technology Plan 2010

U.S. Department of Education 

Office of Educational Technology

Learning 

Powered by Technology

Transforming American Education

National Education Technology Plan 2010

U.S. Department of Education 

Office of Educational Technology

Learning 

Powered by Technology
Section 2422 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act specifies that the secretary shall 

update and publish, in a form readily accessible to the public, a national long-range technology plan 

that describes how the secretary will promote: (a) higher student academic achievement through the 

integration of advanced technologies, including emerging technologies, into curricula and instruction; 

(b) increased access to technology for teaching and learning for schools with a high number or 

percentage of children from families with incomes below the poverty line; and (c) the use of technology 

to assist in the implementation of state systemic reform strategies. In addition, Section 2422 specifies 

that this report should also include a description of joint activities of the Department of Education and other 

federal departments or agencies that will promote the use of technology in education. In accordance with that 

requirement, the Office of Educational Technology of the Department of Education is publishing this report.

This report was produced under U.S. Department of Education Contract No. ED-04-CO-0040, Task 

Order 0002, with SRI International. Bernadette Adams Yates served as the contracting officer’s 

representative. Mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations in this report does not 

imply endorsement by the U.S. government. This publication also contains URLs for information created 

and maintained by private organizations. This information is provided for the reader’s convenience. The 

U.S. Department of Education is not responsible for controlling or guaranteeing the accuracy, relevance, 

timeliness, or completeness of this outside information. Further, the inclusion of information or URLs 

does not reflect the importance of the organization, nor is it intended to endorse any views expressed, 

or products or services offered.

November 2010

This report is in the public domain. Authorization to reproduce this report in whole or in part is granted. 

While permission to reprint this publication is not necessary, the suggested citation is: U.S. Department 

of Education, Office of Educational Technology, Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by 

Technology, Washington, D.C., 2010.

To order copies of this report, write:

ED Pubs

Education Publications Center

U.S. Department of Education

P.O. Box 22207

Alexandria, VA 22304

To order via fax, dial 703-605-6794. You may also call toll-free: 1-877-433-7827 (1-877-4-ED-PUBS). If 

877 service is not yet available in your area, call 1-800-872-5327 (1-800-USA-LEARN). Those who use 

a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) or a teletypewriter (TTY) should call 1-877-576-7734.

To order online, point your Internet browser to: www.edpubs.ed.gov.

This report is also available on the Department’s Web site at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/opepd/

ppss/reports.html.

On request, this publication is available in alternative formats, such as Braille, large print, or computer 

diskette. For more information, please contact the Department’s Alternate Format Center at 202-260-

0852 or 202-260-0818.

U.S. Department of Education

Arne Duncan

Secretary

Office of Educational Technology

Karen Cator

Director
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology iii

Contents

Letter From the Secretary v

National Education Technology Plan Technical Working Group vii

Executive Summary ix

Introduction 1

Learning: Engage and Empower 9

Assessment: Measure What Matters 25

Teaching: Prepare and Connect 39

Infrastructure: Access and Enable 51

Productivity: Redesign and Transform 63

R&D: Innovate and Scale 75

References 81

Appendix A. How This Plan Was Developed A-1

Appendix B. Contributors B-1

Appendix C. Acknowledgments C-1



Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology vii

National Education Technology Plan

Technical Working Group

Daniel E. Atkins, University of Michigan

John Bennett, Akron Public Schools

John Seely Brown, Deloitte Center for the Edge 

Aneesh Chopra, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Chris Dede, Harvard University

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Louis Gomez, University of Pittsburgh

Margaret Honey, New York Hall of Science

Yasmin Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

Maribeth Luftglass, Fairfax County Public Schools

Roy Pea, Stanford University

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

David Rose, Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)

Candace Thille, Carnegie Mellon University

Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary ix

Executive Summary

Education is the key to America’s economic growth and prosperity and to our ability to 

compete in the global economy. It is the path to good jobs and higher earning power for 

Americans. It is necessary for our democracy to work. It fosters the cross-border, crosscultural collaboration required to solve the most challenging problems of our time.

Under the Obama administration, education has become an urgent priority driven by two 

clear goals: 

 • We will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands (around 

41 percent) so that 60 percent of our population holds a two-year or four-year degree by 2020.

 • We will close the achievement gap so that all students graduate from high school ready 

to succeed in college and careers.

These are aggressive goals and achieving them is a sizable challenge. Add to the challenge 

the projections of most states and the federal government of reduced revenues for the 

foreseeable future, and it is clear we need cost-effective and cost-saving strategies that 

improve learning outcomes and graduation rates for millions of Americans.

Specifically, we must embrace innovation, prompt implementation, regular evaluation, and 

continuous improvement. The programs and projects that work must be brought to scale 

so every school has the opportunity to take advantage of their success. Our regulations, 

policies, actions, and investments must be strategic and coherent.

Transforming American Education

The National Education Technology Plan 2010 (NETP) calls for revolutionary transformation 

rather than evolutionary tinkering. It urges our education system at all levels to

 • Be clear about the outcomes we seek.

 • Collaborate to redesign structures and processes for effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility.

 • Continually monitor and measure our performance.

 • Hold ourselves accountable for progress and results every step of the way.

The plan recognizes that technology is at the core of virtually every aspect of our daily lives 

and work, and we must leverage it to provide engaging and powerful learning experiences and 

content, as well as resources and assessments that measure student achievement in more 

complete, authentic, and meaningful ways. Technology-based learning and assessment systems 

will be pivotal in improving student learning and generating data that can be used to continuously 

improve the education system at all levels. Technology will help us execute collaborative teaching 

strategies combined with professional learning that better prepare and enhance educators’ 
x Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

competencies and expertise over the course of their careers. To shorten our learning curve, we 

should look to other kinds of enterprises, such as business and entertainment, that have used 

technology to improve outcomes while increasing productivity. 

We also should implement a new approach to research and development (R&D) in 

education that focuses on scaling innovative best practices in the use of technology in 

teaching and learning, transferring existing and emerging technology innovations into 

education, sustaining the R&D for education work that is being done by such organizations 

as the National Science Foundation, and creating a new organization to address major R&D 

challenges at the intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education. 

A Model of Learning Powered by Technology

The NETP presents a model of learning powered by technology, with goals and 

recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, 

and productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching “grand challenge” R&D problems that 

should be funded and coordinated at a national level.

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people 

need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people 

learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

Learning: Engage and Empower

The model of learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning 

experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match 

what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs 

to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all 

students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power 

of technology to provide personalized learning and to enable continuous and lifelong learning.

Many students’ lives today are filled with technology that gives them mobile access to 

information and resources 24/7, enables them to create multimedia content and share it with 

the world, and allows them to participate in online social networks where people from all 

over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new things. Outside school, students are 

free to pursue their passions in their own way and at their own pace. The opportunities are 

limitless, borderless, and instantaneous.

The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern 

technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all 

learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to 

traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and 

empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several 

dimensions.

A core set of standards-based concepts and competencies should form the basis of what 

all students should learn. Beyond that, students and educators should have options for 

engaging in learning: large groups, small groups, and work tailored to the individual goals, 

needs, interests, and prior experience of each learner. Technology should be leveraged to 

provide access to more learning resources than are available in classrooms and connections 

to a wider set of “educators,” including teachers, parents, experts, and mentors outside the 

classroom. It also should be used to enable 24/7 and lifelong learning.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xi

What and How People Need to Learn

Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, 

art, or music, 21st-century competencies and such expertise as critical thinking, complex 

problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all 

content areas. These competencies are necessary to become expert learners, which we 

all must be if we are to adapt to our rapidly changing world over the course of our lives. 

That involves developing deep understanding within specific content areas and making the 

connections among them.

How we need to learn includes using the technology that professionals in various disciplines 

use. Professionals routinely use the Web and tools, such as wikis, blogs, and digital content 

for the research, collaboration, and communication demanded in their jobs. They gather 

data and analyze the data using inquiry and visualization tools. They use graphical and 

3D modeling tools for design. For students, using these real-world tools creates learning 

opportunities that allow them to grapple with real-world problems—opportunities that prepare 

them to be more productive members of a globally competitive workforce.

Assessment: Measure What Matters

The model of learning requires new and better ways to measure what matters, diagnose 

strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to improve student 

performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and 

using assessment. In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to 

drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that, in aggregate, 

will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.

The nation’s governors and state education chiefs have begun to develop standards and 

assessments that measure 21st-century competencies and expertise in all content areas. 

Technology-based assessments that combine cognitive research and theory about how 

students think with multimedia, interactivity, and connectivity make it possible to directly 

assess these types of skills. This can be done within the context of relevant societal issues 

and problems that people care about in everyday life.

When combined with learning systems, technology-based assessments can be used 

formatively to diagnose and modify the conditions of learning and instructional practices 

while at the same time determining what students have learned for grading and 

accountability purposes. Both uses are important, but the former can improve student 

learning in the moment (Black and Wiliam 1998). Furthermore, systems can be designed 

to capture students’ inputs and collect evidence of their knowledge and problem-solving 

abilities as they work. Over time, the system “learns” more about students’ abilities and can 

provide increasingly appropriate support. 

Using Data to Drive Continuous Improvement

With assessments in place that address the full range of expertise and competencies 

reflected in standards, student-learning data can be collected and used to continually 

improve learning outcomes and productivity. For example, such data could be used to create 

a system of interconnected feedback for students, educators, parents, school leaders, and 

district administrators.

For this to work, relevant data must be made available to the right people at the right time 

and in the right form. Educators and leaders at all levels of our education system also must 

be provided with support—tools and training—that can help them manage the assessment 

process, analyze relevant data, and take appropriate action.
xii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Teaching: Prepare and Connect

Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of 

learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift 

to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators 

replace solo practitioners, classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 

access to data and analytic tools, and educators have access to resources that help them 

act on the insights the data provide.

Professional educators are a critical component of transforming our education systems, 

and therefore strengthening and elevating the teaching profession is as important as 

effective teaching and accountability. All are necessary if we are to attract and retain the 

most effective educators and achieve the learning outcomes we seek. Just as leveraging 

technology can help us improve learning and assessment, it also can help us shift to a model 

of connected teaching.

In a connected teaching model, classroom educators are fully connected to learning data 

and tools for using the data; to content, resources, and systems that empower them to 

create, manage, and assess engaging and relevant learning experiences; and directly to 

their students in support of learning both in and out of school. The same connections give 

them access to resources and expertise that improve their own instructional practices and 

guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators in their students’ increasingly selfdirected learning.

In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning 

communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their 

schools, libraries, and after-school programs; professional experts in various disciplines 

around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they 

are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that 

is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses 

and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by 

online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration. For their part, the 

colleges of education and other institutions that prepare teachers play an ongoing role in the 

professional growth of their graduates throughout the entire course of their careers.

Connected teaching enables our education system to provide access to effective teaching 

and learning resources where they are not otherwise available and more options for all 

learners. This is accomplished by augmenting the expertise and competencies of specialized 

and exceptional educators with online and blended (online and offline) learning systems, ondemand courses, and other self-directed learning opportunities. 

21st-Century Resources for Professional Educators 

The technology that enables connected teaching is available now, but not all the conditions 

necessary to leverage it are. Many of our existing educators do not have the same understanding 

of and ease with using technology that is part of the daily lives of professionals in other sectors. 

The same can be said of many of the education leaders and policymakers in schools, districts, 

and states and of the higher education institutions that prepare new educators for the field.

This gap in technology understanding influences program and curriculum development, funding 

and purchasing decisions about educational and information technology in schools, and 

preservice and in-service professional learning. This gap prevents technology from being used in 

ways that would improve instructional practices and learning outcomes.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xiii

Still, we must introduce connected teaching into our education system rapidly, and therefore we 

need innovation in the organizations that support educators in their profession—schools and 

districts, colleges of education, professional learning providers, and professional organizations.

Infrastructure: Access and Enable

An essential component of the learning model is a comprehensive infrastructure for 

learning that provides every student, educator, and level of our education system with the 

resources they need when and where they are needed. The underlying principle is that 

infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable 

models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, 

management systems, and administration tools. Building this infrastructure is a far-reaching 

project that will demand concerted and coordinated effort.

Although we have adopted technology in many aspects of education today, a comprehensive 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to move us beyond the traditional model of educators 

and students in classrooms to a learning model that brings together teaching teams and 

students in classrooms, labs, libraries, museums, workplaces, and homes—anywhere in the 

world where people have access devices and an adequate Internet connection.

Over the past 40 years, we have seen unprecedented advances in computing and 

communications that have led to powerful technology resources and tools for learning. 

Today, low-cost Internet access devices, easy-to-use digital authoring tools, and the Web 

facilitate access to information and multimedia learning content, communication, and 

collaboration. They provide the ability to participate in online learning communities that cross 

disciplines, organizations, international boundaries, and cultures.

Many of these technology resources and tools already are being used within our 

public education system. We are now, however, at an inflection point for a much bolder 

transformation of education powered by technology. This revolutionary opportunity for 

change is driven by the continuing push of emerging technology and the pull of the critical 

national need to radically improve our education system.

Always-on Learning

An infrastructure for learning is always on, available to students, educators, and administrators 

regardless of their location or the time of day. It supports not just access to information, but 

access to people and participation in online learning communities. It offers a platform on which 

developers can build and tailor applications.

An infrastructure for learning unleashes new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge 

based on multimedia that integrate text, still and moving images, audio, and applications that 

run on a variety of devices. It enables seamless integration of in- and out-of-school learning. 

It frees learning from a rigid information transfer model (from book or educator to students) 

and enables a much more motivating intertwinement of learning about, learning to do, and 

learning to be.

On a more operational level, an infrastructure for learning brings together and enables access 

to data from multiple sources while ensuring appropriate levels of security and privacy. The 

infrastructure integrates computer hardware, data and networks, information resources, 

interoperable software, middleware services and tools, and devices, and connects and 

supports interdisciplinary teams of professionals responsible for its development, maintenance, 

and management and its use in transformative approaches to teaching and learning.
xiv Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Productivity: Redesign and Transform 

To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions 

and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized 

learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our P–16 system 

so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times 

and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We 

must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decisionmakers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our 

education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational 

attainment within the budgets we can afford.

Improving productivity is a daily focus of most American organizations in all sectors—both 

for-profit and nonprofit—and especially in tight economic times. Education has not, however, 

incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve productivity and 

manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. We can learn 

much from the experience in other sectors.

What education can learn from the experience of business is that we need to make 

the fundamental structural changes that technology enables if we are to see dramatic 

improvements in productivity. As we do so, we should recognize that although the 

fundamental purpose of our public education system is the same, the roles and processes 

of schools, educators, and the system itself should change to reflect the times we live in and 

our goals as a world leader. Such rethinking applies to learning, assessment, and teaching 

processes and to the infrastructure and operational and financial sides of running schools 

and school systems.

Rethinking Basic Assumptions

One of the most basic assumptions in our education system is time-based or “seat-time” 

measures of educational attainment. These measures were created in the late 1800s and 

early 1900s to smooth transitions from K–12 into higher education by translating high school 

work to college admissions offices (Shedd 2003) and made their way into higher education 

when institutions began moving away from standardized curricula.

Another basic assumption is the way we organize students into age-determined groups, 

structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly equal size 

with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same pace, and 

keep these groups in place all year.

The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically redesigned schools, 

demonstrating the range of possibilities for structuring education. These include schools 

that organize around competence rather than seat time and others that enable more flexible 

scheduling that fits students’ individual needs rather than traditional academic periods and 

lockstep curriculum pacing. In addition, schools are beginning to incorporate online learning, 

which gives us the opportunity to extend the learning day, week, or year.

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. There is no way to achieve this 

target unless we can dramatically reduce the number of students who leave high school 

without getting a diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education.

A complex set of personal and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave 

school or to disengage from learning, but support should start as early as possible, before 

children enter school, and should become intensified for those students who need it as they 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xv

move through school. Practices supported with technology can help address the problem, 

including learning dashboards that keep students on track with their course requirements 

and earning credits for courses taken online.

Redesigning education in America for improved productivity is a complex challenge that will 

require all 50 states, the thousands of districts and schools across the country, the federal 

government, and other education stakeholders in the public and private sector to come 

together to design and implement innovative solutions. It is a challenge for educators—

leaders, teachers, and policymakers committed to learning—as well as technologists, and 

ideally they will come together to lead the effort.

A Rigorous and Inclusive Process

This plan, led by the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, was 

developed using a rigorous and inclusive process built on the report of a technical working 

group of leading education researchers and practitioners.

In keeping with the White House’s Open Government Directive, the Department invited 

extensive public participation in the development of the plan. Broad outreach efforts and 

state-of-the-art communications and collaboration technology enabled tens of thousands 

of individuals to learn about and contribute to the development of the plan over its 9-month 

development period.

The Time To Act Is Now

The NETP accepts that we do not have the luxury of time: We must act now and commit to 

fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. Success will require leadership, collaboration, 

and investment at all levels of our education system—states, districts, schools, and the federal 

government—as well as partnerships with higher education institutions, private enterprises, 

and not-for-profit entities.

In the United States, education is primarily a state and local responsibility. State and local 

public education institutions must ensure equitable access to learning experiences for all 

students and especially students in underserved populations—low-income and minority 

students, students with disabilities, English language learners, students in rural and frontier 

schools, and others. States and districts need to build capacity for transformation. The 

Department of Education has a role in identifying effective strategies and implementation 

practices; encouraging, promoting, and actively supporting innovation in states and districts; 

and nurturing collaborations that help states and districts leverage resources so the best ideas 

can be scaled up.

Postsecondary education institutions—community colleges and four-year colleges and 

universities—will need to partner more closely with K–12 schools to remove barriers to 

postsecondary education and put plans of their own in place to decrease dropout rates. 

Clearly, postsecondary institutions would be key players in the national R&D efforts 

recommended in this plan.

Education has long relied on the contributions of organizations in both the private and not-forprofit sectors, and this will not change.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, there has never been a more pressing 

need to transform American education or a better time to act. The NETP is a 5-year action plan 

that responds to an urgent national priority and a growing understanding of what the United 

States needs to do to remain competitive in a global economy.
xvi Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Goals and Recommendations

To transform education in America, we must turn ideas into action. The NETP presents 

five goals that address the key components of this plan—learning, assessment, teaching, 

infrastructure, and productivity—along with recommendations for states, districts, the federal 

government, and other stakeholders in our education system for achieving these goals.

1.0 Learning: Engage and Empower

All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and out of 

school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in 

our globally networked society.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following:

1.1 States should continue to revise, create, and implement standards and learning objectives 

using technology for all content areas that reflect 21st-century expertise and the power of 

technology to improve learning.

Our education system relies on core sets of standards-based concepts and competencies that 

form the basis of what all students should know and should be able to do. Whether the domain is 

English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, states should 

continue to consider the integration of 21st-century competencies and expertise, such as critical 

thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, multimedia communication, and technological 

competencies demonstrated by professionals in various disciplines.

1.2 States, districts, and others should develop and implement learning resources that use 

technology to embody design principles from the learning sciences.

Advances in learning sciences, including cognitive science, neuroscience, education, 

and social sciences, give us greater understanding of three connected types of human 

learning—factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and motivational engagement. 

Technology has increased our ability to both study and enhance all three types. Today’s 

learning environments should reflect what we have learned about how people learn and take 

advantage of technology to optimize learning.

1.3 States, districts, and others should develop and implement learning resources that exploit the 

flexibility and power of technology to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.

The always-on nature of the Internet and mobile access devices provides our education system 

with the opportunity to create learning experiences that are available anytime and anywhere. 

When combined with design principles for personalized learning and Universal Design for 

Learning, these experiences also can be accessed by learners who have been marginalized 

in many educational settings: students from low-income communities and minorities, English 

language learners, students with disabilities, students who are gifted and talented, students from 

diverse cultures and linguistic backgrounds, and students in rural areas.

1.4 Use advances in learning sciences and technology to enhance STEM (science, technology, 

engineering, and mathematics) learning and develop, adopt, and evaluate new methodologies 

with the potential to inspire and enable all learners to excel in STEM.

New technologies for representing, manipulating, and communicating data, information, and 

ideas have changed professional practices in STEM fields and what students need to learn to be 

prepared for STEM professions. Technology should be used to support student interaction with 

STEM content in ways that promote deeper understanding of complex ideas, engage students 

in solving complex problems, and create new opportunities for STEM learning throughout our 

education system.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xvii

2.0 Assessment: Measure What Matters

Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what 

matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

2.1 States, districts, and others should design, develop, and implement assessments that 

give students, educators, and other stakeholders timely and actionable feedback about 

student learning to improve achievement and instructional practices.

Learning science and technology combined with assessment theory can provide a 

foundation for new and better ways to assess students in the course of learning, which 

is the ideal time to improve performance. This will require involving experts from all three 

disciplines in the process of designing, developing, and using new technology-based 

assessments that can increase the quality and quantity of feedback to learners.

2.2 Build the capacity of educators, education institutions, and developers to use technology 

to improve assessment materials and processes for both formative and summative uses.

Technology can support measuring performances that cannot be assessed with conventional 

testing formats, providing our education system with opportunities to design, develop, 

and validate new and more effective assessment materials. Building this capacity can be 

accelerated through knowledge exchange, collaboration, and better alignment between 

educators (practitioners) and experts.

2.3 Conduct research and development that explores how embedded assessment 

technologies, such as simulations, collaboration environments, virtual worlds, games, and 

cognitive tutors, can be used to engage and motivate learners while assessing complex skills.

Interactive technologies, especially games, provide immediate performance feedback so that 

players always know how they are doing. As a result, they are highly engaging to students 

and have the potential to motivate students to learn. They also enable educators to assess 

important competencies and aspects of thinking in contexts and through activities that 

students care about in everyday life. Because interactive technologies hold this promise, 

assessment and interactive technology experts should collaborate on research to determine 

ways to use them effectively for assessment.

2.4 Conduct research and development that explores how Universal Design for Learning can 

enable the best accommodations for all students to ensure we are assessing what we intend to 

measure rather than extraneous abilities a student needs to respond to the assessment task. 

To be valid, an assessment must measure those qualities it is intended to measure and 

scores should not be influenced by extraneous factors. An assessment of science, for 

example, should measure understanding of science concepts and their application, not the 

ability to see print, to respond to items using a mouse, or to use word processing skills. 

Assessment and technology experts should collaborate to create assessment design tools 

and processes that make it possible to develop assessment systems with appropriate 

features (not just accommodations) so that assessments capture examinees’ strengths in 

terms of the qualities that the assessment is intended to measure.

2.5 Revise practices, policies, and regulations to ensure privacy and information protection 

while enabling a model of assessment that includes ongoing gathering and sharing of data 

on student learning for continuous improvement.

Every parent of a student under 18 and every student 18 or over should have the right to 

access the student’s own assessment data in the form of an electronic learning record 

that the student can take with them throughout his or her educational career. At the same 
xviii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

time, appropriate safeguards, including stripping records of identifiable information and 

aggregating data across students, classrooms, and schools, should be used to make it 

possible to supply education data derived from student records to other legitimate users 

without compromising student privacy.

3.0 Teaching: Prepare and Connect

Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable 

and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

3.1 Expand opportunities for educators to have access to technology-based content, 

resources, and tools where and when they need them.

Today’s technology enables educators to tap into resources and orchestrate expertise across 

a school district or university, a state, the nation, and even around the world. Educators can 

discuss solutions to problems and exchange information about best practices in minutes, 

not weeks or months. Today’s educators should have access to technology-based resources 

that inspire them to provide more engaging and effective learning opportunities for each and 

every student.

3.2 Leverage social networking technologies and platforms to create communities of practice 

that provide career-long personal learning opportunities for educators within and across 

schools, preservice preparation and in-service education institutions, and professional 

organizations.

Social networks can be used to provide educators with career-long personal learning 

tools and resources that make professional learning timely and relevant as well as an 

ongoing activity that continually improves practice and evolves their skills over time. Online 

communities should enable educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best 

practices for just-in-time problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to 

design and develop resources with and for their colleagues.

3.3 Use technology to provide all learners with online access to effective teaching and better 

learning opportunities and options especially in places where they are not otherwise available.

Many education institutions, particularly those serving the most vulnerable students and 

those in rural areas, lack educators with competencies in reaching students with special 

needs and educators with content knowledge and expertise in specialized areas, including 

STEM. Even in areas where effective teaching is available, students often lack options for 

high-quality courses in particular disciplines or opportunities for learning that prepare them 

for the modern world. Online learning options should be provided to enable leveraging the 

best teaching and make high-quality course options available to all learners.

3.4 Provide preservice and in-service educators with professional learning experiences 

powered by technology to increase their digital literacy and enable them to create compelling 

assignments for students that improve learning, assessment, and instructional practices. 

Just as technology helps us engage and motivate students to learn, technology should be 

used in the preparation and ongoing learning of educators to engage and motivate them in 

what and how they teach. This will require synthesizing core principles and adopting best 

practices for the use of technology in preparing educators. Technology also should be an 

integral component of teaching methods courses and field experiences rather than treated 

as a discrete skill distinct from pedagogical application.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xix

3.5 Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction.

As online learning becomes an increasingly important part of our education system, we 

need to provide online and blended learning experiences that are more participatory 

and personalized and that embody best practices for engaging all students. This creates 

both the need and opportunity for educators who are skilled in instructional design and 

knowledgeable about emerging technologies. Crucial to filling this need while ensuring 

effective teaching are appropriate standards for online courses and teaching and a new way 

of approaching online teacher certification.

4.0 Infrastructure: Access and Enable

All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning 

when and where they need it.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

4.1 Ensure students and educators have broadband access to the Internet and adequate 

wireless connectivity both in and out of school.

Students and educators need adequate broadband bandwidth for accessing the Internet 

and technology-based learning resources. “Adequate” should be defined as the ability to use 

the Internet in school, on the surrounding campus, throughout the community, and at home. 

It should also include simultaneous use of high-bandwidth resources, such as multimedia, 

communication and collaboration environments, and communities. Crucial to providing 

such access are the broadband initiatives being individually and jointly managed by various 

federal agencies.

4.2 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.

Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and 

resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and 

assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes. The form of these 

devices, software, and resources may or may not be standardized and will evolve over time. 

In addition, these devices may be owned by the student or family, owned by the school, or 

some combination of the two. The use of devices owned by students will require advances in 

network filtering and improved support systems.

4.3 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.

The value of open educational resources is now recognized around the world, leading to 

the availability of a vast array of learning, teaching, and research resources that learners 

of any age can use across all content areas. Realizing this value will require new policies 

concerning the evaluation and selection of instructional materials so that digital resources 

are considered and processes are established for keeping educational resource content up 

to date, appropriate, and tagged according to identified content interoperability standards.

4.4 Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving an infrastructure for learning.

Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted 

and coordinated effort. 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 data centers in the cloud for 

greater efficiency and flexibility. This will require leveraging and scaling up the human talent 
xx Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

to build such an infrastructure, which should ultimately save money and enable education IT

professionals to focus more on maintaining the local infrastructure and supporting teachers, 

students, and administrators.

4.5 Develop and use interoperability standards for content and student-learning data to 

enable collecting and sharing resources and collecting, sharing, and analyzing data to 

improve decision making at all levels of our education system.

Fragmented content and resources and student-learning data siloed in different proprietary 

platforms and systems, along with a lack of common standards for collecting and sharing 

data, are formidable barriers to leveraging resources for teaching and learning. These 

barriers exist because we lack common content interoperability standards and tools to 

enable use of such standards. The lack of common standards affects the quality of tools 

because developers limit their R&D investments into narrow markets and are not able 

to leverage overall market advancements in research and development. Interoperability 

standards are essential to resolving these issues.

4.6 Develop and use interoperability standards for financial data to enable data-driven 

decision making, productivity advances, and continuous improvement at all levels of our 

education system.

Just as content, resources, and student learning data are fragmented in disconnected 

technology systems and throughout our education system, the same is true for financial 

data. Therefore, we also need financial data interoperability standards and tools that enable 

the use of these standards.

5.0 Productivity: Redesign and Transform

Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage 

of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of 

time, money, and staff.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

5.1 Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in education and more relevant 

and meaningful measures of outcomes, along with improved policies and technologies for 

managing costs, including those for procurement.

Education has not incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to 

measure outcomes, manage costs, and improve productivity, a number of which are 

enabled or enhanced by technology. As other sectors have learned, we are unlikely to 

improve outcomes and productivity until we define and start measuring them. This starts 

with identifying what we seek to measure. It also requires identifying costs associated with 

components of our education system and with individual resources and activities so that the 

ratio of outcomes to costs can be tracked over time.

5.2 Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit leveraging technology 

to improve learning, starting with our current practice of organizing student and educator 

learning around seat time instead of the demonstration of competencies.

To realize the full potential of technology for improving performance and increasing productivity, 

we must remove the process and structural barriers to broad adoption. The education system 

must work to identify and rethink basic assumptions of the education system. Some of these 

include measurement of educational attainment through seat time, organization of students 

into age-determined groups, the structure of separate academic disciplines, the organization of 

learning into classes of roughly equal size, and the use of time blocks.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xxi

5.3 Develop useful metrics for the educational use of technology in states and districts.

Current data on the use of educational and information technology in our system consist 

of records of purchases and numbers of computers and Internet connections. Very 

little information on how technology is actually used to support teaching, learning, and 

assessment is collected and communicated systematically. Only by shifting our focus 

to collecting data on how and when technology is used will we be able to determine the 

difference it makes and use that knowledge to improve outcomes and the productivity of our 

education system.

5.4 Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs and interventions to 

ensure that students progress seamlessly through our P–16 education system and emerge 

prepared for college and careers.

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. Achieving this target will require 

dramatically reducing the number of students who leave high school without getting a 

diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education. A complex set of personal 

and academic factors underlie students’ decisions to leave school or to disengage from 

learning, and no one strategy will prevent every separation from the education system. 

Collaboration between P–12 and higher education institutions and practices supported with 

technology are crucial to addressing the problem.

Getting Started Now

The Department of Education has a role in identifying effective strategies and 

implementation practices; encouraging, promoting, and actively supporting innovation 

and best practices in states and districts; and nurturing collaborations that help states 

and districts leverage resources so the best ideas can be scaled up. To help ensure the 

successful implementation of this plan, the Department of Education can take action around 

the following priorities:

Convening education stakeholders, in person and online, to share content, insights, and 

expertise and to collaborate on key elements of this plan. Ideas and best practices that 

emerge from these convenings will be shared throughout our education system. 

The Department of Education can

Convene learning science researchers, developers of educational technology, curriculum 

developers, public and private sector organizations, and Universal Design for Learning 

experts to share information and research for developing the next generation of technologybased learning platforms, resources, courses, and tools.

Facilitate collaboration between states and private and public sector organizations to design, 

develop, validate, and scale up new technology-based assessment resources for both 

formative and summative uses. These efforts should include exploring the use of embedded 

assessment technologies, such as simulations, collaboration environments, virtual worlds, 

and games in new assessment resources.

Convene P–12 and higher education institutions, states, and districts to collaborate on 

strategies for creating persistent student electronic learning records and using student data 

for continuous improvement.

Facilitate collaboration between states, districts, universities, other research and 

development organizations, other agencies, and the commercial sector to develop and 

leverage open educational resources. Designs for use and reuse and new business models 

will be included.
xxii Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

Convene states, teacher accreditation organizations, colleges of education, and 

organizations representing online learning providers to promote states’ consideration of 

voluntary standards for online courses and for online teaching. This activity should include 

the promotion of reciprocity agreements between states for certifying online teachers.

Convene states and education leadership organizations to identify and rethink basic assumptions 

in our education system, starting with but not limited to the measurement of educational 

attainment through seat time. Other assumptions that should be reexamined are the organization 

of students into static age-determined groups and the organization of learning into classes of 

roughly equal size, as well as the structure of separate academic disciplines. The use of online 

learning and combining offline and online learning to provide options for flexibility, additional 

learning time, and more effective use of the time allotted should be explored.

Convene states, districts, and education and technology experts from the academic, private, and 

public sectors to define useful metrics for the use of technology in support of teaching and learning 

and improved operations that states and districts can use to guide technology purchases.

Promote collaboration between two- and four-year postsecondary education institutions, 

P–12 programs, and educational technology developers in the private and public sectors 

to design programs and resources to engage and/or reengage students and motivate them 

to graduate from high school ready for postsecondary education. Facilitate collaboration on 

alternative programs that take advantage of technology to reconnect with students and help 

them complete learning programs.

Supporting efforts to ensure that all students and educators have 24/7 access to the 

Internet via devices, including mobile devices, and that states, districts, and schools adopt 

technologies and policies to enable leveraging the technology that students already have. 

The Department of Education can

Endorse and actively support the broadband initiatives of the American Recovery and 

Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are intended to accelerate deployment of Internet services 

in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic anchor institutions, such as 

schools, that are likely to provide significant public benefits. These initiatives are the 

Broadband Technology Opportunities Program of the Department of Commerce’s National 

Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Rural Development Broadband 

Program of the Department of Agriculture, and the interagency National Broadband Plan 

developed by the Federal Communications Commission.

Work with districts, states, and the private sector to articulate effective technology support 

models for 24/7 access including using school- and student-owned devices. New support 

models for this type of access will require improved security systems, more intelligent 

filtering systems that allow blocking and enabling access within this type of infrastructure, 

and personnel and/or systems capable of providing around-the-clock support for school-, 

student-, and educator-owned devices used for learning. 

Participating in efforts to ensure that transitioning from predominantly print-based classrooms 

to digital learning environments promotes organized, accessible, easy-to-distribute and easyto-use content and learning resources. 

The Department of Education can

Support the development of an open architecture mapping and navigation platform that will 

enable the visual depiction of learning progressions across all content areas and reflect 

21st-century expertise. Accessible online, these learning progressions can be used to 

reenvision content, resources, assessments, curricula, and professional learning for teachers 

and encourage the sharing of best practices and new approaches to improve teaching and 

learning. This platform would encourage a variety of mashups and spur innovation.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary xxiii

Initiate an interagency effort to create, publish, and maintain open standards for content, 

student learning, and financial data interoperability. State and district requests for proposals 

for assessment and data systems should require appropriate use of these standards.

Create a learning registry, an open-standard registry of all content developed by various 

agencies throughout the federal government so that states, districts, and schools can access 

and leverage it and combine it with their own repositories of content.

Expand the availability of digital-learning content, resources, courses, and tools and ensure 

their continuous improvement by funding the research and development of open educational 

resources. Facilitate states working together to pool resources for identifying and evaluating 

or issuing requirements for developing open educational resources. 

Support research and evaluation efforts focused on the effectiveness of online and blended 

learning environments at all levels.

Encourage the use of technology and online learning courses and resources in federally 

funded programs that expand learning opportunities for underserved populations and others 

who need it most.

Encourage states, districts, P–12 programs, and postsecondary education institutions to 

experiment with such resources as online learning, online tutoring and mentoring, games, 

cognitive tutors, immersive environments, and participatory communities and social 

networks both within and across education institutions to give students guidance and 

information about their own learning progress and strategies for seamless completion of a 

comprehensive P–16 education.

Funding online communities of practice to ensure that teachers are connected to data, 

resources, experts, and peers to prepare and enable connected teaching. 

The Department of Education can

Fund a contract for design research on online communities of practice and apply the design 

to a series of at least six communities of practice in order to leverage the use of educational 

technology and social networking to improve teaching, assessment, learning, and 

infrastructure in schools. The communities of practice will be designed to ensure teachers 

and other education professionals are highly connected to data, resources, content, experts, 

peers, and just-in-time expertise on a variety of topics.

Leverage the design work on online communities of practice to inform contracts and grants 

for providing technical assistance throughout the Department of Education.

Ensuring a sustained focus on R&D for education, including scaling up and sustaining innovations, 

technology transfer, and grand challenge problems. 

The Department of Education can

Implement an approach to R&D for education that focuses on five areas:

 • Transferring existing and emerging technology innovations from sectors such as 

business, consumer, and entertainment into education. 

 • Transferring appropriate developments from the Department of Defense Advanced 

Research Projects Administration to the public education sector.

 • Supporting and sustaining the education R&D that is currently happening throughout the 

National Science Foundation by designing a commercialization strategy. 
xxiv Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology - Executive Summary

 • Creating a new organization (the National Center for Research in Advanced Information 

and Digital Technologies) with the mission of serving the public good through R&D at the 

intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education.

 • Providing competitive grants for scaling up innovative and evidence-based practices 

through the Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund.

Encouraging states and districts to move to more integrated use of technology in teaching 

and learning. 

The Department of Education can

Encourage states to assign responsibility for educational technology to senior-level 

individuals who will provide leadership in connecting the planning for educational and 

information technology to the core functions of curriculum and instruction, assessment, and 

professional learning and in ensuring that the most efficient and effective purchases are 

made. These individuals will be invited to participate on a cross-functional team organized 

by the Department of Education to share insights and best practices and collaborate on 

technology for teaching and learning.

Encourage every federal grant program and expenditure to consider how technology can be 

a multiplier for support and scale in education.

Leading a national initiative to identify strategies for increasing productivity in education and 

work with states, districts, and schools to build their capacity for implementing them. 

The Department of Education can

Start a national initiative and develop an ongoing research agenda dedicated to improving 

productivity in the education sector. The initiative will focus on defining productivity in 

education and establishing new and more useful metrics and methods for measuring it. The 

initiative will promote continuous improvement and data-driven decision making, leveraging 

technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending so that education decision-makers 

can be provided with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of 

our education system at all levels.

Encourage states to adopt common cost accounting standards to allow benchmarking 

and analysis of costs and provide a platform for sharing strategies for cost saving and 

productivity improvement and highlight policies at the federal, state, and local level that 

might inhibit progress, for example, in procurement.

Develop new and better ways of assessing the efficacy of technology in teaching and 

learning and in the financial operations of education institutions.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 1

Introduction

“By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion

of college graduates in the world.”

—President Barack Obama,

Address to Congress, Feb. 24, 2009

Education is the key to America’s economic growth and prosperity and to our ability 

to compete in the global economy. It is the path to good jobs and higher earning power for 

Americans. It is necessary for our democracy to work.

With this in mind, America needs a public education system that provides all learners—

including low-income and minority students, English language learners, students with 

disabilities, gifted and talented students, early childhood learners, adult workforce learners, 

and seniors—with engaging and empowering learning experiences. Our education system 

also should help learners set goals, stay in school despite obstacles, earn a high school 

diploma, and obtain the further education and training needed for success in their personal 

lives, the workplace, and their communities.

We want to develop inquisitive, creative, resourceful thinkers; informed citizens; effective 

problem-solvers; groundbreaking pioneers; and visionary leaders. We want to foster the 

excellence that flows from the ability to use today’s information, tools, and technologies 

effectively and a commitment to lifelong learning. All these are necessary for Americans to be 

active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.

To accomplish this, schools must be more than information factories; they must be incubators 

of exploration and invention. Educators must be more than information experts; they must 

be collaborators in learning, seeking new knowledge and constantly acquiring new skills 

alongside their students. Students must be fully engaged in school—intellectually, socially, and 

emotionally. This level of engagement requires the chance to work on interesting and relevant 

projects, the use of technology environments and resources, and access to an extended social 

network of adults and peers who support their intellectual growth.
2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Education reform has been on the national agenda for decades. Still, we no longer have the 

highest proportion of college graduates in the world, and we have a system that too often 

fails our students. According to current data,

 • Approximately 25 percent of young people in the United States fail to graduate on time 

with a regular diploma (Stillwell 2010). That number jumps to almost 40 percent for 

Latino and African-American students. 

 • Some 5,000 schools persistently fail year after year, and about 2,000 high schools 

produce about half the nation’s dropouts and three-quarters of minority dropouts 

(Balfanz and Legters 2004; Tucci 2009). 

 • Of students who do graduate from high school, one-third are unprepared for 

postsecondary education, forcing community colleges and four-year colleges and 

universities to devote precious time and resources to remedial work for incoming 

students (National Center for Education Statistics 2003). 

 • By 2016—just six years from now—four out of every 10 new jobs will require some 

advanced education or training (Dohm and Shniper 2007). Fifteen of the 30 fastest-growing 

fields will require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2007).

 • Only about 41 percent of young people earn a two-year or four-year college degree 

(OECD 2010). Enrollment rates are unequal: 69 percent of qualified white high school 

graduates enter four-year colleges compared with just 58 percent of comparable 

Latino graduates and 56 percent of African-American graduates (National Center for 

Education Statistics 2007).

 • Thirty million adults have below-basic levels of English literacy, and another 63 million 

read English only at a basic level, which means that 44 percent of adults living in 

America could benefit from English literacy instruction (National Center for Education 

Statistics 2009).

As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, the current state of our education system 

is “economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable” (Duncan 2010).

Transforming American Education: An Urgent Priority

Under the Obama administration, education has become an urgent priority driven by two 

clear goals set by the president:

 • By 2020, we will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands 

(about 41 percent) so that 60 percent of our population holds a two-year or four-year 

degree (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education 2008).

 • We will close the achievement gap so that all students graduate from high school ready 

to succeed in college and careers.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 3

To accomplish these goals, we must embrace a strategy of innovation, careful 

implementation, regular evaluation, and continuous improvement. The programs and 

projects that work must be brought to scale so that every learner has the opportunity to 

take advantage of that success. Our regulations, policies, actions, and investments must be 

strategic and coherent.

To this end, Secretary Duncan has identified four major areas where our investments and 

efforts can have the greatest impact:

 • States should adopt standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in 

college and the workplace and compete in the global economy.

 • States should build data systems that measure student growth and success and inform 

educators about how they can improve instruction.

 • States should recruit, reward, develop, and retain effective educators, especially in 

underserved areas where they are needed most.

 • States should turn around their lowest-achieving schools.

In addition, in November 2009 President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate 

campaign to improve the participation and performance of all U.S. students, including 

underrepresented groups such as girls and women, in science, technology, engineering, and 

mathematics (STEM). 

We are guided in these and other education initiatives by Secretary Duncan’s conviction that we 

need revolutionary transformation, not evolutionary tinkering, and we know that transformation 

cannot be achieved through outdated reform strategies that take decades to unfold.

We must be clear about the outcomes we seek. We must apply the core principles of 

process redesign to quickly evaluate our education system for effectiveness, efficiency, and 

flexibility and design and implement new processes where needed. We must monitor and 

measure our performance to continually improve learning outcomes while managing costs. 

We must hold ourselves accountable. To do all these things, we must apply the advanced 

technology available in our daily lives to student learning and to our entire education system. 

Above all, we must accept that we do not have the luxury of time. We must act now and 

commit to fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. We must learn from other kinds 

of enterprises that have used technology to improve outcomes and increase productivity.
4 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Drivers of Change

The Department of Education’s decisions and actions—and those of the entire education 

system and its stakeholders throughout the United States—must be guided by the world we 

live in, which demands that we think differently about education than we have in the past. 

Technology and the Internet have fostered an increasingly competitive and interdependent 

global economy and transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives—how we work; play; 

interact with family, friends, and communities; and learn new things.

The context of global interdependence is especially important for this generation of students 

because only individuals and nations working together will solve many of today’s challenges. 

The leadership of the United States in the world depends on educating a generation of 

young people who are capable of navigating an interdependent world and collaborating 

across borders and cultures to address today’s great problems.

Another important context is the growing disparity between students’ experiences in and 

out of school. Students use computers, mobile devices, and the Internet to create their own 

engaging learning experiences outside school and after school hours—experiences that too 

often are radically different from what they are exposed to in school. Our leadership in the 

world depends on educating a generation of young people who know how to use technology 

to learn both formally and informally.

Technology itself is an important driver of change. Contemporary technology offers 

unprecedented performance, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness.

Technology can enable transforming education but only if we commit to the change that 

it will bring to our education system. For example, students come to school with mobile 

devices that let them carry the Internet in their pockets and search the Web for the answers 

to test questions. While such behavior traditionally has been viewed as cheating, with such 

ubiquitous access to information is it time to change what and how we teach? Similarly, 

do we ignore the informal learning enabled by technology outside school, or do we create 

equally engaging and relevant experiences inside school and blend the two?

We know from our rankings in the world in terms of academic achievement and graduation 

rates that what we have been doing to fill our education pipeline and ensure students 

graduate is not working. Getting students to stay in school is crucial, and equipping them 

with the skills they need to learn to be successful throughout their lives is equally important.

The essential question facing us as we transform the U.S. education system is this: 

What should learning in the 21st century look like? 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 5

Learning Powered by Technology

Building on the report of a technical working group of leading researchers and practitioners 

and on input received from many respected education leaders and the public, this National 

Education Technology Plan tackles this essential question and other important questions. 

The plan presents goals, recommendations, and actions for a model of learning informed by 

the learning sciences and powered by technology. Advances in the learning sciences give us 

valuable insights into how people learn. Technology innovations give us the ability to act on 

these insights as never before.

The plan is based on the following assumptions:

 • Many of the failings of our education system stem from our failure to engage the hearts 

and minds of students.

 • What students need to learn and what we know about how they learn have changed, 

and therefore the learning experiences we provide should change.

 • How we assess learning focuses too much on what has been learned after the fact and 

not enough on improving learning in the moment.

 • We miss a huge opportunity to improve our entire education system when we 

gather student-learning data in silos and fail to integrate the information and make it 

broadly available to decision-makers at all levels of our education system—individual 

educators, schools, districts, states, and the federal government.

 • Learning depends on effective teaching, and we need to focus on extended teams of 

connected educators with different roles who collaborate within schools and across 

time and distance and who use technology resources and tools to augment 

human talent.

 • Effective teaching is an outcome of preparing and continually training teachers and 

leaders to guide the type of learning we want in our schools.

 • Making engaging learning experiences and resources available to all learners anytime 

and anywhere requires state-of-the-art infrastructure, which includes technology, 

people, and processes that ensure continuous access.

 • Education can learn much from such industries as business and entertainment about 

leveraging technology to continuously improve learning outcomes while increasing the 

productivity of our education system at all levels.

 • Just as in health, energy, and defense, the federal government has an important 

role to play in funding and coordinating some of the R&D challenges associated with 

leveraging technology to ensure the maximum opportunity to learn.
6 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The plan also assumes that with technology we can provide engaging and powerful learning 

content, resources, and experiences and assessment systems that measure student 

learning in more complete, authentic, and meaningful ways. With technology-based learning 

and assessment systems, we can improve student learning and generate data that can be 

used to continuously improve the education system at all levels. With technology, we can 

execute collaborative teaching strategies combined with professional learning strategies 

that better prepare and enhance educators’ competencies and expertise over the course 

of their careers. With technology, we can redesign and implement processes to produce 

better outcomes while achieving ever higher levels of productivity and efficiency across the 

education system.

Collaboration and Investment for Success

Transforming U.S. education is no small task, and accomplishing it will take leadership 

throughout our education system—states, districts, schools, and the federal government—as well 

as partnerships with higher education institutions, private enterprises, and not-for-profit entities.

In the United States, education is primarily a state and local responsibility. State and local 

public education institutions must ensure equitable access to learning experiences for all 

students and especially students in underserved populations—low-income and minority 

students, students with disabilities, English language learners, preschool-aged children, 

and others. States and districts need to build capacity for transformation. The Department 

of Education has a role in identifying effective strategies and implementation practices; 

encouraging, promoting, and actively supporting innovation in states and districts; and 

nurturing collaborations that help states and districts leverage resources so the best ideas 

can be scaled up.

Building capacity for transformation also will require investment. But we must resolve to 

spend investment dollars wisely, with clear expectations about what we expect in terms of 

learning outcomes and process improvements. 

Implementing the plan depends on the broadband initiatives of the American Recovery and 

Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are intended to accelerate deployment of Internet services 

in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create 

jobs or provide significant public benefits. These initiatives are the Broadband Technology 

Opportunities Program of the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and 

Information Administration, the Rural Development Broadband Program of the Department 

of Agriculture, and the interagency National Broadband Plan developed by the Federal 

Communications Commission (FCC).

The plan also draws guidance and inspiration from the report of the National Science 

Foundation (NSF) Task Force on Cyberlearning, Fostering Learning in the Networked World: 

The Cyberlearning Challenge and Opportunity, published in June 2008, and the work of the 

President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 7

The plan will be best served if postsecondary education institutions—community colleges 

and four-year colleges and universities—partner with K–12 schools to remove barriers to 

postsecondary education and put plans of their own in place to decrease dropout rates. 

In addition, postsecondary institutions are key players in the transformation of teacher 

preparation and the national R&D efforts recommended in this plan.

Education has long relied on the contributions of organizations in both the private and notfor-profit sectors, and this will not change.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, there has never been a more 

pressing need to transform American education, and there will never be a better time to 

act. In keeping with the appropriate role of the federal government, this Nation Education 

Technology Plan is not a prescription but rather a common definition and a five-year action 

plan that responds to an urgent national priority and a growing understanding of what the 

United States needs to do to remain competitive in a global economy.

Accessibility of Web Content

Not all of the websites identified in this plan, at the time of its publication, meet the technical 

requirements for Web accessibility established by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 

1973, as amended (see http://www.Section508.gov for these requirements). The Department of 

Education will take appropriate steps to bring all websites subject to Section 508 into compliance 

with those accessibility requirements as soon as reasonably possible. Moreover, as Secretary 

of Education Duncan stated in the cover letter to this plan, the Department is committed to 

taking a leadership role in ensuring that the benefits of educational technology are accessible 

to all learners “regardless of background, languages, or disabilities.” To meet that goal, the 

Department will not only exercise its authority under sections 508 and 504 of the Rehabilitation 

Act of 1973*as necessary to achieve compliance, but also will work with and encourage the 

broader educational community to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not denied the 

benefits of educational technology due to accessibility issues. 

* Section 504 provides that:

No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States, as defined in section 

705(2) of this title, shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the 

participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program 

or activity receiving Federal financial assistance or under any program or activity conducted by 

any Executive agency or by the United States Postal Service.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 9

Learning: Engage and Empower

Goal: All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and out 

of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in 

our globally networked society.

Our education system today supports learning, mostly in classrooms and from textbooks, 

and depends on the relationship between individual educators and their students. The role 

technology plays in the nation’s classrooms varies dramatically depending on the funding 

priorities of states, districts, and schools and individual educators’ understanding of how to 

leverage it in learning in meaningful ways.

Meanwhile, many students’ lives outside school are filled with technology that gives them 

mobile access to information and resources 24/7, enables them to create multimedia content 

and share it with the world, and allows them to participate in online social networks and 

communities where people from all over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new 

things. According to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8- to 18-year-olds 

today devote an average of seven hours and 38 minutes to using entertainment media in a 

typical day—more than 53 hours a week (Kaiser Family Foundation 2009). The opportunity 

to harness this interest and access in the service of learning is huge. 

Technology brings similar opportunities to professionals in many fields. Physicians 

use mobile Internet access devices to download x-rays and test results or to access 

specialized applications, such as medicine dosage calculators. Earthquake geologists 

install underground sensors along fault lines, monitor them remotely, and tie them in to early 

warning systems that signal the approach of seismic waves. Filmmakers use everyday 

computers and affordable software for every phase of the filmmaking process, from editing 

and special effects to music and sound mixing. Technology dominates the workplaces of 

most professionals and managers in business, where working in distributed teams that need 

to communicate and collaborate is the norm.

The challenge for our education system is to leverage technology to create relevant learning 

experiences that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. We live in a highly 

mobile, globally connected society in which young Americans will have more jobs and more 

careers in their lifetimes than their parents. Learning can no longer be confined to the years 

we spend in school or the hours we spend in the classroom: It must be lifelong, lifewide, and 

available on demand (Bransford et al. 2006).
10 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

To prepare students to learn throughout their lives and in settings far beyond classrooms, we 

must change what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, 

and where and when they learn and change our perception of who needs to learn. We must 

bring 21st-century technology into learning in meaningful ways to engage, motivate, and 

inspire learners of all ages to achieve.

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people 

need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people 

learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

What Learning Should Look Like

Figure 1 depicts a model of learning powered by technology. In contrast to traditional 

classroom instruction, which often consists of a single educator transmitting the same 

information to all learners in the same way, the model puts students at the center and 

empowers them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several 

dimensions. A core set of standards-based concepts and competencies form the basis of 

what all students should learn, but beyond that students and educators have options for 

engaging in learning: large groups, small groups, and activities tailored to individual goals, 

needs, and interests.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 11

Peers With

Common

Interests

Personal

Learning 

Networks

Online

Tutoring & 

Guided

Courses

Expertise &

Authoritative

Sources

Information, 

Data & 

Resources

Learning

Communities

Knowledgebuilding

Tools

Information

Management & 

Communication

Tools

Teachers Parents

Peers Mentors &

Coaches

t

Student

Figure 1. A Model of Learning, Powered by Technology

In this model, technology supports learning by providing engaging environments and tools 

for understanding and remembering content. For example, game-based courses use 

features familiar to game players to teach core subject content, such as history. 

Technology provides access to a much wider and more flexible set of learning resources than 

is available in classrooms and connections to a wider and more flexible set of “educators,” 

including teachers, parents, experts, and mentors outside the classroom. Engaging and 

effective learning experiences can be individualized or differentiated for particular learners 
12 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

(either paced or tailored to fit their learning needs) or 

personalized, which combines paced and tailored learning 

with flexibility in content or theme to fit the interests and prior 

experience of each learner. (See sidebar for definitions of 

individualized, differentiated, and personalized learning.)

An example of individualized and differentiated learning can be 

found in New York City’s School of One pilot, a 2009 summer 

program that allowed students learning mathematics to learn 

at their own pace and in a variety of ways. On the basis of its 

initial success, the School of One concept was expanded in 

2010 and is set for further expansion in 2011. (See sidebar on 

the School of One for more information.) 

Personalized learning supports student learning in areas of 

particular interest to them. For example, a student who learns 

Russian to read the works of Dostoevsky in their original form and 

another who orders a surgical kit on eBay to practice sutures on 

oranges are learning things we would never ask all students to do. 

But these things are important because they are driven by learners’ 

own passions.

Within specific content areas, although standards exist for what 

we expect all students to know and be able to do, the model also 

provides options for how the learning can take place. Among 

these options is working with others in project-based learning 

built around challenges with real-world relevance. Well-designed 

projects help students acquire knowledge in specific content 

areas and also support the development of more specialized 

adaptive expertise that can be applied in other areas (Trilling 

and Fadel 2009). (See sidebar on Winona Middle School for an 

example of such a project.) 

Technology also gives students opportunities for taking 

ownership of their learning. Student-managed electronic 

learning portfolios can be part of a persistent learning record 

and help students develop the self-awareness required to 

set their own learning goals; express their own views of 

their strengths, weaknesses, and achievements; and take 

responsibility for them. Educators can use them to gauge 

students’ development, and they also can be shared with peers, 

parents, and others who are part of students’ extended network.

Individualized, Personalized, and 

Differentiated Instruction

Individualization, differentiation, and 

personalization have become buzzwords in 

education, but little agreement exists on what 

exactly they mean beyond the broad concept that 

each is an alternative to the one-size-fits-all model 

of teaching and learning. For example, some 

education professionals use personalization to 

mean that students are given the choice of what 

and how they learn according to their interests, 

and others use it to suggest that instruction is 

paced differently for different students. Throughout 

this plan, we use the following definitions:

Individualization refers to instruction that is 

paced to the learning needs of different learners. 

Learning goals are the same for all students, 

but students can progress through the material 

at different speeds according to their learning 

needs. For example, students might take longer 

to progress through a given topic, skip topics that 

cover information they already know, or repeat 

topics they need more help on. 

Differentiation refers to instruction that is tailored 

to the learning preferences of different learners. 

Learning goals are the same for all students, 

but the method or approach of instruction varies 

according to the preferences of each student or 

what research has found works best for students 

like them.

Personalization refers to instruction that is 

paced to learning needs, tailored to learning 

preferences, and tailored to the specific interests 

of different learners. In an environment that is fully 

personalized, the learning objectives and content 

as well as the method and pace may all vary (so 

personalization encompasses differentiation and 

individualization).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 13

What People Need to Learn

Education is an enterprise that asks, What’s worth knowing and 

being able to do?

Education experts have proposed answers to this question, 

and although they differ in the details all recognize that what we 

need to know goes beyond the traditional three Rs of Reading, 

’Riting, and ’Rithmetic. Whether the domain is English language 

arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or 

music, 21st-century competencies and expertise such as critical 

thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia 

communication should be woven into all content areas.

We are still evolving our understanding of what it means to be 

a 21st-century learner. For example, what does it mean to be 

digitally literate in an age of constantly evolving technologies 

and resources, and how we can teach learners to use new 

technology in ways that are productive, creative, and responsible? 

One response to these essential questions is offered by the 

International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), which 

has published the National Educational Technology Standards 

for Students (NETS–S). (See sidebar on ISTE’s standards for 

students for more information.)

A number of other researchers and organizations also have 

addressed the issue either in part or whole, and the domain 

seems to include three categories: information literacy, the ability 

to identify, retrieve, evaluate, and use information for a variety of 

purposes; media literacy, the ability to consume and understand 

media, as well as communicate effectively using a variety of 

media types; and digital citizenship, the ability to evaluate and use 

technologies appropriately, behave in socially acceptable ways 

within online communities, and develop a healthy understanding 

of issues surrounding online privacy and safety. All this requires a 

basic understanding of technologies themselves and the ability to 

make increasingly sound judgments about the use of technology 

in our daily lives.

Answers to questions about 21st-century learning also must 

take into account that people no longer can learn everything 

there is to know in a lifetime, and the economic reality is that 

most people will change jobs throughout their lives. Therefore, 

we need adaptive learning skills that blend content knowledge 

with the ability to learn new things. This requires developing 

deep understanding within specific domains and the ability to 

School of One: Individualizing and 

Differentiating Learning 

During summer 2009, the New York City school 

system conducted a two-month pilot test of a 

radically new education concept, the School of 

One. Conducted at Middle School 131 in New 

York’s Chinatown, the pilot program focused on a 

single subject, mathematics, and a single grade 

level (sixth grade). The New York City Department 

of Education views it as demonstration of a 

concept that is equally applicable in other subjects 

and grades. 

Instead of organizing the 80 participating students 

into classes with one of the school’s four teachers 

assigned to each class, the School of One used 

flexible arrangements of students and teachers and 

a large collection of alternative ways for students 

to learn the 77 mathematics skills that were the 

objectives for the program. The School of One 

lesson bank included more than 1,000 lessons 

covering those 77 mathematics skills. Rather 

than giving every student the same content, the 

School of One used data from prior assessments 

to identify which skills each student should work 

on during the summer. Inputs from teachers and 

from students provided information about how 

each student learned best (for example, “likes to 

learn through games” or “likes to learn alone”). A 

computer algorithm used information about each 

student’s demonstrated mathematics skills and his 

or her learning preferences to generate individual 

“playlists” of appropriate learning activities. 

Staff for the summer pilot included teachers whose 

efforts focused on large-group instruction, college 

students studying to be teachers who provided 

small-group instruction and support for online 

learning, and high school students who focused on 

tutoring and the grading of assessments. 

School of One uses technology to develop a unique 

learning path for each student and to provide a 

significant portion of the instruction that is both 

individualized and differentiated. The New York 

City Department of Education now operates the 

School of One program in three middle schools and 

plans to expand the program to serve over 5,000 

students by 2012.
14 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

make connections that cut across domains—learning 

activities that should replace the broad but shallow 

exposure to many topics that is the norm in our 

education system today. We also need to know how to 

use the same technology in learning that professionals 

in various disciplines do.

Professionals routinely use Web resources and such 

participatory technology as wikis, blogs, and usergenerated content for the research, collaboration, and 

communication demanded in their jobs. For students, 

these tools create new learning activities that allow 

them to grapple with real-world problems, develop 

search strategies, evaluate the credibility and authority 

of websites and authors, and create and communicate 

with multimedia (Jenkins 2009; Leu et al. 2004). For 

example,

 • In the study of mathematics, professional-level 

interactive graphing and statistical programs make 

complex topics more accessible to all learners and 

help them connect to datasets that are current and 

relevant to their lives.

 • In earth sciences, collecting data with inquiry tools, 

adding geotags with GPS tools, and interactively 

analyzing visualizations of data patterns through 

Web browsers bring professional scientific methods 

and techniques to learners of all ages and abilities.

 • In history, original documents available to historians 

as digital resources from the Smithsonian and other 

institutions are available to engage learners in 

historical thinking and reasoning.

As these examples illustrate, the world’s information 

and sophisticated tools for using it, which are available 

anytime and anywhere, demand that in addition to 

knowing content, we become expert learners in at least 

three ways: 

 • As skillful and strategic learners who have learned 

how to learn new things and communicate what we 

have learned;

 • As motivated and engaged learners who identify 

ourselves as growing in competence and want to 

learn even more; and 

Winona Middle School’s Cultural History Project

In 1995, when the Internet was just arriving in schools, 

students at Winona Middle School in Winona, Minn., 

began to use it to support and showcase a class project 

about local history and the changing demographics of 

their town. Students gathered information about their 

community by visiting local museums, searching texts, 

and interviewing local residents. They built a website 

to share their findings with one another and with their 

community. The website began to take on a life of its own, 

attracting the interest of community leaders, professional 

historians, and individuals living halfway around the 

world who found they were distant relatives of the town’s 

earliest immigrants. Students expanded the website to 

include the contributions of the wider community and built 

a searchable database of genealogical information and 

other artifacts. 

Today, Winona’s Cultural History website continues to be 

a valuable resource for the school and its community, and 

students continue to interact with others in or outside their 

local area to evolve an ongoing knowledge base. One of 

the secrets of this project’s success is that it leverages 

very simple technology so that it can be sustained with 

minimal funding and maintenance.

ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards 

for Students

The International Society for Technology in Education 

has created National Educational Technology Standards 

for Students (NETS-S) that encompass a full range of 

technology competencies. The NETS standards include

 • Creativity and innovation. Students should be able 

to use technology and their existing knowledge to 

generate new ideas, products, or processes.

 • Communication and collaboration. Students should 

be able to work collaboratively, both in person and at 

a distance, and to communicate ideas effectively to 

multiple audiences using new media.

 • Research and information fluency. Students should be 

able to use a variety of digital media to locate, organize, 

analyze, and evaluate information from a variety of sources.

 • Critical thinking, problem solving, and decision 

making. Students should be able to define problems, 

plan and conduct research, and identify solutions or 

appropriate decisions using digital tools and resources.

 • Digital citizenship. Students should take responsibility 

for their own lifelong learning and should practice safe, 

legal, and ethical use of information and digital tools.

 • Technology operations and concepts. Students 

should understand technology systems, select and 

use technology applications effectively, and be able to 

troubleshoot systems and applications.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 15

 • As networked learners who have the ability to tap expertise 

anytime and anywhere that can advance our learning.

A crucial step in transforming American education to produce 

expert learners is creating, revising, and adopting content 

standards and learning objectives for all content areas that 

reflect 21st-century expertise and the power of technology to 

improve learning.

How People Learn

Advances in the learning sciences, including cognitive science, 

neuroscience, education, and social sciences, give us greater 

understanding of three connected types of human learning—

factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and motivational 

engagement. Neuroscience tells us that these three different 

types of learning are supported by three different brain systems. 

(See sidebar on the neuroscience of learning.) Social sciences 

reveal that human expertise integrates all three types of 

learning. Technology has increased our ability to both study and 

enhance all three types of learning (National Research Council 

2000, 2003, 2007, 2009; National Science Foundation 2008b).

Factual Knowledge

Students are surrounded with information in a variety of forms, 

and specific features of information design affect how and 

whether students build usable knowledge from the information 

they encounter. For example, computers can replicate and 

integrate a wide variety of media for learning and education: 

text, video/film, animations, graphics, photos, diagrams, 

simulations, and more. As a result, technology can be designed 

to provide much richer learning experiences without sacrificing 

what traditional learning media offer. Technology can

 • Represent information through a much richer mix of 

media types. This allows the integration of media and 

representations to illustrate, explain, or explore complex 

ideas and phenomena, such as interactive visualizations 

of data in earth and environmental sciences, chemistry, or astronomy. 

Technology can help learners explore phenomena at extreme spatial or 

temporal scales through simulation and modeling tools. This opens up 

many domains and ways of learning that were formerly impossible or 

impractical. (See sidebar on Chesapeake Bay FieldScope.)

The Neuroscience of Learning

Three broad types of learning—learning that, 

learning how, and learning why—each correspond 

to one of three main areas of the human brain. 

Learning that is associated with the posterior 

brain regions (the parietal, occipital, and temporal 

lobes within the cerebral cortex). These regions 

primarily take information in from the senses 

and transform it into usable knowledge—the 

patterns, facts, concepts, objects, principles, and 

regularities of our world. The medial temporal 

lobe, including the hippocampus, provides a 

system of anatomically related structures essential 

to conscious memory for facts and events—what 

is called declarative knowledge (Squire, Stark, 

and Clark 2004). 

Learning how is associated with the anterior 

parts of the brain (the frontal lobe, from the primary 

motor cortex to the prefrontal cortex), specialized 

for learning how to do things, and is expressed 

through performance (Squire 2004). This also 

has been called procedural knowledge, implicit 

memory, and knowing how. This type includes 

learning “low-level” motor skills but also high-level 

skills and strategies known as executive functions. 

Learning why is associated with the interior or 

central brain regions, including the extended 

limbic system and amygdale. These evolutionarily 

primitive brain regions are specialized for affective 

and emotional learning (LeDoux 2000). They 

contribute to learning and remembering not 

what an object is or how to use it but why it is 

important to us. These structures underlie what 

attracts our attention and interest, sustains our 

effort, motivates our behavior, and guides our goal 

setting and priorities. With these regions, we learn 

our values and priorities: our image as a person 

and as a learner and the values and goals that 

comprise it.
16 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

 • Facilitate knowledge connections through interactive tools. 

These include interactive concept maps, data displays, and 

timelines that provide visual connections between existing 

knowledge and new ideas.

Procedural Knowledge 

Procedural knowledge learning includes both content-related 

procedures (learning how to do science inquiry, for example) 

and learning-related strategies (learning how to figure out how 

to solve a new problem or self-monitor progress on a task). 

Technology can expand and support a growing repertoire of 

strategies for individual learners by

 • Providing scaffolds to guide learners through the 

learning process. Many programs use interactive prompts 

embedded directly into the learning resources, live or 

virtual modeling of helpful strategies, interactive queries 

that prompt effective processing, and timely and informative 

feedback on results. These scaffolds can be designed to 

respond to differences in individual learning styles and be 

available on demand when the learner needs help and then 

evolve or fade as the learner builds stronger skills.

 • Providing tools for communicating learning beyond written or spoken language. This 

can be accomplished through Web-based multimedia, multimedia presentations, or 

such gestural expressions as those that drive interactions in gaming systems. 

 • Fostering online communities. Technology can provide platforms for connecting 

learners in online communities where they can support each other as they explore and 

develop deeper understanding of new ideas, share resources, work together beyond 

the walls of a school or home, and gain access to a much wider pool of expertise, 

guidance, and support (Ito 2009).

Motivational Engagement

The field of affective neuroscience has drawn attention to the critical importance of 

motivation in how the brain learns. We learn and remember what attracts our interest and 

attention, and what attracts interest and attention can vary by learner. Therefore, the most 

effective learning experiences are not only individualized in terms of pacing and differentiated 

to fit the learning needs of particular learners, but also personalized in the sense that they 

are flexible in content or theme to fit the interests of particular learners. 

Chesapeake Bay FieldScope: Analyzing 

Authentic Scientific Phenomena

Chesapeake Bay FieldScope is a collaborative 

high school science project that combines 

traditional hands-on fieldwork with Web-based 

geospatial technology and other tools to help 

students build a rich understanding of the 

ecosystem around them. Students 

use National Geographic FieldScope, a 

Web-based mapping, analysis, and collaboration 

tool, to investigate water quality issues in and 

around the Chesapeake Bay. In the classroom, 

students learn about the bay using a multimedia 

database of scientific information. In the field, 

students gather their own scientific observations 

(such as water quality samples, written notes, 

or digital photos of wildlife) and then upload 

them to the FieldScope database. All database 

information is organized as points on a map, 

providing an intuitive geospatial format to 

scaffold student learning.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 17

To stimulate motivational engagement, technology can

 • Engage interest and attention. Digital learning resources enable engaging individual 

learners’ personal interests by connecting Web-learning resources to learning standards, 

providing options for adjusting the challenge level of learning tasks to avoid boredom 

or frustration, and bridging informal and formal learning in and out of school (Brown 

and Adler 2008; Collins and Halverson 2009; National Science Foundation 2008b). 

Technology also can be used to create learning resources that provide immediate 

feedback modeled on games to help engage and motivate learners (Gee 2004).

 • Sustain effort and academic motivation. Technology-based learning resources can 

give learners choices that keep them engaged in learning, for example, by providing 

personally relevant content, a customized interface, options for difficulty level or 

alternative learning pathways, or choices for support and guidance.

 • Develop a positive image as a lifelong learner. Technology can inspire imagination and 

intellectual curiosity that help people engage actively as learners and open new channels 

for success or visions of career possibilities. For example, when students use the tools 

of professionals to engage in real-world problems, they can begin to see themselves in 

productive professional roles (“I am a graphic artist,” “I am a scientist,” “I am a teacher”). 

Technology also provides opportunities for students to express themselves by engaging 

in online communities and sharing content they have created with the world.

Where and When People Learn

Not that long ago, people expected to learn much of the information and skills they needed 

for life and work within the confines of a school day and their years in school. Today, learning 

must be continuous and lifelong. (See Figure 2.)

Source: Banks et al. 2006.

Figure 2. Lifelong and lifewide learning
18 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

A key enabler of continuous and lifelong learning is technology. Technology gives learners 

direct access to learning and to the building blocks of their knowledge—organized, indexed, 

and available 24/7. This empowers learners to take control of and personalize their learning. 

Technology also can serve as a bridge across formal (in school) and informal (outside 

school) learning settings (Barron 2006), creating new opportunities to leverage informal 

learning by integrating it purposefully into the fabric of formal learning. Technology also 

provides ways to ensure that as students pursue self-directed and informal learning they are 

still guided by professional educators. 

These are powerful ideas for individual learners but even more so when applied to 

groups of learners and learning communities—from small groups with different roles and 

responsibilities in pursuit of a learning project to far larger communities that may be pursuing 

ambitious design and learning products. Group learning especially is enhanced by social and 

participatory approaches, such as wikis, in which learners and teachers regardless of their 

location or the time of day can build knowledge structures or tackle inquiry problems that 

are posed together. Social media content created by teachers and learners, from blogs to 

podcasts to YouTube videos or creations and performances in virtual worlds (Jenkins 2009; 

Johnson, Levine, and Smith 2009; OECD 2008, 2009b), enrich such learning.

Specific examples of individual and collaborative learning with technology include the following:

 • Inquiry and adventure environments with games and activities that foster learning. 

 • Online “collaboratories” (National Science Foundation 2008a) in which scientists 

establish protocols for collecting data with sensors from local environments across the 

planet. Learners and teachers learn science by doing science as they capture, upload, 

and then visualize and analyze geospatial and temporal data patterns from the data 

contributed by the globally networked community.

 • Earth- and sky-mapping Web resources with data from the sciences and other fields 

of scholarly inquiry that anyone can use to develop virtual travel tours to be applied in 

learning and teaching activities.

 • Augmented reality platforms and games that bring locally relevant learning resources into 

view for users of mobile devices with a GPS (Johnson et al. 2010). 

 • Use of the power of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing to tackle complex 

interdisciplinary problems.

 • Powerful learning applications for mobile Internet access devices, such as musical 

instrument simulators, language-learning tools, and mathematical games.

 • Sites and communities that publish academic content, including user-generated 

content. One notable example is the videotaped lectures of MIT physics professor 

Walter Lewin, available on MIT’s OpenCourseWare site as well as through commercial 

courseware and video-sharing sites. Lewin’s engaging and entertaining lectures have 

earned him a following of millions worldwide. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 19

Who Needs to Learn

The United States cannot prosper economically, culturally, or politically if major parts of our 

citizenry lack a strong educational foundation, yet far too many students are not served by 

our current one-size-fits-all education system. The learning sciences and technology can 

help us design and provide more effective learning experiences for all learners.

Universal Design for Learning

Making learning experiences accessible to all learners requires universal design, a concept 

well established in the field of architecture, where all modern public buildings, including 

schools, are designed to be accessible by everyone. Principles and guidelines have been 

established for universal design in education based on decades of research and are known 

as Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The UDL principles reflect the way students take in 

and process information (Rose and Meyer 2002). Using them to develop goals, instructional 

methods, classroom materials, and assessments, educators can improve outcomes for 

diverse learners by providing fair opportunities for learning by improving access to content. 

The UDL principles are as follows:

 • Provide multiple and flexible methods of presentation of information and knowledge. 

Examples include digital books, specialized software and websites, text-to-speech 

applications, and screen readers. 

 • Provide multiple and flexible means of expression with alternatives for students to 

demonstrate what they have learned. Examples include online concept mapping and 

speech-to-text programs. 

 • Provide multiple and flexible means of engagement to tap into diverse learners’

interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn. Examples include 

choices among different scenarios or content for learning the same competency and 

opportunities for increased collaboration or scaffolding.

The definition of UDL that appears in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (103 

U.S.C. § 42) has come to dominate the field because of its broad applicability and its 

research foundation in the learning sciences, both cognitive and neurosciences. 

Serving the Underserved

The goal of UDL is to reach all learners, but some groups are especially underserved. In the 

past two decades, the disparities in access to and the use of technology have been closely 

associated with socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geographical location, and gender; primary 

language; disability; educational level; and generational characteristics (Pew Internet & 

American Life Project 2007). The FCC now refers to “digital exclusion” as what must be 
20 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

overcome, because job applications, health information, and 

many other crucial information resources appear only in the 

digital realm (Federal Communications Commission 2009). As 

we use technology to reach all learners, the following groups 

need special attention:

 • Low-income and minority learners. Despite significant 

gains, learners from low-income communities and 

underserved minority groups still are less likely to have 

computers and Internet access and have fewer people in 

their social circles with the skills to support technologybased learning at home (Warschauer and Matuchniak 

2010). Some of the solutions to the access problem are 

capitalizing on existing programs in the public sphere—

extended hours for use of networked computers in 

schools, libraries, community centers, and so on.

 • English language learners. English is the predominant 

language of instruction in most U.S. classrooms and in 

the vast majority of Web resources. The challenges of 

learning the content and skills necessary to function as 

a 21st-century citizen are heightened if English is not a 

person’s first language. Recent advances in language 

translation technology provide powerful tools for reducing 

language barriers. With proper design, technology can 

easily represent information so that there are multiple 

alternatives for English, multiple options for unfamiliar 

vocabulary or syntax, and even alternatives to language 

itself (use of image, video, and audio).

 • Learners with disabilities. In public schools, many learners 

are identified as having special needs. These students 

need accommodations to have the opportunity to achieve 

at the same levels as their peers. In addition to UDL for 

learners with significant physical and sensory disabilities, 

powerful new assistive technologies are increasingly 

becoming available to improve access to learning 

opportunities. These include electronic mobility switches 

and alternative keyboards for students with physical 

disabilities, computer-screen enlargers and text-to-speech 

and screen readers for individuals with visual disabilities, 

electronic sign-language dictionaries and signing avatars 

for learners with hearing disabilities, and calculators and 

spellcheckers for individuals with learning disabilities. 

Many of these devices are difficult or impossible to 

use with traditional learning materials, such as printed 

textbooks. The advantage of digital resources, 

Universal Design for Textbooks: National 

Instructional Materials Accessibility 

Standard—NIMAS

Traditional textbooks, like any standardized 

learning technology, are much more accessible to 

some learners than others. For students who are 

blind, who have physical disabilities, or who have 

reading disabilities, textbooks impose barriers 

rather than opportunities for learning. In the past, 

each classroom teacher or school had to generate 

some kind of work-around to overcome these 

barriers—contracting for a Braille version of the 

book, engaging an aide to help with the physical 

demands of textbooks, recording or purchasing 

an audio version for students with dyslexia, and 

so forth. The costs—in time, resources, learning 

opportunities—of retrofitting in these ways are 

high. Most important, the costs of such one-off 

accommodations are repeated in every classroom 

and district throughout the country—a staggering 

waste of money and time. 

In 2006, the U.S. Congress mandated a new 

and more universally designed approach. In that 

year, regulations for the National Instructional 

Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) went 

into effect. That standard stipulates that all U.S. 

textbooks be available as a “digital source file” 

(a fully marked up XML source file based on the 

Daisy international standard). The power of that 

digital source file is in its flexibility: It can be easily 

transformed into many different student-ready 

versions, including a Braille book, a digital talking 

book, a large-text version, and so forth. The same 

content can be generated once by a publisher but 

can be displayed in many different ways to match 

the different needs of diverse students. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 21

 • Early childhood: For underserved children, learning 

gaps in literacy begin in early childhood and become 

increasingly difficult to overcome as their education 

progresses. Early intervention is crucial if these children 

are to keep pace with their peers, especially intervention 

that augments the linguistic, visual, and symbolic 

worlds that learners experience and seek to emulate. 

Increasingly, educational television offerings are being 

complemented with computer-based activities and 

resources for caregivers that help them engage with 

young learners around the learning content. A recent 

rigorous experimental test of such a combination, when 

used in daycare settings to target early literacy skills, 

found significant positive effects. (See the sidebar on 

building early literacy skills through technology.) 

 • Adult workforce. Many adults in the workforce are 

underproductive, have no postsecondary credential, and 

face limited opportunities because they lack fluency in 

English or other basic literacy skills. Unfortunately, they 

have little time or opportunity for the sustained learning 

and development that becoming fluent would require. For 

these learners, technology expands the opportunities for 

where and when they can learn, enabling them to catch 

up and continue to learn. Such resources as Learner 

Web and USA Learns make it possible for working adults 

to take online courses anytime and anywhere. While 

individual adults benefit from more opportunities for 

advancement, companies and agencies benefit from the 

increased productivity of a fully literate workforce, one 

continuously preparing for the future. (See the sidebar on 

adult learning resources.) 

 • Seniors. The aging population is rapidly expanding, and 

elders have specific disabilities—visual, hearing, motor, 

cognitive—that accompany the neurology of aging. 

At the same time, seniors have special strengths that 

come from their accumulated wisdom and experience. 

Capitalizing on those strengths in supporting lifelong 

learning for seniors requires careful design of learning 

environments and the use of technology so that sensory 

Building Early Literacy Skills Through 

Technology-rich Learning Experiences 

Although decades of research show that public 

media can improve literacy skills when young 

children watch at home (Fisch 2004; Thakkar, 

Garrison, and Christakis 2006), using digital media in 

preschools has been more controversial. Now, new 

research suggests that technology-rich classroom 

experiences can help build young children’s school 

readiness skills (Penuel et al. 2009).

In a recent study, researchers evaluated the 

impact of a 10-week literacy intervention built 

around media-rich materials developed with 

support from Ready to Learn. The intervention 

targeted preschool children’s literacy skills through 

a combination of teacher-led video viewings of 

PBS shows, educational computer games, and 

hands-on activities. Early childhood educators 

learned how to use the media as tools to support 

academic instruction, actively engaging children 

with technology to teach key learning concepts.

Children who participated in the literacy curriculum 

outscored the control group children on four 

important literacy measures that predict later 

reading success: the ability to name letters, know 

the sounds associated with those letters, recognize 

letters in their own names, and understand basic 

concepts about stories and printed words. Notably, 

these learning gains were of a magnitude rarely 

observed in preschool curriculum intervention 

studies (Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research 

Consortium 2008), demonstrating the power of 

technology-based interventions to help close early 

learning gaps.

especially those that are universally designed, is that 

they can easily be made accessible through assistive 

technologies. (See the sidebar on universal design 

for textbooks.)
22 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

weaknesses (in vision or hearing) and mnemonic capacity (in 

working and associative memory) do not erect insurmountable 

barriers to continued learning, independence, and socialization.

Enabling All Learners to Excel in STEM

The state of science and engineering in the United States 

is strong, but U.S. dominance worldwide has eroded 

significantly in recent years, primarily because of rapidly 

increasing capability in East Asian nations, particularly China 

(National Science Board 2010). In addition, new data show 

that U.S. 15-year-olds are losing ground in science and math 

achievement compared with their peers around the world 

(McKinsey & Company 2009).

In November 2009, President Obama launched the Educate 

to Innovate campaign to improve the participation and 

performance of America’s students in STEM with the goal of 

enabling all learners to excel in STEM. In January 2010, the 

President announced a new set of public-private partnerships 

committing $250 million in private resources to attract, develop, 

reward, and retain STEM educators.

In addition, the NSF through its cyberlearning initiatives 

and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and 

Technology (PCAST) are making recommendations to guide 

the restructuring of STEM domains for more effective learning 

with technology, taking into account that technologies for 

representing, manipulating, and communicating information 

and ideas have changed professional practices and what 

students need to learn to be prepared for STEM professions. 

In particular, technology can be used to support student 

interaction with STEM content in ways that promote deeper 

understanding of complex ideas, engage students in solving 

complex problems, and create new opportunities for STEM 

learning at all levels of our education system. 

Adult Learning Resources

Learner Web

Developed at Portland State University, Learner 

Web is a learning support system for adults with a 

specific goal, such as earning a GED, transitioning 

to higher education, or gaining skills to qualify for 

a job. The system is structured around the adult’s 

selected learning plan and offers courseware, 

work with a tutor or teacher, assessments, and 

an electronic portfolio. Learners can receive 

assistance both over the Web and by telephone. 

USA Learns

The online multimedia resource USA Learns helps 

adult learners increase their skills in reading, 

writing, and speaking English. USA Learns was 

created for Spanish-speaking adult immigrants by 

the U.S. Department of Education in collaboration 

with the Sacramento County Office of Education 

and the University of Michigan Institute of Social 

Research. The topics, characters, and simulations 

in USA Learns reflect the challenges of the 

immigrant experience. The system is intended 

for home use but includes a management 

component that teachers or tutors can use to 

monitor progress if the adult learner is in a formal 

program. Users of USA Learns can choose to get 

instructions in English or Spanish, and immediate 

feedback and comprehension checks and quizzes 

help learners gauge their own progress.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 23

Reaching Our Goal

1.0 Learning:

All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and out of 

school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in 

our globally networked society.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following:

1.1 States should continue to revise, create, and implement standards and learning 

objectives using technology for all content areas that reflect 21st-century expertise and the 

power of technology to improve learning.

Our education system relies on core sets of standards-based concepts and competencies 

that form the basis of what all students should know and should be able to do. Whether 

the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, 

or music, states should continue to consider the integration of 21st-century competencies 

and expertise, such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, multimedia 

communication, and technological competencies demonstrated by professionals in various 

disciplines.

1.2 States, districts, and others should develop and implement learning resources that use 

technology to embody design principles from the learning sciences.

Advances in learning sciences, including cognitive science, neuroscience, education, 

and social sciences, give us greater understanding of three connected types of human 

learning—factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and motivational engagement. 

Technology has increased our ability to both study and enhance all three types. Today’s 

learning environments should reflect what we have learned about how people learn and 

take advantage of technology to optimize learning.

1.3 States, districts, and others should develop and implement learning resources that 

exploit the flexibility and power of technology to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.

The always-on nature of the Internet and mobile access devices provides our education 

system with the opportunity to create learning experiences that are available anytime and 

anywhere. When combined with design principles for personalized learning and UDL, 

these experiences also can be accessed by learners who have been marginalized in 

many educational settings: students from low-income communities and minorities, English 

language learners, students with disabilities, students who are gifted and talented, students 

from diverse cultures and linguistic backgrounds, and students in rural areas. 
24 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

1.4 Use advances in learning sciences and technology to enhance STEM learning and 

develop, adopt, and evaluate new methodologies with the potential to inspire and enable all 

learners to excel in STEM.

New technologies for representing, manipulating, and communicating data, information, 

and ideas have changed professional practices in STEM fields and what students need to 

learn to be prepared for STEM professions. Technology should be used to support student 

interaction with STEM content in ways that promote deeper understanding of complex ideas, 

engage students in solving complex problems, and create new opportunities for STEM 

learning throughout our education system.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 25

Assessment: Measure What Matters

Goal: Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure 

what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

Most of the assessment done in schools today is after the fact and designed to indicate only 

whether students have learned. Little is done to assess students’ thinking during learning 

so we can help them learn better. Nor do we collect and aggregate student-learning data in 

ways that make the information valuable to and accessible by educators, schools, districts, 

states, and the nation to support continuous improvement and innovation. We are not using 

the full flexibility and power of technology to design, develop, and validate new assessment 

materials and processes for both formative and summative uses.

Just as learning sciences and technology play an essential role in helping us create 

more effective learning experiences, when combined with assessment theory they also 

can provide a foundation for much-needed improvements in assessment (Pellegrino, 

Chudowsky, and Glaser 2001; Tucker 2009). These improvements include finding new 

and better ways to assess what matters, doing assessment in the course of learning when 

there is still time to improve student performance, and involving multiple stakeholders in the 

process of designing, conducting, and using assessment.

Equally important, we now are acutely aware of the need to make data-driven decisions 

at every level of our education system on the basis of what is best for each and every 

student—decisions that in aggregate will lead to better performance and greater efficiency 

across the entire system. 
26 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

What We Should Be Assessing

“I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards 

and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a 

test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” 

—President Barack Obama, 

Address to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, March 10, 2009

President Obama issued this challenge to change our thinking about what we should be 

assessing. Measuring these complex skills requires designing and developing assessments 

that address the full range of expertise and competencies implied by the standards. 

Cognitive research and theory provide rich models and representations of how students 

understand and think about key concepts in the curriculum and how the knowledge 

structures we want students to have by the time they reach college develop over time. An 

illustration of the power of combining research and theory with technology is provided by the 

work of Jim Minstrell, a former high school physics teacher who developed an approach to 

teaching and assessment that carefully considers learners’ thinking.

Minstrell’s work began with a compilation of student ideas about force and motion based on 

both the research literature and the observations of educators. Some of these student ideas, 

or “facets” in Minstrell’s terminology, are considered scientifically correct to the degree one 

would expect at the stage of introductory physics. Others are partially incorrect, and still 

others are seriously flawed. Using these facets as a foundation, Minstrell designed a Webbased assessment program with sets of questions that can be used to inform learning about 

force and motion rather than simply test how much students have learned (Minstrell and 

Kraus 2005). Minstrell’s facet assessments and instructional materials are available on the 

Web (http://www.diagnoser.com).
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 27

Technology Supports Assessing 

Complex Competencies

As Minstrell’s and others’ work shows, through multimedia, interactivity, and connectivity 

it is possible to assess competencies that we believe are important and that are aspects 

of thinking highlighted in cognitive research. It also is possible to directly assess problemsolving skills, make visible sequences of actions taken by learners in simulated environments, 

model complex reasoning tasks, and do it all within the contexts of relevant societal issues 

and problems that people care about in everyday life (Vendlinski and Stevens 2002).

Other technologies enable us to assess how well students communicate for a variety of 

purposes and in a variety of ways, including in virtual environments. An example of this is 

River City, a decade-long effort at Harvard University funded by the NSF. River City is a 

multiuser virtual environment designed by researchers to study how students learn through 

using it (Dede 2009). This virtual environment was built as a context in which middle school 

students could acquire concepts in biology, ecology, and epidemiology while planning and 

implementing scientific investigations in a virtual world. 

River City takes students into an industrial city at the time in the 18th century when scientists 

were just beginning to discover bacteria. Each student is represented as an avatar and 

communicates with other student avatars through chat and gestures. Students work in teams 

of three, moving through River City to collect data and run tests in response to the mayor’s 

challenge to find out why River City residents are falling ill. The student teams form and test 

hypotheses within the virtual city, analyze data, and write up their research in a report they 

deliver to the mayor. 

Student performance in River City can be assessed by analyzing the reports that are the 

culmination of their experiences and also by looking at the kinds of information each student 

and each student team chose to examine and their moment-to-moment movements, 

actions, and utterances. On the basis of student actions in River City, researchers developed 

measures of students’ science inquiry skills, sense of efficacy as a scientist, and science 

concept knowledge (Dede 2009; Dieterle 2009). Materials and other resources have been 

developed to support educators in implementing River City in their classrooms. 

As the River City example illustrates, just as technology has changed the nature of inquiry 

among professionals, it can change how the corresponding academic subjects can be taught 

and tested. Technology allows representation of domains, systems, models, and data and 

their manipulation in ways that previously were not possible. Technology enables the use 

of dynamic models of systems, such as an energy-efficient car, a recycling program, or a 

molecular structure. Technology makes it possible to assess students by asking them to 

design products or experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests, record data, and graph 

and describe their results.
28 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Another advantage to technology-based assessments is we 

can use them to assess what students learn outside school 

walls and hours as well as inside. Assuming that we have 

standards for the competencies students must have and 

valid, reliable techniques for measuring these competencies, 

technology can help us assess (and reward) learning 

regardless of when and where it takes place.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has 

designed and fielded several technology-based assessments 

involving complex tasks and problem situations (Bennett et al. 

2007). (See sidebar on technology-based assessment using a 

hot-air balloon simulation.)

Growing recognition of the need to assess complex 

competencies also is demonstrated by the Department’s Race 

to the Top Assessment Competition. The 2010 competition 

challenged teams of states to develop student assessment 

systems that assess the full range of standards, including 

students’ ability to analyze and solve complex problems, 

synthesize information, and apply knowledge to new situations. 

The Department of Education urged participants in this 

competition to take advantage of the capabilities of technology 

to provide students with realistic, complex performance tasks; 

provide immediate scoring and feedback; and incorporate 

accommodations that make the assessments usable by a 

diverse array of students (Weiss 2010)

Using Technology to Assess in Ways That 

Improve Learning

There is a difference between using assessments to determine 

what students have learned for grading and accountability 

purposes (summative uses) and using assessments to diagnose 

and modify the conditions of learning and instruction (formative 

uses). Both uses are important, but the latter can improve student 

learning in the moment (Black and Wiliam 1998). Concepts that are 

widely misunderstood can be explained and demonstrated in a way 

that directly addresses students’ misconceptions. Strategic pairing 

of students who think about a concept in different ways can lead to 

conceptual growth for both of them as a result of experiences trying 

to communicate and support their ideas.

Technology-based Assessment Using a Hot-air 

Balloon Simulation

The National Assessment of Educational Progress 

(NAEP) has been exploring the use of more 

complex assessment tasks enabled by technology. 

In one technology-based simulation task, for 

example, eighth-graders are asked to use a hot 

air balloon simulation to design and conduct an 

experiment to determine the relationship between 

payload mass and balloon altitude. After completing 

the tutorial about the simulation tool interface, 

students select values for the independent variable 

payload mass. They can observe the balloon rise 

in the flight box and note changes in the values of 

the dependent variables of altitude, balloon volume, 

and time to final altitude.

In another problem, the amount of helium, another 

independent variable, is held constant to reduce 

the task’s difficulty. Students can construct tables 

and graphs and draw conclusions by clicking on 

the buttons below the heading Interpret Results. 

As they work with the simulation, students can get 

help if they need it: A glossary of science terms, 

science help about the substance of the problem, 

and computer help about the buttons and functions 

of the simulation interface are built in to the 

technology environment. The simulation task takes 

60 minutes to complete, and student performance 

is used to derive measures of the student’s 

computer skills, scientific inquiry exploration skills, 

and scientific inquiry synthesis skills within the 

context of physics.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 29

Assessing in the Classroom

Educators routinely try to gather information about their 

students’ learning on the basis of what students do in class. But 

for any question posed in the classroom, only a few students 

respond. Educators’ insight into what the remaining students do 

and do not understand is informed only by selected students’ 

facial expressions of interest, boredom, or puzzlement.

To solve this problem, a number of groups are exploring the 

use of various technologies to “instrument” the classroom in an 

attempt to find out what students are thinking. One example 

is the use of simple response devices designed to work with 

multiple-choice and true-false questions. Useful information 

can be gained from answers to these types of questions if they 

are carefully designed and used in meaningful ways. Physics 

professor Eric Mazur poses multiple-choice physics problems 

to his college classes, has the students use response devices 

to answer questions, and then has them discuss the problem 

with a peer who gave a different answer. Mazur reports much 

higher levels of engagement and better student learning from 

this combination of a classroom response system and peer 

instruction (Mazur 1997).

Science educators in Singapore have adopted a more 

sophisticated system that supports peer instruction by capturing 

more complex kinds of student responses. Called Group 

Scribbles, the system allows every student to contribute to a 

classroom discussion by placing and arranging sketches or small 

notes (drawn with a stylus on a tablet or handheld computer) on 

an electronic whiteboard. One educator using Group Scribbles 

asked groups of students to sketch different ways of forming an 

electric circuit with a light bulb and to share them by placing them 

on a whiteboard. Students learned by explaining their work to 

others and through providing and receiving feedback (Looi, Chen, 

and Ng 2010). (See sidebar on networked graphing calculators 

for another example of how a technology-based assessment can 

be used to adjust instruction.) 

Assessing During Online Learning

When students are learning online, there are multiple opportunities to exploit the power of 

technology for formative assessment. The same technology that supports learning activities 

gathers data in the course of learning that can be used for assessment (Lovett, Meyer, and 

Thille 2008). An online system can collect much more and much more detailed information 

about how students are learning than manual methods. As students work, the system can 

Using Networked Graphing Calculators for 

Formative Assessment

Over a wireless network, students can contribute 

mathematical content to the classroom, such as 

algebraic functions or graphs—content that is much 

richer than the answer to a multiple-choice question.

Mrs. J, an experienced science teacher in an urban 

middle school, participated in a large field trial testing 

the effectiveness of networked graphing calculators. 

When district-level tests had revealed that her 

students struggled to interpret graphs, Mrs. J used 

the graphing calculator-based wireless system to 

implement weekly practice on graph interpretations, 

overcoming her initial feeling that “technology is just 

overwhelming.” She reported, “I have taught for 18 

years and I have been in seventh-grade science 

for about 15 of the 18 ... and there are things that 

I have always been really sure that ... kids have 

understood completely. Now I see what they are 

thinking. And I am like, whoa, I am just amazed.”

Mrs. J used the insights into her students’ 

misunderstandings as revealed by the graphs they 

constructed to guide her instructional decisions.

Mrs. J also found the classroom network 

technology beneficial for providing specific help 

for individual students: “We were doing earth and 

sun relationships ... revolution versus rotation 

... and ... I was able to ... see who was making 

those mistakes still.... So it helped me because 

I could pinpoint [students’ weaknesses] without 

embarrassing them.” 
30 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

capture their inputs and collect evidence of their problem-solving sequences, knowledge, 

and strategy use, as reflected by the information each student selects or inputs, the number 

of attempts the student makes, the number of hints and type of feedback given, and the time 

allocation across parts of the problem.

The ASSISTment system, currently used by more than 4,000 students in Worcester County 

Public Schools in Massachusetts, is an example of a Web-based tutoring system that 

combines online learning and assessment activities (Feng, Heffernan, and Koedinger 2009). 

The name ASSISTment is a blend of tutoring “assistance” with “assessment” reporting to 

educators. The ASSISTment system was designed by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic 

Institute and Carnegie Mellon University to teach middle school math concepts and to 

provide educators with a detailed assessment of students’ developing math skills and their 

skills as learners. It gives educators detailed reports of students’ mastery of 100 math skills, 

as well as their accuracy, speed, help-seeking behavior, and number of problem-solving 

attempts. The ASSISTment system can identify the difficulties that individual students are 

having and the weaknesses demonstrated by the class as a whole so that educators can 

tailor the focus of their upcoming instruction.

When students respond to ASSISTment problems, they receive hints and tutoring to the 

extent they need them. At the same time, how individual students respond to the problems 

and how much support they need from the system to generate correct responses constitute 

valuable assessment information. Each week, when students work on the ASSISTment 

website, the system “learns” more about the students’ abilities and thus can provide 

increasingly appropriate tutoring and can generate increasingly accurate predictions of 

how well the students will do on the end-of-year standardized test. In fact, the ASSISTment 

system has been found to be more accurate at predicting students’ performance on the state 

examination than the pen-and-paper benchmark tests developed for that purpose (Feng, 

Heffernan, and Koedinger 2009).

How Technology Supports Better Assessment

Adaptive Assessment Facilitates Differentiated Learning 

As we move to a model where learners have options in terms of how they learn, there is a 

new role for assessment in diagnosing how best to support an individual learner. This new role 

should not be confused with computerized adaptive testing, which has been used for years to 

give examinees different assessment items depending on their responses to previous items on 

the test in order to get more precise estimates of ability using fewer test items. 

Adaptive assessment has a different goal. It is designed to identify the next kind of learning 

experience that will most benefit the particular learner. The School of One demonstration 

project (see the sidebar on the School of One in the Learning section) used adaptive 

assessment to differentiate learning by combining information from inventories that students 

completed on how they like to learn with information on students’ actual learning gains 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 31

after different types of experiences (working with a 

tutor, small-group instruction, learning online, learning 

through games). This information was used to generate 

individual “playlists” of customized learning activities for 

every student. (See the sidebar on meshing learning and 

assessment for an example of adaptive assessment in 

higher education.)

Universal Design for Learning and Assistive 

Technology Improve Accessibility

Technology allows the development of assessments 

using Universal Design for Learning principles that make 

assessments more accessible, effective, and valid for 

students with greater diversity in terms of disability and 

English language capability. (See the sidebar on universal 

design for textbooks in the Learning section.)

Most traditional tests are written in English and can be 

taken only by sighted learners who are fluent in English. 

Technology allows for presentation and assessment using 

alternative representations of the same concept or skill and 

can accommodate various student disabilities and strengths. 

Moreover, having the option of presenting information 

through multiple modalities enlarges the proportion of the 

population that can be assessed fairly. 

Technology also can support the application of UDL 

principles to assessment design. For example, the 

Principled-Assessment Designs for Inquiry (PADI) system 

developed by Geneva Haertel, Robert Mislevy, and 

associates (Zhang et al. 2010) is being used to help states 

develop science assessment items that tap the science 

concepts the states want to measure and minimize the 

influence of such extraneous factors as general English 

vocabulary or vision. Technology can support doing this 

labor-intensive work more efficiently and provides a record of 

all the steps taken to make each assessment item accessible 

and fair for the broadest number of students.

Similarly, assistive technology can make it possible for 

students who have disabilities that require special interfaces 

to interact with digital resources to demonstrate what they 

know and can do in ways that would be impossible with 

Meshing Learning and Assessment in Online and 

Blended Instruction

The online learning systems being developed through 

the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon 

University illustrate the advantages of integrating 

learning and assessment activities. The OLI R&D team 

set out to design learning systems incorporating the 

learning science principle of providing practice with 

feedback. In the OLI courses, feedback mechanisms 

are woven into a wide variety of activities. In a biology 

course, for example, there are 

 • Interactive simulations of biological processes that 

students can manipulate; the student’s interaction 

with the simulation is interspersed with probes to get 

at his or her understanding of how it works;

 • “Did I Get This?” quizzes following presentation 

of new material so that students can check for 

themselves whether or not they understood, without 

any risk of hurting their course grade;

 • Short essay questions embedded throughout 

the course material that call on students to make 

connections across concepts; and

 • “Muddiest Point” requests that ask students what 

they thought was confusing.

Tutored problem solving gives students a chance to 

work through complex problems with the opportunity 

to get scaffolds and hints to help them. The students 

receive feedback on their solution success after doing 

each problem, and the system keeps track of how much 

assistance students needed for each problem as well as 

whether or not they successfully solved it.

When OLI courses are implemented in a blended 

instruction mode that combines online and classroom 

learning, the instructor can use the data that the learning 

system collects as students work online to identify the 

topics students most need help on so that they can focus 

upcoming classroom activities on those misconceptions 

and errors (Brown et al. 2006). OLI is now doing R&D on 

a digital dashboard to give instructors an easy-to-read 

summary of the online learning data from students taking 

their course.

The OLI has developed learning systems for 

engineering statics, statistics, causal reasoning, 

economics, French, logic and proofs, biology, chemistry, 

physics, and calculus. A study contrasting the 

performance of students randomly assigned to the OLI 

statistics course with those in conventional classroom 

instruction found that the former led to better student 

learning outcomes in half the time (Lovett, Meyer, and 

Thille 2008).
32 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

standard print-based assessments. Designing assessments to work with assistive technologies is 

much more cost-effective than trying to retrofit the assessments after they have been developed.

Technology Speeds Development and Testing of New Assessments

One challenge associated with new technology-based assessments is the time and cost of 

development, testing for validity and reliability, and implementation. Here, too, technology 

can help. When an assessment item is developed, it can be field-tested automatically by 

putting it into a Web-based learning environment with thousands of students responding 

to it in the course of their online learning. Data collected in this way can help clarify the 

inferences derived from student performance and can be used to improve features of the 

assessment task before its large-scale use.

Technology Enables Broader Involvement in Providing Feedback

Some performances are so complex and varied that we do not have automated scoring options 

at present. In such cases, technology makes it possible for experts located thousands of miles 

away to provide students with authentic feedback. This is especially useful as educators work 

to incorporate authentic problems and access to experts into their instruction.

The expectation of having an audience outside the classroom is highly motivating for many 

students. Students can post their poems to a social networking site or make videotaped 

public service announcements for posting on video-sharing sites and get comments and 

critiques. Students who are developing design skills by writing mobile device applications 

can share their code with others, creating communities of application developers who 

provide feedback on each other’s applications. The number of downloads of their finished 

applications provides one way of measuring success. 

For many academic efforts, the free-for-all of the Internet would not provide a meaningful 

assessment of student work, but technology can support connections with online 

communities of individuals who do have the expertise and interest to be judges of students’

work. Practicing scientists can respond to student projects in online science fairs. Readers 

of online literary magazines can review student writing. Professional animators can judge 

online filmmaking competitions. Especially in contests and competitions, rubrics are useful 

in communicating expectations to participants and external judges and in helping promote 

judgment consistency.

Technology also has the potential to make both the assessment process itself and the data 

resulting from that process more transparent and inclusive. Currently, only average scores 

and proficiency levels on state assessments are widely available through both public and 

private systems. Still, parents, policymakers, and the public at large can see schools’ and 

districts’ test scores and in some instances test items. This transparency increases public 

understanding of the current assessment system.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 33

Technology Could Reduce Test Taking for 

Accountability Only

Many educators, parents, and students are concerned with the 

amount of class time devoted to taking tests for accountability 

purposes. Students not only are completing the tests required 

every year by their states, but they also are taking tests of the 

same content throughout the year to predict how well they will 

perform on the end-of-year state assessment (Perie, Marion, 

and Gong 2009).

When teaching and learning are mediated through technology, 

it is possible to reduce the number of external assessments 

needed to audit the education system’s quality. Data streams 

captured by an online learning system can provide the 

information needed to make judgments about students’ 

competencies. These data-based judgments about individual 

students could then be aggregated to generate judgments about 

classes, schools, districts, and states.

West Virginia uses this strategy in its assessment of students’ 

technology skills. (See sidebar on moving assessment data from 

the classroom to the state.)

Prospects for Electronic 

Learning Records

Much like electronic medical records in this country, electronic learning records could stay 

with students throughout their lives, accumulating evidence of growth across courses 

and across school years. A logical extension of online grade books and other electronic 

portfolios, electronic learning records would include learning experiences and demonstrated 

competencies, including samples of student work.

Many schools are using electronic portfolios of students’ work as a way to demonstrate 

what they have learned. (See sidebar on how New Tech High School uses technology 

to document student accomplishments.) Although students’ digital products are often 

impressive on their face, a portfolio of student work should be linked to an analytic 

framework if it is to serve assessment purposes. The portfolio reviewer needs to know 

what competencies the work is intended to demonstrate, what the standard or criteria for 

competence are in each area, and what aspects of the work provide evidence of meeting 

those criteria. Definitions of desired outcomes and criteria for levels of accomplishment can 

be expressed in the form of rubrics.

An advantage of using rubrics is that they can be communicated not only to the people 

judging students’ work, but also to the students themselves. When students receive 

Moving Assessment Data From the Classroom 

to the State 

West Virginia’s techSteps program is an example of 

an assessment system coordinated across levels of 

the education system. techSteps is organized around 

six technology integration activities per grade level. 

The activities are sequenced to introduce technology 

skills developmentally and in a 21st-century context 

and are largely open-ended and flexible, so they can 

be integrated into county and school curricula.

Each techSteps activity includes a classroom 

assessment rubric. After a student completes a 

techSteps activity, the teacher enters an assessment 

of his or her performance against the rubric 

into the techSteps website. techSteps uses the 

teacher-completed rubric form to identify the target 

skills demonstrated by that student and uses this 

information to build the student’s Technology Literacy 

Assessment Profile.

Through techSteps, West Virginia is able to have 

statewide student data on technology proficiencies at 

each grade level without requiring a separate “drop-infrom-the-sky” technology test.
34 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

assessment rubrics before doing an assignment—and 

especially when students participate in developing the 

rubrics—they can develop an understanding of how quality is 

judged in the particular field they are working in (for example, 

an essay of literary criticism, the design of a scientific 

experiment, or a data analysis).

As with any other kind of assessment score, ratings derived 

from rubrics should be both valid (demonstrated to measure 

what they are intended to measure) and reliable (consistent 

no matter who the rater is). Before rubrics are used on a larger 

scale for assessments that have consequences for schools 

and students, their validity and reliability must be established.

Using Assessment Data to Drive 

Continuous Improvement

Once we have assessments in place that assess the full range 

of expertise and competencies reflected in standards, we could 

collect student learning data and use the data to continually 

improve learning outcomes and productivity. For example, 

such data could be used to create a system of interconnected 

feedback for students, educators, parents, school leaders, and 

district administrators.

The goal of creating an interconnected feedback system would 

be to ensure that key decisions about learning are informed 

by data and that data are aggregated and made accessible at 

all levels of the education system for continuous improvement. 

The challenge associated with this idea is to make relevant 

data available to the right people, at the right time, and in the 

right form.

For example, assessment data should be made available to 

students so they can play a larger role in directing their own 

learning, as demonstrated by New Tech High and its use of 

online grade books. (See the sidebar on New Tech High School).

Assessment data also should be used to support educators’ 

efforts to improve their professional practice. Data from student 

assessments can enable teachers to become more effective 

by giving them evidence about the effectiveness of the things 

they do.

New Tech High School: Supporting Student 

Use of Assessment Results Using Technology

New Tech High School in Napa Valley, Calif., 

has been using innovative technology-based 

assessment practices since the school was 

founded in 1996. Instruction at the school 

emphasizes project-based learning, with students 

tackling complex, interdisciplinary problems and 

typically working in groups. New Tech instructors 

design these projects around both required 

content standards and core learning outcomes 

that cut across academic content areas, including 

collaboration, critical thinking, oral and written 

communication, use of technology, and citizenship.

By using this common framework in assessing 

student’s work across classes and grade 

levels, New Tech teachers provide more useful 

information than could be obtained from a 

summary grade alone. Assessments of writing skill, 

for example, are aggregated across all projects 

and all courses so that teachers, parents, and the 

students themselves can get a view of strengths 

and weaknesses across multiple contexts. In 

addition, these assessments are made available to 

students in online grade books that are continually 

updated so that students can see how they are 

doing not only in each course, but also on each of 

the learning outcomes, averaged across all their 

courses. Electronic learning portfolios contain 

examples of students’ work and associated 

evaluations also across all classes and grades.

In addition to receiving performance ratings from 

their teachers and peers, students at New Tech 

do postproject self-assessments on completion 

of major projects. These assessments provide 

feedback for the teacher who designed the 

project and an opportunity for the student to think 

about the project experience. The postproject 

self-assessment template guides the student 

in reflecting on how successful the project was 

in terms of the material learned, engagement 

(interest, relevance), process (for example, how 

clear project instructions were and whether 

sufficient scaffolding for student work was 

available), and self (extent to which the student 

fulfilled tasks assigned within the group and 

showed a solid work ethic). 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 35

In addition, teams of educators reflecting on student data together 

can identify colleagues who have the most success teaching 

particular competencies or types of students, and then all team 

members can learn from the practices used by their most effective 

colleagues (Darling-Hammond 2010; U.S. Department of Education 

Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development 2010). Using 

student data in this way also could improve educators’ collaboration 

skills and skills in using data to improve instruction. At times, it might 

be useful to have educators use common assessments to facilitate 

this kind of professional learning.

The same student-learning data that guide students and educators 

in their decision making can inform the work of principals and district 

administrators. Administrators and policymakers should be able to 

mine assessment data over time to examine the effectiveness of 

their programs and interventions.

The need for student data plays out at the district level as well. 

Districts adopt learning interventions they believe will address 

specific learning needs, but these interventions often rely on 

untested assumptions and intuition. In a data-driven continuous 

improvement process, the district could review data on the 

intervention’s implementation and student-learning outcomes after 

each cycle of use and then use the data as the basis for refining the 

learning activities or supports for their implementation to provide a 

better experience for the next group of students. (See sidebar on 

using technology to make the link between assessment data and 

instructional resources in Fairfax County, Va.)

As good as technology-based assessment and data systems 

might be, educators need support in learning how to use them. 

An important direction for development and implementation of 

technology-based assessment systems is the design of technologybased tools that can help educators manage the assessment 

process, analyze data, and take appropriate action.

Advancing Technical and Regulatory Practice

Two types of challenges to realizing the vision of sharing data across systems are technical 

and regulatory. On the technical front, multiple student data systems, the lack of common 

standards for data formats, and system interoperability pose formidable barriers to the 

development of multilevel assessment systems. For example, student and program data 

today are collected at various levels and in various amounts to address different needs in 

the educational system. State data systems generally provide macro solutions, institutionUsing Technology to Make the Link Between 

Assessment Data and Instructional Resources

To encourage teachers to make formative use of 

assessment data, Fairfax County Public Schools 

(FCPS), Va., developed eCART (Electronic 

Curriculum Assessment Resource Tool). This 

Web-based system allows teachers to access 

everything, from lesson plans to assessment 

tools, all in one place.

eCART’s searchable database provides access 

to district-approved resources and curriculum 

correlated to specific standards, benchmarks, 

and indicators. It allows teachers to create 

assessments using varied combinations of FCPS 

common assessment items.

The eCART assessment items were developed 

by district teachers and designed to provide 

diagnostic information. The assessments are used 

to reveal student misconceptions and skills that 

need to be reinforced.

Using assessment results for their students, 

Fairfax teachers can follow links to a large 

library of instructional resources, including 

supplementary materials, lesson plans, work 

sheets, and Web links. Students can take eCART 

assessments online or using pencil and paper. 

Student eCART assessment results are stored 

in the district’s data system so that classroom 

assessment data can be viewed along with 

benchmark assessment data and results from 

state tests. Having a common set of formative 

assessments enables comparisons of student 

performance across classrooms and schools. 
36 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

level performance management systems are micro 

solutions, and student data generated by embedded 

assessment are nano solutions. Providing meaningful, 

actionable information that is collected across multiple 

systems will require building agreement on the technical 

format for sharing data.

To assist with these efforts, the National Center for 

Education Statistics at the Department of Education 

has been leading the Common Data Standards 

(CDS) Initiative, a national, collaborative effort to 

develop voluntary, common data standards. The CDS 

Initiative’s objective is to help state and local education 

agencies and higher education organizations work 

together to identify a minimal set of key data elements, 

common across organizations and necessary to 

meet student, policymaker, and educator needs, and 

come to agreement on definitions, business rules and 

technical specifications, when possible, to improve the 

comparability and share-ability of those elements. (Note: 

Version 1.0 of CDS was released on Sept. 10, 2010.)

As the reliance on data to inform decisions, the public’s 

demand for transparency and accountability, and the world 

of technology grow exponentially, we must stay vigilant 

in our efforts to protect student privacy. On the regulatory 

front, regulations such as the Family Educational Rights 

and Privacy Act (FERPA) serve the important purpose of 

protecting student privacy but also can present challenges, 

if not properly understood and implemented. Much of the 

confusion surrounding research and data sharing posed 

by FERPA in its original form was reduced or eliminated 

through a 2008 revision of FERPA regulations. Still, varying 

interpretations of FERPA requirements and differences 

in district and state policies have made data sharing a 

complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. (See 

the sidebar on FERPA.)

 Advancing the technical and regulatory practices to 

ensure privacy is maintained and information is secure 

while aggregating and sharing data would facilitate 

efficient use of data that are already being collected to 

make judgments about students’ learning progress and 

the effectiveness of education programs.

FERPA

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act 

(FERPA) is a federal law that protects student privacy 

by prohibiting the disclosure of personally identifiable 

information from education records without prior written 

consent, except as set forth in 34 CFR § 99.31. FERPA 

also allows parents and “eligible students” (defined 

as students who are age 18 or over or who attend 

post-secondary institutions) to inspect and review their 

education records and to request that inaccuracies in 

their records be corrected. 

Advance written consent is generally required to disclose 

student-level information from education records, such 

as student grades, if the information would be linked or 

linkable to a specific student by a reasonable member 

of the school community. However, schools may nonconsensually disclose basic “directory information” such 

as student names and phone numbers, if schools give 

public notice to parents and eligible students that they 

are designating this type of information as “directory 

information” and provide parents and eligible students 

a reasonable period of time after such notice has been 

given to opt out. Another exception to the requirement of 

prior, written consent permits teachers or administrators 

within the same school or school district who have a 

legitimate educational interest in the student’s record to 

access personally identifiable student data.

In 2008, the FERPA regulations were updated to address 

the conditions under which FERPA permits the nonconsensual disclosure of personally identifiable information 

from education records for research. In this respect, 

the regulations were amended to permit the release of 

de-identified records and information, which requires the 

redaction of all personally identifiable information per 34 

CFR § 99.31(b). The 2008 final regulations also specified 

the conditions under which states or other state educational 

authorities that have legal authority to enter into agreements 

for local educational agencies (LEAs) or post-secondary 

institutions may enter into agreements to non-consensually 

disclose personally identifiable information from education 

records to an organization conducting a study for the LEA 

or institution under 34 CFR § 99.31(a)(6). The updates to 

the 2008 FERPA regulations also addressed the nonconsensual disclosure of personally identifiable information 

from education records in a health or safety emergency in 

34 CFR §§ 99.31(a) (10) and 99.36.

Source: U.S. Department of Education Family Policy 

Compliance Office 2010
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 37

Reaching Our Goal

2.0 Assessment:

Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what 

matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

2.1 States, districts, and others should design, develop, and implement assessments that 

give students, educators, and other stakeholders timely and actionable feedback about 

student learning to improve achievement and instructional practices.

Learning science and technology combined with assessment theory can provide a 

foundation for new and better ways to assess students in the course of learning, which 

is the ideal time to improve performance. This will require involving experts from all three 

disciplines in the process of designing, developing, and using new technology-based 

assessments that can increase the quality and quantity of feedback to learners.

2.2 Build the capacity of educators, educational institutions, and developers to use 

technology to improve assessment materials and processes for both formative and 

summative uses.

Technology can support measuring performance that cannot be assessed with conventional 

testing formats, providing our education system with opportunities to design, develop, 

and validate new and more effective assessment materials. Building this capacity can be 

accelerated through knowledge exchange, collaboration, and better alignment between 

educators (practitioners) and the experts.

2.3 Conduct research and development that explores how embedded assessment 

technologies, such as simulations, collaboration environments, virtual worlds, games and 

cognitive tutors, can be used to engage and motivate learners while assessing complex skills.

Interactive technologies, especially games, provide immediate performance feedback so that 

players always know how they are doing. As a result, they are highly engaging to students 

and have the potential to motivate students to learn. They also enable educators to assess 

important competencies and aspects of thinking in contexts and through activities that 

students care about in everyday life. Because interactive technologies hold this promise, 

assessment and interactive technology experts should collaborate on research to determine 

ways to use them effectively for assessment.
38 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

2.4 Conduct research and development that explores how UDL can enable the best 

accommodations for all students to ensure we are assessing what we intend to measure 

rather than extraneous abilities a student needs to respond to the assessment task.

To be valid, an assessment must measure those qualities it is intended to measure, and 

scores should not be influenced by extraneous factors. An assessment of science, for 

example, should measure understanding of science concepts and their application, not the 

ability to see print, to respond to items using a mouse, or to use word processing skills. Test 

items and tasks should be designed from the outset to measure the knowledge, skills, and 

abilities that the test intends to assess and not the students’ ability to read when assessing 

mathematics skills or to self-monitor when completing a science task that includes several 

steps. Assessment and technology experts should collaborate to create assessment design 

tools and processes that make it possible to develop assessment systems with appropriate 

features (not just accommodations) so that assessments capture examinees’ strengths in 

terms of the qualities that the assessment is intended to measure.

2.5 Revise practices, policies, and regulations to ensure privacy and information protection 

while enabling a model of assessment that includes ongoing gathering and sharing of data 

for continuous improvement.

Every parent of a student under 18 and every student 18 or over should have the right to 

access the student’s own assessment data in the form of an electronic learning record 

that the student can take with them throughout his or her educational career. At the same 

time, appropriate safeguards, including stripping records of identifiable information and 

aggregating data across students, classrooms, and schools, should be used to make it 

possible to supply education data derived from student records to other legitimate users 

without compromising student privacy.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 39

Teaching: Prepare and Connect

Goal: Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can 

empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching for all learners. 

Teaching today is practiced mostly in isolation. Many educators work alone, with little 

interaction with professional colleagues or experts in the outside world. Professional 

development typically is provided in short, fragmented, and episodic workshops that offer 

little opportunity to integrate learning into practice. A classroom educator’s primary job is 

understood to be covering the assigned content and ensuring that students test well. Many 

educators do not have the information, the time, or the incentives to continuously improve 

their professional practice from year to year. 

Not surprisingly, half of freshly minted teachers leave the profession within the first five years 

(Ingersoll and Smith 2003). These conditions exist because our education system and the 

institutions that prepare educators often fail to give educators the tools to do their job well. Our 

education system holds educators responsible for student achievement but does support them 

with the latest technology the way professionals in other fields are supported. Although some 

preservice programs are using technology in innovative ways (Gomez et al. 2008), widespread 

agreement exists that teachers by and large are not well prepared to use technology in their 

practice (Kay 2006). As a result, the technology of everyday life has moved well beyond what 

educators are taught to and regularly use to support student learning.

Meanwhile, policymakers and education leaders point to a lack of effective teaching and the 

need for greater accountability among teachers as the key to fixing education in America. 

Although the expectation of effective teaching and accountability for professional educators is 

a critical component of transforming our education system, we also need to recognize that we 

must strengthen and elevate the teaching profession. This is necessary to attract and retain 

the most effective educators and achieve the learning outcomes we seek for all learners.

Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, technology 

can help us better prepare effective educators and increase their competencies throughout 

their careers while building the capacity of our education system to deliver effective 

teaching. Technology can do this by enabling a shift to a new model of connected teaching. 
40 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The Practice of Connected Teaching

In connected teaching, classroom educators are fully instrumented, with 24/7 access to 

data about student learning and analytic tools that help them act on the insights the data 

provide. They are connected to their students and to professional content, resources, 

and systems that empower them to create, manage, and assess engaging and relevant 

learning experiences for students both in and out of school. They also are connected to 

resources and expertise that improve their own instructional practices, continually add to 

their competencies and expertise, and guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators 

in their students’ increasingly self-directed learning (Figure 3). Like students in the learning 

model described earlier, teachers engage in personal learning networks that support their 

own learning and their ability to serve their students well.

Figure 3. Connected Teaching Builds New Competencies and Expertise
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 41

In addition, as learning environments become more complex, connected teaching supports 

educators in managing the multiple dimensions of curricular instruction. Commercially 

available and open-source learning management systems are already used widely in 

universities, and their use is expanding in K–12 settings. Such tools allow educators to 

coordinate course materials, syllabi, assignments, discussions, and more in a central 

location for students. 

Teachers at George J. Ryan Junior High School in Queens, N.Y., for example, saw improved 

literacy outcomes in their first year of using an online writing workshop environment. The 

environment creates virtual classrooms in which educators and students can interact in new 

ways with course content and with one another. It features a room where students can post 

writing samples, hold discussions, and find animated content objects linked to quiz data, 

feedback, and grading. Face-to-face training provided to educators ensured that they could 

use the environment effectively.

Other online environments also allow broader participation in a student’s learning. School 

administrators can join virtual classrooms for a window on the progress of a given class. 

Parents or members of other partner institutions can log in for a virtual tour through a class 

project or contribute materials to the environment.

In connected teaching, individual educators also create their own online learning 

communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their 

schools, libraries, and after-school programs; professional experts in various disciplines 

around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they 

are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that 

is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses 

and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by 

online learning. For their part, the colleges of education and other institutions that prepare 

teachers play an ongoing role in the professional growth of their graduates by partnering 

with schools and organizations that provide engaging and relevant learning experiences 

throughout the entire course of their careers.

Connected teaching also enables our education system to augment the expertise and 

competencies of specialized and exceptional educators through online learning systems, 

online courses, and other self-directed learning opportunities, providing effective teaching 

where it is not otherwise available.

Connecting With Students to Personalize and Motivate Learning

Connected teaching offers a vast array of opportunities to personalize learning. Many 

simulations and models for use in science, history, and other subject areas are now available 

online, including immersive virtual and augmented reality environments that encourage 

students to explore and make meaning in complex simulated situations (Dede 2009). To 

deeply engage their students, educators need to know about their students’ goals and 
42 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

interests and have knowledge of learning resources and systems that can help students plan 

sets of learning experiences that are personally meaningful. For a more extensive discussion 

of personalized learning, see the Learning section of this plan.

Although using technology to personalize learning is a boost to effective teaching, teaching 

is fundamentally a social and emotional enterprise. The most effective educators connect to 

young people’s developing social and emotional core (Ladson-Billings 2009; Villegas and 

Lucas 2002) by offering opportunities for creativity and self-expression. Technology provides 

an assist here as well.

Digital authoring tools for creating multimedia projects and online communities for sharing 

them with the world offer students outlets for social and emotional connections with 

educators, peers, communities, and the world at large. Educators can encourage students 

to do this within the context of learning activities, gaining further insights into what motivates 

and engages students—information they can use to encourage students to stay in school.

Connecting to Content, Expertise, and Activities Through Online Communities

Many of the technology-based learning resources available today prompt learners to 

engage with advanced content and authentic activities, which are facilitated when educators 

orchestrate access to content, experts, and activities of many kinds through online 

learning communities.

Online learning communities break through educators’ traditional isolation, enabling them to 

collaborate with their peers and leverage world-class experts to improve student learning. 

Online learning communities also permit the coordination of teams of educators within a 

school, between a school and homes, and among schools, museums, community centers, 

and other settings that can support a student’s learning. Educators are no longer limited by 

where they teach or where they lead, nor are they required to deliver teaching as 

solo practitioners.

For example, through an online learning community, an educator can bring guest speakers 

located anywhere in the world into student learning. The class can watch the speaker and 

interact live while the speaker delivers a lecture, demonstrates a scientific experiment or 

a musical technique, or leads a guided virtual tour of a museum exhibit. A recording of the 

event can be archived for later viewing or uploaded to a website that hosts free educational 

content. (For an example of an online learning community built around deep content 

expertise, see the sidebar on connected teaching in K–12 mathematics.)
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 43

Connecting to Serve the Underserved

Unfortunately, we do not have enough effective educators in many places, including those 

where we need them most. The shortage of effective educators is especially evident in 

the STEM areas that are vital to our economic prosperity. A prime example is high school 

physics: More than 1 million high school students take a physics course each year. Of the 

educators hired to instruct them, only a third hold a degree in physics or physics education. 

Many of the other educators who are asked to teach physics (usually in addition to other 

subjects) have not been trained in how to teach physics concepts and might have limited 

understanding of those concepts themselves (Hodapp, Hehn, and Hein 2009).

Connected Teaching in K–12 Mathematics

The Math Forum (http://mathforum.org) is an online community that supports a connected 

teaching approach to improving K–12 mathematics education. The Math Forum, based at Drexel 

University’s School of Education, receives between 2 million and 3 million online visits per month.

For educators, the Math Forum website provides valuable instructional resources, including Math 

Tools, a searchable community library of interactive lessons, activities, and support materials. 

Educators also can consult a library of articles on current issues in mathematics education and 

discuss challenges in online forums (Teacher2Teacher). Educators pose questions, which are 

answered by program associates, who then post the thread for public comment. 

Parents can find information about math summer camps and get help explaining concepts. 

Students can send letters to Dr. Math; between 200 and 300 trained experts are behind the 

collective identity of Dr. Math.

Problem of the Week, a particularly popular feature on the site, is a subscription-based service. 

Students around the world submit answers online to the Problem of the Week, annotating their 

answers with step-by-step explanations. Expert mentors then reply to the submissions, guiding 

students if necessary to find the right answer. 

Math Forum also has been used to support preservice teacher education. In 2004, for example, 

preservice teachers in two education programs in Oregon used Math Forum’s Problem of 

the Week to practice responding productively to assignments submitted by middle school 

students. As preservice teachers practiced giving constructive feedback to students, mentors 

provided guidance and support to improve the feedback. Through this hands-on experience, 

the preservice teachers learned what kinds of feedback most effectively guided students to the 

correct answers.

Growth of such online learning communities that foster deep expertise has been limited 

because they exist outside the formal structure of funding and certifying educator learning. So 

even though participating in Math Forum may be better for educators than most of the other 

professional learning experiences they are offered, time spent using online resources like Math 

Forum does not relieve them of their obligations to attend other programs to meet district and 

state requirements. 

The principle that learning outcomes are more important than where and when the learning takes 

place should be applied to educator learning just as it should to student learning.
44 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Moreover, the least effective educators are most likely to be teaching in schools serving 

students from homes that are economically and educationally disadvantaged. Limited access 

to excellent teaching is a source of inequity in our education system (Darling-Hammond 2010). 

A recent study found that students in urban and suburban high schools can choose from 

between three and four times as many advanced mathematics courses (which typically earn 

extra credit in the college admission process) as students in rural schools (Graham 2009).

Connected teaching can make it possible to extend the reach of specialized and exceptional 

educators through online learning activities made available to students in every zip code. 

When a school is unable to attract educators qualified to teach courses that its students need 

or want, students should be given the option of taking the course online. Many schools have 

found that K–12 students taking online courses benefit from having an educator on site who 

keeps track of their progress and provides encouragement, however, that staff member does 

not need the depth of content expertise of a person solely responsible for teaching a class.

Preparing New Educators and 

Ongoing Professional Learning

Technology is a powerful enabler of learning, but educators still must teach. They must support 

their students’ engagement with technology resources for learning, highlighting the important 

subject matter content, pressing students for explanations and higher-order thinking, tracking 

their students’ progress, and encouraging their students to take more responsibility for learning. 

This requires deep transformations of teaching practices. These transformations must begin in 

the places where our education system is preparing new professionals: colleges of education 

and other teacher preparation institutions and organizations.

Young teachers are similar to their students in that they have grown up in a world where 

laptop computers, cell phones, and handheld gaming devices are commonplace, and homes 

are filled with computers, TVs, digital video recorders, and game consoles. They are as 

comfortable interacting with digital devices and accessing the Internet as their students 

are. Still, this does not mean they understand how to use the technology of their daily lives 

to improve their teaching practices. Helping them develop this understanding is the job of 

preservice teacher preparation programs.

The best way to prepare teachers for connected teaching is to have them experience it. 

All institutions involved in preparing educators should provide technology-supported 

learning experiences that promote and enable the use of technology to improve learning, 

assessment, and instructional practices. This will require colleges of education and 

postsecondary institutions generally to draw from advances in learning science and 

technology to change what and how they teach when they prepare teachers, keeping in mind 

that everything we now know about how people learn applies to new teachers as well. (See 

sidebar on integrating technology into teacher preparation.)
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 45

The same imperatives for teacher preparation apply to 

ongoing professional learning. Professional learning 

should support and develop educators’ identities as fluent 

users of advanced technology, creative and collaborative 

problem solvers, and adaptive, socially aware experts 

throughout their careers.

Research shows that U.S. teachers have less time in their 

workweek for professional learning than their counterparts 

in countries where students have the best performance 

on international examinations (Darling-Hammond 2010). 

Increasing the time for our educators to engage in 

professional learning will require processes that cross 

time and space boundaries. 

Educators can be engaged in professional learning not 

only when attending formal workshops or other activities 

outside the classroom, but also in the very act of teaching, 

which can offer a rich source of information to inform 

professional growth (Ancess 2000; Borko et al. 1997; 

Kubitskey 2006). When interwoven with daily activities, 

professional learning allows learning about techniques 

and materials for teaching that can be directly applied 

with students. In this process, providing continuous 

supports for examining, revising, and reflecting on 

instruction is essential to improving educator practices 

that affect student outcomes. Technology can help 

provide continuous supports through models of educator 

learning that blend face-to-face and online experiences. 

Technology-supported informal learning communities can 

connect teachers to university experts in content domains 

and in pedagogy.

Connecting With Exemplary Practices

Technology can support professional learning by making the practices of exemplary 

educators accessible to other educators (Fishman 2007; Richardson and Kile 1999). With 

today’s video-sharing tools, for example, outstanding demonstrations of teaching practice 

can be captured and annotated. Educators can view and analyze their practice and then 

innovate and customize new ways to refine their craft in light of new insights. Resources 

such as Teachers.tv can be used to make the act of teaching visible, helping the entire 

community better understand effective teaching practices. (See sidebar on Teachers.tv.)

Integrating Technology Into Teacher Preparation

The UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin 

is designed to bring more mathematics and science 

majors into teaching. Participants enter the program in 

their junior year and graduate with both a bachelor’s 

degree in a STEM field and a teaching certificate. 

UTeach interweaves technology throughout its course 

and practicum offerings. Early in their course work, 

UTeach preservice teachers use technology to find 

information and to communicate with their professors 

and with each other. They post lesson plans online and 

take online assessments. More advanced courses build 

on these experiences and involve the instructional use 

of technology within the content areas the preservice 

teachers will teach. UTeach preservice teachers have 

multiple opportunities to use technology with students in 

the field both before and during student teaching. 

A different kind of example comes from the alternative 

teacher certification program at Northwestern University. 

Northwestern’s program uses video and computer 

technology to capture classroom interactions during 

interns’ summer teaching placements. Peers, mentor 

teachers, and university faculty review video excerpts with 

the teaching interns, providing analyses of the teaching 

and learning and helping to scaffold reflective discourse 

about classroom practice. In this way, technology helps 

teaching interns make connections between the language 

and concepts of the teacher education program and the 

real practice that occurs in classrooms. 
46 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Connecting With Other Professionals

More than two decades of research has demonstrated 

the importance of collaboration among teachers. When 

teachers make their work public and examine each 

other’s work, the quality of their practice and student 

outcomes improve (Lieberman and Pointer Mace 2010). 

Social networking technology provides a platform for 

making teachers’ work public, with opportunities for both 

local and global communities of practice. 

Communities of practice provide a strong mechanism 

for promoting ongoing growth from novice preservice 

educators through expert master educators and offer 

opportunities for the engagement of a broad range of 

participants from outside formal education (Wenger, 

White, and Smith 2009). Successful learning circles also 

can bring together educators and students to deepen 

learning (Riel 1992).

PBS TeacherLine is one example of an online system that 

engages teachers in collaboration and builds professional 

community. PBS TeacherLine, long a provider of online 

courses for teachers, is now focusing on making online 

courses more interactive to help educators build their 

own communities of practice. Online courses of 15 or 

30 hours are designed as interactive environments in 

which an expert facilitator communicates best practice 

approaches and helps educators share ideas. Educators 

in a course share resources by creating digital portfolios 

and participating in facilitated discussions.

The Department of Education also is acknowledging 

the need for communities of practice for educators 

by funding design research on online communities of 

practice to learn more about what types of content and 

interactions will compel people to participate and will 

provide useful supports for professional educators. This 

project also includes the development of at least six 

online communities to leverage the use of educational 

technology to improve teaching, assessment, learning, 

and infrastructure in schools. Communities of practice 

funded by the Department will scaffold best practices, 

ensuring teachers are highly effective and connected to 

data, resources, content, and expertise. 

Teachers.tv

Teachers.tv is a collection of multimedia resources 

developed and disseminated in the United Kingdom with 

the mission of spreading best practices in education 

as broadly as possible among the entire community 

involved in student learning—not only those who work 

in schools, but also parents and district leaders.

The station’s programming is available through a variety 

of media platforms. It is broadcast via Internet all day, 

everyday and via traditional television for a few hours 

per day on several stations. Once a program has been 

broadcast, the content is archived on the site in a 

searchable library of downloadable videos. Links to the 

videos can be found on a number of frequently used 

websites, including that of the Guardian newspaper and 

both YouTube and iTunes.

Programs ranging in length from 15 minutes to one hour 

target different members of the educational community. 

For example, broadcast content in the first week of 

December 2009 included programs on teaching math, 

English, and science concepts at the primary or secondary 

level, a program on effective uses of assessment, a 

program for district leaders on special needs students, 

and general-audience programs on Asperger’s syndrome, 

healthy eating, and youth and crime.

Teachers.tv seeks to show, not just tell, how and why 

best practices work. The regularly scheduled programs 

“Classroom Observation” and “Great Lesson Ideas” 

show K–12 teachers’ best practice modeled by first-rate 

teachers in the context of actual classroom instruction. 

Similarly, a program on special needs students takes 

viewers inside schools that have been serving that 

population exceptionally well. 

On the Teachers.tv website, users can log in to a 

community portal where they can find and store the 

content most relevant for them and discuss their 

practices with other educators. Teachers also can 

become “associates” of the station, serving as liaisons 

between schools and parents and the station. The 

associates offer suggestions for topics and give first 

feedback on content.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 47

Career-long Personal Learning Networks

A transformative idea in the preparation and professional learning of educators and 

education leaders is to leverage technology to create career-long personal learning networks 

within and across schools, preservice preparation and in-service educational institutions, 

and professional organizations. The goal of these career-long personal learning networks 

would be to make professional learning timely and relevant as well as an ongoing activity 

that continually improves practices. These networks and other resources would enable 

educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best practices for just-in-time learning 

and problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to design and develop 

resources and share them with their colleagues.

As we move into an era when colleges of education will be held accountable for the effectiveness 

of their graduates, these institutions can use personal learning networks to provide ongoing 

support once their graduates enter the workforce. An example of this is TFANet, a website 

provided by Teach for America (TFA) for all its new educators. TFANet offers valuable resources 

for educators and opportunities for TFA teachers to connect and share ideas. This resource 

exchange also enables TFA teachers and alumni to share, rate, and download successful lesson 

and unit plans, data-tracking tools, and classroom management strategies.

Using technology in these ways for ongoing professional learning for educators will 

require rethinking the use of time-based measures of attainment rather than competencybased measures. Strictly time-based measures do not allow professional educators to 

take advantage of the many new opportunities that online learning offers by being able to 

transcend time and space.

Growing Demand for Skilled Online Instruction 

As online learning becomes an increasingly important part of our education system at all 

levels, this creates both the need and opportunity for educators who are skilled in online 

instruction and the demand for greater knowledge of the most effective practices. As we 

implement online learning, we should make sure that students’ learning experiences address 

the full range of expertise and competencies as reflected in standards and use meaningful 

assessments of the target competencies. Crucial to filling this need while ensuring effective 

teaching are appropriate standards for online courses and teaching, and a new way of 

approaching online teacher certification that functions across state lines.
48 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Closing the Technology Gap in Teaching

The technology that enables connected teaching is available now, but not all the 

conditions necessary to leverage it are. Many of our existing educators do not have the 

same understanding of and ease with using technology that is part of the daily lives of 

professionals in other sectors and with this generation of students. The same can be said of 

many of the education leaders and policymakers in schools, districts, and states and of the 

higher education institutions that prepare new educators for the field.

This gap in technology understanding influences program and curriculum development, 

funding and purchase decisions about educational and information technology in schools, 

and preservice and in-service professional learning. Too often, this gap prevents technology 

from being used in ways that would improve instructional practices and learning outcomes.

Still, we must introduce connected teaching into our education system rapidly, and for 

that we must rely on the organizations that support educators in their profession—schools 

and districts, colleges of education, professional learning providers, librarians and media 

specialists, and professional organizations. We also must call on education leaders 

and policymakers to remove barriers to connected teaching and provide incentives and 

recognition for educators who demonstrate effective teaching in a connected model.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 49

Reaching our Goal

3.0 Teaching:

Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that 

connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable 

and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

3.1 Expand opportunities for educators to have access to technology-based content, 

resources, and tools where and when they need them.

Today’s technology enables educators to tap into resources and orchestrate expertise 

across a school district or university, a state, the nation, and even around the world. 

Educators can discuss solutions to problems and exchange information about best practices 

in minutes, not weeks or months. Today’s educators should have access to technologybased resources that inspire them to provide more engaging and effective learning 

opportunities for each and every student.

3.2 Leverage social networking technologies and platforms to create communities of 

practice that provide career-long personal learning opportunities for educators within 

and across schools, preservice preparation and in-service educational institutions, and 

professional organizations.

Social networks can be used to provide educators with career-long personal learning 

tools and resources that make professional learning timely and relevant as well as an 

ongoing activity that continually improves practice and evolves their skills over time. Online 

communities should enable educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best 

practices for just-in-time problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to 

design and develop resources with and for their colleagues.

3.3 Use technology to provide all learners with online access to effective teaching and better 

learning opportunities and options in places where they are not otherwise available and in 

blended (online and offline) learning environments.

Many education institutions, particularly those serving the most vulnerable students and 

those in rural areas, lack educators with competencies in reaching students with special 

needs and educators with content knowledge and expertise in specialized areas, including 

STEM. Even in areas where effective teaching is available, students often lack options for 

high-quality courses in particular disciplines or opportunities for learning that prepare them 

for the modern world. Online learning options should be provided to enable leveraging the 

best teaching and make high-quality course options available to all learners.
50 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

3.4 Provide preservice and in-service educators with professional learning experiences 

powered by technology to increase their digital literacy and enable them to create compelling 

assignments for students that improve learning, assessment, and instructional practices. 

Just as technology helps us engage and motivate students to learn, technology should be 

used in the preparation and ongoing learning of educators to engage and motivate them in 

what and how they teach. This will require synthesizing core principles and adopting best 

practices for the use of technology in preparing educators. Technology also should be an 

integral component of teaching methods courses, and field experiences rather than treated 

as a discrete skill distinct from pedagogical application.

3.5 Develop a teaching force skilled in online instruction.

As online learning becomes an increasingly important part of our education system, we 

need to provide online and blended learning experiences that are more participatory and 

personalized and that embody best practices for engaging all students. This creates both 

the need and opportunity for educators who are skilled in instructional design combined 

with knowledge of emerging technologies. Crucial to filling this need while ensuring effective 

teaching are appropriate standards for online courses and teaching and a new way of 

approaching online teacher certification.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 51

Infrastructure: Access and Enable

Goal: All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for 

learning when and where they need it.

Although we have adopted technology in many aspects of education today, a comprehensive 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to move us beyond the traditional model of educators 

and students in classrooms to a learning model that brings together teaching teams and 

students in classrooms, labs, libraries, museums, workplaces, and homes—anywhere in 

the world where people have access devices and an adequate Internet connection. An 

infrastructure for learning is necessary to support a learning society in which learning is 

lifelong and lifewide.

Our infrastructure for learning is modeled on the cyberinfrastructure envisioned and 

deployed by the National Science Foundation to encourage collaboration among scientists 

and researchers, which was subsequently broadened to apply to learning in all domains 

(National Science Foundation 2008b). The term “cyber” tells us that the time and distance 

barriers of the physical world are reduced by virtual connections between people and 

between people and technology resources and tools. “Infrastructure” reminds us that even 

in virtual worlds, physical and organizational structures are needed to run a system.

The essential underlying principle is that the infrastructure includes people, processes, 

learning resources, and policies and sustainable models for continuous improvement 

in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and 

administrative tools.

Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project that will require the 

participation and collaboration of individuals from all disciplines and types of institutions 

across the entire spectrum of education. It also will require education, business, and 

government as partners. And it will take leadership and a commitment to a shared 

understanding of its importance to transforming U.S. education.
52 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Revolutionary Opportunity for Change

Over the past 40 years, we have seen unprecedented advances in computing and 

communications that have led to powerful technology resources and tools for learning. 

Today, low-cost Internet access devices, easy-to-use digital authoring tools, and the Web 

facilitate access to information and multimedia learning content, communication, and 

collaboration. They also provide the ability to participate in online learning communities that 

cross disciplines, organizations, international boundaries, and cultures.

Many of these technology resources and tools already are being used within our public 

education system. We are now, however, at an inflection point for a much bolder transformation 

of education powered by technology. This revolutionary opportunity for change is driven by 

the continuing push of emerging technology and the pull of the critical national need for new 

strategies to turn around a P–12 system that is failing to adequately prepare young Americans 

for postsecondary education and the workforce and a postsecondary system that is failing to 

prepare its graduates for success in life and work in a changing world.

Our model of an infrastructure for learning is always on and makes learning opportunities 

available to learners, educators, and administrators regardless of their location, the time of day, 

or the type of access devices. It supports not just access to information, but also the creation of 

content and access to people and participation in online learning communities. 

An infrastructure for learning unleashes new ways of capturing and sharing knowledge 

based on multimedia that integrate text, still and moving images, audio, and applications that 

run on a variety of devices. It enables seamless integration of in-school and out-of-school 

learning. It frees learning from a rigid information-transfer model (from book or educator to 

students) and enables a much more motivating intertwine of learning about, learning to do, 

and learning to be.

On a more operational level, an infrastructure for learning brings together and enables access 

to data from multiple sources while ensuring appropriate levels of security and privacy. 

The infrastructure integrates computer hardware, data and networks, information resources, 

interoperable software, middleware services and tools, and devices, and it also connects and 

supports interdisciplinary teams of professionals responsible for its development, maintenance, 

and management, and its use in transformative approaches to teaching and learning.

Unpacking the Challenge

Given the enormity of the challenge of building an infrastructure for learning, we should 

approach it step-by-step, designing and implementing individual elements so we can take 

advantage of their incremental benefits along the way.

Broadband Everywhere

A crucial element of an infrastructure for learning is a broadband network of adequate 

performance and reach, including abundant wireless coverage in and out of school buildings. 

“Adequate” means enough bandwidth to support simultaneous use by all students and 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 53

educators anywhere in the building and the surrounding campus to routinely use the 

Web, multimedia, and collaboration software. The activities of the FCC (http://www.fcc.

gov/broadband) and the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and 

Information Administration (NTIA) Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (http://

www2.ntia.doc.gov) to bolster the nation’s broadband provisioning are essential to learning 

lifelong and lifewide.

In March 2010, the FCC released the National Broadband Plan to provide a blueprint for 

connecting all Americans to broadband capability. The National Broadband Plan recognizes 

the crucial task of improving high-speed Internet access for learners in schools and homes 

and calls for a number of changes to the E-Rate that would dramatically improve learners’

access to broadband-enabled learning experiences. (See the sidebar on the National 

Broadband Plan. For background information on the E-Rate, see the sidebar on balancing 

connectivity and student safety on the Internet on p. 56.) 

The National Broadband Plan and Education

The National Broadband Plan deals with many aspects of the nation’s technology infrastructure, including 

the infrastructure for education. In the education arena, the plan calls for specific actions in three areas:

Supporting and promoting online learning. The plan calls for expanded access to educational digital 

content, increased recognition of credits earned through online learning, refinements of digital data and 

interoperability standards, digital literacy promotion, and research and development of new broadbandenabled online learning systems.

Unlocking the value of data and improving transparency. The plan advocates the adoption of electronic 

learning records and the modernization of privacy laws to protect student data while allowing its use to 

improve learning outcomes. The FCC also calls for improved financial data transparency in education, 

supported by online tools that make school systems’ spending visible and connect local education agencies 

with product and service providers that meet their technology needs more efficiently.

Modernizing educational broadband infrastructure. Most critically, the plan calls for several changes 

to the E-Rate that would increase learners’ access to broadband-enabled learning experiences. Proposed 

changes to the E-Rate include the following:

 • Raising the E-Rate cap to account for inflation, providing much-needed additional funding to schools 

and libraries;

 • Funding wireless connectivity to portable learning devices, allowing students and teachers to continue 

learning beyond the school day;

 • Providing more support for internal network connections, allowing greater student and teacher access to 

high-speed connectivity in the classroom;

 • Allowing community members to make use of E-Rate-funded connections outside school hours, creating 

new opportunities for job training and extended learning opportunities for adults; 

 • Encouraging schools and libraries to partner with state, regional, local, and tribal entities to establish 

networks that increase broadband purchasing power;

 • Streamlining the E-Rate application process to reduce the burden on schools and libraries that seek funding;

 • Increasing E-Rate recipients’ flexibility to purchase the most cost-effective broadband solutions available in 

their geographic area;

 • Setting new minimum service goals for broadband connectivity that take into account the numbers and needs 

of E-rate network users, providing sufficient bandwidth for learners to take advantage of engaging multimedia 

tools; and

 • Awarding some E-Rate funds competitively to promote innovation in technology-supported learning.

The full text of the National Broadband Plan’s recommendations and vision for education are available online 

at http://www.broadband.gov/plan/11-education. 
54 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Access Devices for Every Student and Educator 

Because an infrastructure for learning should support learning 

in and out of the classroom, students and educators need 

Internet access devices for around-the-clock use from any 

location. Internet access devices are continually evolving and 

today include desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, public 

access kiosks, mobile phones, portable digital players, and 

wireless readers. 

Many districts say they face major challenges in providing 

access devices for every student and educator. Even with the 

rise of relatively low-cost mobile devices and netbooks, most 

devices cost at least several hundred dollars and need to be 

replaced every few years. In 2002, however, Maine became 

the first state in the country to give every seventh- and eighthgrade student and educator a laptop for use both at school and 

at home. Research on the effectiveness of the program shows 

that student learning has improved (Berry and Wintle 2009; 

Silvernail and Bluffington 2009; Silvernail and Gritter 2007), 

and the program is now being expanded to high schools. (See 

sidebar on building a statewide infrastructure for learning.) 

Many K–12 students already carry mobile devices for personal 

use with greater computing power than the supercomputers 

of a generation ago. K–12 educators routinely own access 

devices for use in their daily lives. Students at our nation’s 

colleges and universities increasingly are arriving on campus 

with powerful laptops and mobile devices of their own. The 

presence of so many access devices and the precedent 

that has been established at colleges and universities are 

prompting some K–12 school districts to explore having their 

students and educators use their own personal access devices 

as an alternative to purchasing them.

In the past, districts were reluctant to allow students to use 

their own devices in school because of concerns about the 

unfair advantage of affluent students who are more likely to 

have the latest devices and the risk of students accessing 

inappropriate Internet content or using their connectivity to 

cheat on tests. However, districts are finding that a combination 

of acceptable use policies and staff training makes student use 

of personal digital devices both feasible and safe.

Building a Statewide Infrastructure for Learning

In 2001, Maine kicked off the Maine Learning 

Technology Initiative (MLTI), the first statewide 

effort to provide students and educators across 

multiple grades with 24/7 access to personal 

learning devices. A joint task force convened by 

the governor and the state legislature assessed 

Maine’s education needs and the infrastructure that 

would be required for implementation of one-to-one 

computing, including hardware, software, internal 

and external school networks and servers, technical 

support, and educator professional development.

To be able to provide all aspects of the 

infrastructure to support worthwhile uses of 

technology for learning while staying within 

Maine’s budget parameters, the decision was 

made to focus the first phase of MLTI on middle 

school students. 

After pilot testing and training at “exploration sites” in 

each of the state’s nine regions, Maine’s one-toone program was extended to seventh-graders in 

all state middle schools in 2002 and to all eighthgraders in 2003. MLTI now equips each of Maine’s 

243 middle schools with wireless Internet access 

and provides each school with enough laptops 

for every seventh- and eighth-grade student and 

educator to use both in and outside school. Since 

MLTI’s inception, more than 37,000 laptops provided 

by the program have been used by over 100,000 

educators and learners throughout the state. MLTI 

also provides intensive professional development, 

implementation assistance, and technical support 

to educators to ensure that the technology is fully 

leveraged to support student learning.

Maine believes that its investment in technology for 

its middle school students has paid off: The state’s 

eighth-grade writing proficiency jumped 12 percent 

after statewide one-to-one implementation (Silvernail 

and Gritter 2007). Laptop use also has been linked 

to gains on statewide mathematics tests and 

improved retention of science course material (Berry 

and Wintle 2009; Silvernail and Bluffington 2009).

Inspired by this success, Maine has expanded 

its laptop initiative to all students in grades 9–12. 

The state is committed to funding wireless Internet 

access in all Maine secondary schools and has 

negotiated discounts for districts to provide their 

students with laptops.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 55

Using Cell Phones to Support Teaching 

and Learning

After letting two students use the calculator 

functions on their cell phones to solve the crisis of 

being two calculators short for a schoolwide math 

exam, the principal at Passage Middle School, Va., 

decided that he might be on to something. Hoping to 

capitalize on students’ excitement when allowed to 

use their cell phones in school, he instituted Phone 

Fridays in math class and challenged students to 

come up with ways to use their phones to enhance 

learning. Students started using the phones’ 

calendar function to keep track of homework 

schedules and the camera function to take pictures 

of the notes on the classroom’s whiteboards. 

They created blogs and podcasts related to their 

homework and supported their math work both with 

the phone’s calculator and by using the stopwatch 

function to time their speed at doing calculations. 

Positive student reactions led the principal to invite 

other interested educators to join in the cell phone 

experiment. Before allowing cell phone usage on a 

broader scale, each educator had a discussion with 

his or her students to set ground rules for usage. All 

the classes came up with similar rules, and a school 

policy was developed: Cell phones could be used in 

class only for working on assignments. Text or video 

could be sent only with the educator’s permission. 

No photographing or video- or audio-recording of 

people was allowed without their permission, no 

posting to websites was allowed without permission, 

and online safety precautions were to be taken 

when publishing from a mobile phone.

Teachers began using cell phone applications for 

polling and to set up an online text messaging board 

to discuss homework. One educator used the cell 

phones while teaching, asking students to answer 

questions via text messaging rather than out loud. 

As student answers came in, they were displayed 

on a screen at the front of the class, identified by the 

student’s cell phone screen name. English teachers, 

in particular, found the cell phones useful as they 

started using blogs to engage students in writing. 

One class used Twitter to collaborate in generating 

stories in class.

Middletown Public Schools in New Jersey, for example, 

brought together elementary, middle, and high school 

educators to forge an acceptable-use policy that would allow 

students to use personal cell phones and other computing 

devices in school. Students then created videos to illustrate 

acceptable and unacceptable uses for their peers. At Passage 

Middle School in Newport News, Va., a host of student 

and educator uses of cell phones to support learning was 

unleashed when the principal decided to allow the use of cell 

phones for instructional purposes during class. (See sidebar 

on using cell phones to support teaching and learning.) 

Schools also can solve the equity issue—concern that affluent 

students will have devices and others will not—by purchasing 

devices just for the students who need such financial support. 

This is more cost-effective than purchasing devices for every 

student. Districts can think about providing an access device 

and Internet access at home for those students who need 

them in the same way they provide a free or reduced-price 

hot lunch for students who could not otherwise afford it. In 

choosing the devices to provide for students who otherwise 

would not have them, districts need to make sure that all their 

students have devices that support writing, analysis, and the 

creation of digital content related to their courses, not just 

consumption of content created by others.

Allowing students to bring their own access devices to school 

has been limited, however, by provisions within the E-Rate, 

a federal program that supports connectivity in elementary 

and secondary schools and libraries by providing discounts 

on Internet access, telecommunications services, internal 

network connections, and basic maintenance to support 

them. Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on 

compliance with several federal laws designed to ensure 

student privacy and safety on the Internet. These include 

the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires 

the use of electronic filtering on school networks. In some 

cases, lack of full understanding of this requirement creates 

unnecessary barriers to the rich learning experiences that inschool Internet access should afford students. 

E-Rate provisions and CIPA requirements should be clarified, 

and schools and districts should explore the ways that 

student-owned devices can aid in learning. (See the sidebar 

on balancing connectivity and student safety on the Internet.)
56 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) 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—

including for commercial purposes—and collaborating with 

others. These resources are an important element of an 

infrastructure for learning. Originating in higher education, 

OER forms range from podcasts to digital libraries to 

textbooks, games, and courses, and they are freely 

available to anyone over the Web. 

MIT’s decision to launch the OpenCourseWare (OCW) 

initiative to make the core content from all its courses 

available online in 2000 gave the OER movement a 

credible start (Smith 2009). Other universities joined the 

OCW Consortium, and today there are more than 200 

members, each of which has agreed to make at least 10 

courses available in open form.

Equally important to the OER movement was the 

emergence of the Creative Commons, an organization 

that developed a set of easy-to-use licenses whereby 

individuals or institutions could maintain ownership of their 

creative products while giving others selected rights for 

using OER for noncommercial purposes.

Advances in our understanding of how to design good 

OER are coming out of the work of the Open Learning 

Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University. OLI has been 

developing state-of-the-art, high-quality online learning 

environments that are implemented as part of courses 

taught not only at Carnegie Mellon, but also at other 

universities and at community colleges. The OLI learning 

systems are submitted to rigorous ongoing evaluation and 

refinement as part of each implementation. 

Many OER materials are available not just to individuals 

enrolled in courses, but to anyone who wants to use them. 

Nearly half of downloads of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, for 

example, are by individual self-directed learners 

(Maxwell 2009). 

Because OER materials are online, their development, 

publishing, and consumption have crossed geographic 

boundaries, enabling the movement to support a global 

Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety 

on the Internet 

E-Rate is a federal program that supports connectivity 

in elementary and secondary schools and libraries 

by providing discounts on Internet access, 

telecommunications services, internal network 

connections, and basic maintenance. Schools, school 

districts, and consortia can receive discounts on these 

services ranging from 20 to 90 percent depending on 

their level of poverty and geographic location. 

Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on 

compliance with several federal laws designed to ensure 

student privacy and safety on the Internet. The Children’s 

Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that 

funds Internet access or internal network connections with 

E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ 

access to content that may be harmful to minors, including 

obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools 

receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to 

students and to monitor their online activities. 

Ensuring student safety on the Internet is a critical 

concern, but many filters designed to protect students 

also block access to legitimate learning content and such 

tools as blogs, wikis, and social networks that have the 

potential to support student learning and engagement. 

More flexible, intelligent filtering systems can give 

teachers (to whom CIPA restrictions do not apply) access 

to educationally valuable content. On the other end of the 

spectrum, some schools and districts filter students’ online 

activities with proxy servers that meet CIPA requirements 

but are easy to get around, minimizing their utility for 

managing and monitoring students’ online activity.

CIPA also has posed challenges to accessing school 

networks through students’ own cell phones, laptop 

computers, and other Internet access devices to support 

learning activities when schools cannot afford to purchase 

devices for each student. Applying CIPA-required network 

filters to a variety of student-owned devices is a technical 

challenge that may take schools months or years to 

implement. However, districts such as Florida’s Escambia 

County Schools have created technical solutions and 

accompanying acceptable use policies (AUPs) that 

comply with CIPA regulations, allowing Web-based 

learning on student devices to run on networks supported 

by federal E-Rate funding.

Source: Universal Service Administrative Company 2008.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 57

education community. For example, the OER Commons is a well-known global membership 

network providing access to content that is free to use or share and, in some cases, change 

and share again. In many cases, these materials also are licensed so they can be incorporated 

into new courses and in new ways, even within a product that can be sold commercially.

The OER movement could be leveraged more fully throughout the education system and 

across types of learners. Students in the P–16 systems and adults who are changing 

careers or who simply have an interest could make use of these materials. Further, as we 

transition from the static print-based textbook to a more dynamic digital resource network, 

assets that are published as OER could be integrated into a new kind of “open textbook.” 

For example, the development of a high-quality algebra textbook could be funded by a 

consortium and then the textbook could made freely available for use, reuse, and continuous 

improvement. A company could leverage these materials within an even better product for 

schools to use. Traditionally, textbooks have been a significant portion of the K–12 budget as 

well as the student-borne cost of higher education, and in budget-conscious times this is one 

strategy that could be considered. 

Interoperability Standards 

Not all high-quality technology-based learning resources are open, and ideally individual 

learners, teachers, schools, districts, and states could bring together an array of digital 

learning resources from many sources—both open and fee based—to meet their needs. 

Combining resources in this way, however, requires standards for interoperability so 

the resources can be catalogued and work together. A number of efforts to develop 

specifications for learning applications (SIF, SCORM, and IMS) have been underway for 

years, but no single approach has become the standard.

Next-generation Computing 

To help build out an infrastructure for learning, districts and schools should begin a transition 

to the next generation of computing system architectures. Districts should consider 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 reduce the number of servers on their networks dramatically, cutting costs and 

making the networks less complex and easier to manage.

Districts also can consider moving to cloud computing, which involves shifting from the 

procurement and maintenance of servers in local datacenters to purchasing software as a 

service (SaaS) and Web applications from datacenters running in the cloud. 

Cloud computing is a catchy new name, but its principal outcome—utility computing—is not 

new. Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources as a metered service similar 

to how public utilities package and sell electricity through our nation’s power grid. What 

makes cloud computing more desirable and possible is that we are nearing an inflection 
58 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

point driven by technology advances and the need for more 

powerful and collaborative platforms at lower cost.

Cloud computing can support both the academic and 

administrative services required for learning and education. 

It can enable students and educators to access the same 

learning resources using different Internet devices anytime 

and anywhere, both in and out of school. This will not happen 

automatically, however. School systems and other youth-serving 

organizations—public libraries, public broadcasting, after-school 

clubs, and so on—will need to engage each other and seek 

common platforms or at least technical interoperability. 

Cloud computing is still in a nascent stage with obstacles to 

overcome to fully realize its potential. Still, now is the time to 

move forward with investments that contribute to the shift to 

cloud computing, with the primary benefits being cost savings 

and an ability for education institutions to refocus on their core 

mission, educating students. (See sidebar on North Carolina 

State University.)

Services Delivered From the Cloud

Figure 4 illustrates the comprehensive nature of integrated 

software services needed for learning experiences and that 

can be delivered from the cloud.

At the top are the users of the services—students, educators, 

administrators, and parents—with a variety of Internet access 

devices. With these devices, users can find a large and diverse 

set of digital educational resources from both proprietary and 

open providers.

Education resources and services could be used directly in 

a variety of educator- or learner-directed ways. They also 

could be used as ingredients for derivative products that are 

authored, built, edited, disseminated, and managed as student 

projects or educator-author curriculum modules through 

services indicated in the adjacent cluster. In this model, 

students and educators are both consumers and producers 

of educational content, with the role of student and educator 

sometimes interchanged. The framework of services also 

includes the administrative services for operating the school 

and school systems.

North Carolina State University Cloud 

Computing Services

The Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) at North 

Carolina State University has been a pioneer in 

delivering secure on-demand computing services 

for education institutions. VCL was using cloud 

computing before the term came into popular use: 

It has been doing research on virtual computing 

since 2003 and began offering cloud services 

in 2004.

The VCL academic cloud is based on opensource technology and offers infrastructure as a 

service, platform as a service, and software as 

a service, including support of high-performance 

computing services. The advantages of VCL’s 

cloud computing approach include consolidation 

of computing resources and technical support 

services, delivery of applications that would be 

difficult to install on student computers, and the 

extension of computing services to education 

institutions that otherwise would have only limited 

technology infrastructures.

As of 2009 VCL was serving more than 30,000 

faculty and staff members. A typical user accesses 

VCL through a Web interface, going through a 

set of authentication and authorization steps 

and then choosing the desired kind of computing 

environment and time period from a set of pulldown menus.

VCL can dynamically move resources from one 

application to another, producing increased 

efficiency and lower costs. During semester 

breaks, for example, when most students are not 

using computing resources, the system assigns 

those resources to researchers with heavy 

computing requirements for activities, such as 

running complex models and simulations.

VCL now offers services on a pilot basis to seven 

other North Carolina public universities, the North 

Carolina Community College System, and several 

out-of-state universities including three in India. 

Possible extension of these academic cloud 

services to K-12 schools is being considered.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 59

Below the three types of services are cross-cutting integrated capabilities to support datadriven assessment of individual students, individual educators, and the resources (content) 

and processes serving teaching and learning. Included here are assessments for formative 

and summative uses at time scales ranging from real time to decades. Also included are 

rating, ranking, and recommender services for educational resources.

The resources, authoring, and administrative services all can be used by individuals for solo 

work and also by teams of people working in various configurations of same and different 

place and time, perhaps internationally, through social networking and collaboration services. 

All the above rest critically on networking and middleware, with public and private cloud 

computing as the underlying platform for computation, data, and digital object management.

Human Talent and Scaling Expertise 

Building and nurturing an infrastructure for learning requires providers and users who have 

knowledge and expertise in emerging technologies and a shared commitment to standards 

and specialists with experience integrating technology into curriculum development and 

assessment in meaningful ways.

The challenge of providing this level of expertise on the scale our education system requires 

should not be underestimated. Already, for example, the number of computers per computer 

technician in K–12 education is estimated at 612 compared with 150 computers per 

technician in private industry (CoSN 2009). To an increasing extent, students and educators 

are handling routine maintenance and troubleshooting of computer equipment themselves. 

Figure 4: Framework for software services in a technology-empowered 

learning environment

Users of Services: Students, Teachers, Administrators, Parents

Internet Access Devices

Resources and Applications

Education resources 

& services

(open & proprietary)

digital textbooks • digital libraries 

• tutoring systems 

• simulations • augmented 

reality • interactive visualization 

• educational 

Authoring, editing, 

disseminating 

& content management

text processing • audio/video 

capture/edit • programming 

platforms • blogs• wikis 

• instructional/course 

management

Administrative

scheduling • personnel/HR 

• plant/facilities 

management 

• procurement • attendance 

• student records

Assessment and Reporting 

Social Networking and Collaboration 

Public and Private Network-connected Clouds – software services, data libraries & repositories
60 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Programs have been developed to make the technical support 

and troubleshooting a learning experience for students as well 

as a cost-saving measure. Students can also develop both 

technical and leadership skills through this experience. (See 

sidebar on using students as technical resources.)

Another level of support required is a professional educator 

who can engage with educators on leveraging technology for 

improving their professional practice. Studies have found that 

educators are more likely to incorporate technology into their 

instruction when they have access to this kind of coaching and 

mentoring (Strudler and Hearrington 2009). School technology 

coordinators, librarians, and media specialists may play this 

important role. Innovative approaches to staffing in schools that 

take advantage of online learning resources may free resources 

that can be applied to fund on-site mentors and coaches who 

can help educators make good use of technology resources.

Over time, districts have evolved instructional technology 

departments concerned with the use of technology in teaching 

and learning in addition to traditional information technology 

departments. Some districts have both kinds of IT departments 

(under any variety of names), and some have combined the 

two functions under a single leadership.

Even in the latter case, those in charge of IT for a district 

or state may find they are left out of deliberations on key 

decisions in such areas as instruction, personnel assignment, 

or assessment. Those responsible for instruction, personnel, 

and assessment, on the other hand, are often frustrated 

by technology that does not meet their needs. Building an 

infrastructure for learning will require close coordination 

among all these functions. 

Using Students as Technical Resources 

Generation YES

Generation YES started in 1995 as one of the 

first 100 federally funded Technology Innovation 

Challenge Grants. Its founder, Dennis Harper, 

believed that there was a better way than trying 

to train teachers in using technology with the 

expectation that they would then pass these skills 

to students. His insight was to use students as the 

technology experts, with each student assigned 

to a teacher as the technology consultant 

responsible for helping him or her develop and 

implement technology-based classroom activities. 

The learning goals for the student center on such 

real-world skills as project planning, collaboration, 

and communication. Since its inception, 1,200 

schools and 75,000 students have participated in 

Generation YES.

MOUSE

Since its start in New York City in 1997, MOUSE 

has had the dual purpose of providing technical 

support to help teachers integrate technology into 

instruction and helping students (Mouse Squad 

volunteers) acquire the skills and attitudes they 

need for college. Now operating in more than 200 

locations, MOUSE provides student-run technical 

help desks. MOUSE Corps is a career readiness 

program that offers professional internships, 

mentoring, and skill-building workshops to high 

school students. Citigroup has estimated that 

MOUSE volunteer labor saves the average school 

$19,000 a year in technical support costs.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 61

Reaching Our Goal

4.0 Infrastructure:

All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning 

when and where they need it.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

4.1 Ensure students and educators have broadband access to the Internet and adequate 

wireless connectivity both in and out of school.

Students and educators need adequate broadband bandwidth for accessing the Internet 

and technology-based learning resources. Adequate should be defined as the ability to use 

the Internet in school, in the surrounding campus, throughout the community, and at home. 

It should also include simultaneous use of high-bandwidth resources, such as multimedia, 

communication and collaboration environments, and communities. Crucial to providing 

such access are the broadband initiatives being individually and jointly managed by various 

federal agencies.

4.2 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.

Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and 

resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and 

assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes. The form of these 

devices, software, and resources may or may not be standardized and will evolve over time. 

In addition, these devices may be owned by the student or family, owned by the school, or 

some combination of the two. The use of devices owned by students will require advances in 

network filtering and improved support systems.

4.3 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.

The value of open educational resources is now recognized around the world, leading to 

the availability of a vast array of learning, teaching, and research resources that learners 

of any age can use across all content areas. Realizing this value will require new policies 

concerning the evaluation and selection of instructional materials so that digital resources 

are considered and processes are established for keeping educational resource content up 

to date, appropriate, and tagged according to identified content interoperability standards.
62 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

4.4 Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving an infrastructure for learning.

Building an infrastructure for learning is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted 

and coordinated effort. 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. This will require leveraging and scaling up the human talent 

to build such an infrastructure, which should ultimately save money and enable education IT

professionals to focus more on maintaining the local infrastructure and supporting teachers, 

students, and administrators.

4.5 Develop and use interoperability standards for content and student-learning data to 

enable collecting and sharing resources and collecting, sharing, and analyzing data to 

improve decision making at all levels of our education system.

Fragmented content, resources, and student-learning data siloed in different proprietary 

platforms and systems, along with a lack of common standards for collecting and sharing 

data, are formidable barriers to leveraging resources for teaching and learning. These 

barriers exist because we lack common content interoperability standards and tools to 

enable use of such standards. The lack of common standards affects the quality of tools 

because developers limit their R&D investments into narrow markets and are not able 

to leverage overall market advancements in research and development. Interoperability 

standards are essential to resolving these issues.

4.6 Develop and use interoperability standards for financial data to enable data-driven 

decision making, productivity advances, and continuous improvement at all levels of our 

education system.

Just as content, resources, and student-learning data are fragmented in disconnected 

technology systems and throughout our education system, the same is true for financial 

data. Therefore, we also need financial data interoperability standards and tools that enable 

the use of these standards. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 63

Productivity:

Redesign and Transform

Goal: Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take 

advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more 

efficient use of time, money, and staff.

To reach the president’s goal of regaining global leadership in college graduation rates by 

2020, the United States must increase the percentage of citizens holding college degrees 

from the current level of just under 40 percent to 60 percent. That is a sizable increase and, 

considering that college graduation rates in our country have held steady for more than three 

decades (OECD 2009a), a sizable challenge.

Add to this challenge the projections of most states and the federal government of reduced 

revenues for the foreseeable future, and it is clear that we will not reach this goal simply by 

spending more money on education.

In fact, over the last 30 years, the United States has increased its real dollar K–12 education 

spending per student by more than 70 percent without a commensurate improvement 

in outcomes (National Center for Education Statistics 2005; 2008). In higher education, 

tuition costs are on the rise, yet just 21 percent of the increased revenue goes to instruction 

(Vedder 2004) and spending changes have not resulted in higher degree completion rates 

(Bound, Lovenheim, and Turner 2009).

More money for education is important, but we must spend education dollars wisely, starting 

with being clear about the learning outcomes we expect from the investments we make. We 

also must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending so that we 

can provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial 

performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to improving 

productivity and accountability.

At the same time, we must make a commitment to continuous improvement by continually 

measuring and improving the productivity of our education system to meet our goals for 

educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.
64 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The Productivity Paradox

Improving productivity is a daily focus of most American organizations in all sectors—both 

for-profit and nonprofit—and especially in tight economic times. Education has not, however, 

incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve outcomes and 

manage costs, nor has it leveraged technology to enable or enhance them. We can learn much 

from the experience in other sectors.

During the 1970s and 1980s, economists puzzled over what they called the “productivity 

paradox.” Businesses were rapidly deploying technology in the belief that it would help 

them perform better and more efficiently. But when economists looked for hard data to 

demonstrate that U.S. economic output per unit of investment was increasing, they turned 

up empty-handed.

In the 1990s, economists were finally able to find evidence of substantial improvements in 

productivity related to technology (Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1998). They discovered that when 

businesses first introduced technology, they tended to use it to automate existing processes 

and procedures, without regard to whether they might be flawed or inefficient. Such uses may 

have had some benefit in terms of accuracy or speed, but the cost and complexity of acquiring 

technology, implementing it, and training staff in its use far outweighed its contributions.

Later still, in the 2000s, economists concluded that dramatic improvements in productivity 

were the result of structural innovations and a thorough redesign of business processes made 

possible by technology (Black and Lynch 2003).

What education can learn from the experience of business is that we need to make 

the fundamental structural changes that technology enables if we are to see dramatic 

improvements in productivity. As we do so, we should recognize that although the fundamental 

purpose of our public education system is the same, the roles and processes of schools, 

educators, and the system itself should change to reflect the times we live in and our goals 

as a world leader. Such rethinking applies not just to learning, assessment, and teaching 

processes, but also to the infrastructure and operational and financial sides of running schools 

and school systems.

A Call to Action for Education Leaders

Redesigning education in America is a complex challenge that will require all 50 states, the 

thousands of districts and schools across the country, the federal government, and other 

education stakeholders in the public and private sector to come together to design and 

implement solutions. It is a challenge for education leaders and policymakers, technologists 

in both the public and private sectors, and for educators throughout our education system.

An appropriate role for the Department of Education is to identify strategies for improving 

productivity in education and to work with states and districts to increase their capacity to 

implement them. This will include encouraging states and local education agencies to make 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 65

changes to practices, policies, and regulations that prevent or 

inhibit education from using technology to improve productivity.

In addition, when learning is powered by technology, the role 

of education leadership changes dramatically. Having leaders 

throughout our education system who understand the role 

of technology is essential. For example, every state should 

assign responsibility for educational technology to a seniorlevel individual who can provide a new kind of education 

leadership by ensuring that planning for educational and 

information technology is connected with the core functions 

of curriculum and instruction, assessment, professional 

learning, and administration. A senior-level leader equally 

knowledgeable about education and technology also would 

ensure that educational technology purchases are efficient 

and effective, both in terms of what is purchased and how 

purchases are made. (For an example of one state that has 

learned a new way to lead, see sidebar.)

Embracing Continuous Improvement

The underlying principle of continuous improvement is that 

we are unlikely to improve productivity until we can define 

and measure it. This starts with identifying what we seek in 

learning outcomes. It also requires getting a handle on the 

costs associated with components of our education system 

and with individual resources and activities so that the ratio of 

outcomes to costs can be tracked over time.

This plan devotes considerable space to the learning 

outcomes we seek and measuring what matters in learning. It 

also considers pragmatic such outcomes as successful high 

school graduation, readiness for postsecondary education, 

and college degree completion.

As we establish new and more complete measures of 

learning and pragmatic outcomes, however, quality matters. 

A student who successfully completes algebra in one high 

school may learn more, be better prepared for college-level 

mathematics, and be more inspired to pursue a career in 

mathematics than a student who successfully completes 

algebra at another high school. Even if we cannot accurately 

measure or easily remedy these qualitative differences, we 

must consider them as we determine what to measure for 

continuous improvement.

Leading for Learning

Taking advantage of technology to make 

transformative changes in learning opportunities 

requires leadership. The number of aspects of 

the existing system that need to change make the 

effort both daunting and complex, but examples of 

leaders working together to address this challenge 

are starting to emerge.

In Michigan, Mike Flanagan, the state 

superintendent of instruction, was motivated to take 

on educational transformation by the high dropout 

rate in many school districts. Superintendent 

Flanagan issued a Dropout Challenge, calling on 

districts to lower the number of students who leave 

school without a diploma. One of the first steps in 

the Dropout Challenge work was to get accurate 

data on the number of students who had started 

ninth grade who actually graduated four years later 

so that Michigan districts knew where they really 

stood with respect to dropouts. This understanding 

was hard to come by with the old practice of merely 

looking at the number of students starting 12th 

grade who do not earn a diploma. 

Next, Superintendent Flanagan reasoned that 

schools need to measure and use indicators 

known to predict dropping out—such as poor 

attendance, earning few course credits in ninth and 

10th grades, and failure to progress to the next 

grade. These data were not part of the state’s data 

system, and many districts did not keep track of 

them. Michigan used $11.5 million in funding from 

the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 

of 2009 to fund a Regional Data Initiatives grant 

program to make these kinds of data available 

at the school level. More than 97 percent of the 

states’ school districts signed on to the initiative. In 

addition, an online professional learning community 

is focusing on best practices in using data for 

dropout prevention.

The state legislature supported Superintendent 

Flanagan’s Dropout Challenge initiative by raising 

the age at which a student can leave school without 

parental permission from 16 to 18. To provide 

alternatives for students who have dropped out or 

who are considering doing so, Michigan also has 

begun expanding alternative programs, including 

options for online instruction. Superintendent 

Flanagan has given waivers to the state’s seat time 

requirements to 21 programs, some of which allow 

students to take all their instruction online. 
66 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Measuring and Managing Costs

The United States spends an average of about $10,000 per student per year on K–12 

education. But for too many education leaders and decision-makers, visibility into the 

costs of specific services our education system delivers to students is nonexistent. This is 

because education accounting and reporting typically are done across large programs and 

broad categories, such as instruction or instructional support. These accounting practices 

are insufficient for tracking, benchmarking, and analyzing the costs of various services 

individually or compared with one another—all of which are essential to making decisions 

that lead to better outcomes and productivity.

A better approach to accounting for these purposes is cost accounting, which focuses on 

recording, tracking, and reporting costs associated with specific functions or services. Cost 

accounting can provide a complete picture of actual costs today and also serve as the basis for 

projecting costs in the future. As part of a commitment to continuous improvement, states and 

districts should adopt common cost-accounting standards for benchmarking and analyzing costs. 

Using Data in Decision Making

An essential component of continuous improvement is making decisions based on data, 

which will require fundamental changes in how we collect and use data and in the processes 

we currently use for decision making.

For many years, school districts have been developing and using multiple data systems for 

different purposes. As a result, many districts today have separate systems for finance data, 

personnel data, required accountability information for special education students, school 

lunch data, enrollment and attendance, and assessment data. Historically, linking data from 

these different systems has been cumbersome or impossible.

Advances in technology and a recent policy emphasis on using data in decision making 

have resulted in much improved data in many districts. Still, although almost all districts have 

electronic access to such data as student demographics, attendance, grades, and test scores, 

less than half have the ability to combine data from different types of systems so as to link 

student outcome data to data about specific instructional programs, teacher characteristics, 

or school finances (Gray and Lewis 2009; U.S. Department of Education Office of Planning, 

Evaluation, and Policy Development 2010). Combining data from these different types of 

systems will require at a minimum the development and use of content, student-learning, and 

financial data interoperability standards. Over time, it will require designing, developing, and 

adopting integrated systems for collecting the complex forms of data we need and for deriving 

meaningful interpretations relative to what we want to measure.

In addition to fragmented data systems, the silos created by funding programs, tradition, 

and interest groups present a major barrier to improving the productivity of our education 

system. When those responsible for a given function are isolated from others within the 

same organization, they tend to develop practices and procedures that are optimal only 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 67

from their own perspective. In addition, decisions made 

in one portion of an organization may create tension with 

decisions made in another.

To ensure better alignment in decision making, states and 

districts should develop process-redesign teams that cut 

across functions and follow the process rather than looking 

at work flow only within a given office (CoSN 2009). In 

addition, federal and state policies and regulations should 

be reviewed to identify and remove barriers to more efficient 

use of resources within schools and districts. Policies 

also should be reviewed to remove practices that keep 

technology functions isolated from the functions of teaching, 

learning, and assessment. These include separate funding 

streams and restrictions on the use of funds that reinforce 

the isolation of the educational technology function. (See 

sidebar on using data to drive improvement.)

Employing Iterative Design and Development

As we embrace continuous improvement, we must 

respect the complexity of our system and invest the effort 

needed to evaluate educational practices in different 

contexts over time. Rather than expecting to find an ideal 

turnkey solution, states and districts should define, test, 

and refine new ideas on a trial basis and measure their 

implementation effectiveness and results. New educational 

practices should be adopted with the expectation that 

there will be multiple cycles of implementation and 

refinement. States and districts also should partner with 

each other on process redesign pilots and programs to 

leverage resources and scale up the best ideas.

Moving to Useful Metrics on the Use of Technology

Current data on the use of educational and information 

technology in our system consist of records of purchases 

and numbers of computers and Internet connections. Very 

little information on how technology is actually used to 

support teaching, learning, and assessment is collected 

and communicated systematically. Only by shifting our 

focus to collecting data on how and when technology is 

used will we be able determine the difference it makes and 

use that knowledge to improve learning outcomes and the 

productivity of our education system.

Using Data to Drive Improvement

During the 1980s and 1990s, Maryland’s Montgomery 

County Public Schools (MCPS) saw dramatic changes 

in their student bodies, with increasing numbers of 

students living in poverty and coming from immigrant 

families or historically underserved ethnic groups. 

When Jerry Weast became superintendent in 1999, 

he initiated an Integrated Quality Management System 

(IQMS) as a strategy for identifying and closing 

achievement gaps. IQMS combines student information, 

such as enrollment, attendance, grades, scheduling, 

and test performance, with data on professional 

development, finances, and human resources. An 

Instructional Management System (IMS) was added to 

give teachers online access to curriculum resources, 

student performance on formative and summative 

assessments and various screenings, and curriculum 

guides and lesson plans. 

A joint venture with a technology developer produced 

software for a handheld computing device that allowed 

teachers to do individual assessments of a student’s 

literacy skills and capture the data for the student’s 

electronic file. The electronic records enabled reading 

coaches to look at data for individual students, identify 

students who were not making the expected progress, 

and seek out the relevant teachers to offer suggestions 

and support. The result was that district reading 

achievement rose overall, with especially large gains for 

African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students 

(Childress, Doyle, and Thomas 2009).

More recently, MCPS has implemented a collaborative 

data-focused process it calls M-STAT. Community 

superintendents come together and use data to 

examine such issues as differential advanced course 

enrollment rates within their high schools. The district 

had long recognized the lower participation of Hispanic 

and African-American students in advanced courses 

and had switched from using teacher recommendations 

to using PSAT scores and other objective indicators 

to counsel students into honors and AP courses. 

The M-STAT process revealed that Hispanic and 

African-American students were less likely than other 

students to participate in the PSAT. The community 

superintendents started working with their principals 

on such actions as meeting with African-American and 

Hispanic parents to talk about the importance of the 

PSAT and making the examination more enjoyable 

by providing snacks. By 2008, 88 percent of AfricanAmerican and 84 percent of Hispanic students in MCPS 

took the PSAT; more than 60 percent of AfricanAmerican and Hispanic high school students were 

enrolled in at least one honors or AP course (Childress, 

Doyle, and Thomas 2009).
68 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Employing technology on the scale proposed in this plan is new to education. Findings 

from evaluations of technological adaptations demonstrate a range of effectiveness, from 

low to high, depending on not just the specific technology but also the way in which it is 

used, the training associated with it, and the effort applied to on-going refinement and 

further development (Campuzano et al. 2009; Kulik 2003). The lessons learned from 

previous efforts emphasize that the introduction of new or adapted technologies must be 

accompanied, at a minimum, by a deliberate, often repeating cycle of implementation, 

observation and assessment, and improvement. To truly build a knowledge base and ensure 

that we are using our scarce resources wisely, formative research, which might often be 

quite local in focus, should be accompanied by a more broadly coordinated program of 

summative research that measures both effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. 

Reorganizing Teaching and Learning

We have long known that whatever it is we are trying to teach, whether drawing or quantum 

mechanics, individual students will vary in how much they know already, how they like to learn, 

and the speed at which they can learn more. In a time when we have the capability to support 

learning 24/7 and personalize the way a student interacts with digital content, it no longer 

makes sense to give every 13-year-old the same set of 45-minute American history lessons.

How much could we save if students who are ready and interested in moving ahead in their 

studies were allowed to do so instead of marking time until their classmates catch up? How 

much more efficient would our system be if students who need extra support in reading 

comprehension strategies had that support at their fingertips whenever they were reading 

in the content areas? How many more students would pass their courses and not have to 

repeat them? These are essential questions we must ask as we redesign education, and 

answering them will require rethinking basic assumptions about how our education system 

meets our goals.

One of the most basic assumptions in our education system is time-based or seat-time 

measures of educational attainment. These measures were created in the late 1800s and 

early 1900s to smooth transitions from K–12 into higher education by translating high school 

work to college admissions offices (Shedd 2003) and made their way into higher education 

when institutions began moving away from standardized curricula.

Time-based measures were appropriate in their day, but they are not now when we 

know more about how people learn and we have access to technology that can help us 

accommodate different styles and paces of learning. As we move to online learning and 

learning that combines classroom and online learning, time-based measures will increasingly 

frustrate our attempts to provide learning experiences that lead to achievement and the 

pursuit of postsecondary education that our modern world requires.

Another basic assumption is the inflexible way we organize students into age-determined 

groups, structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 69

equal size with all the students in a particular class 

receiving the same content at the same pace, and keep 

these groups in place all year. (See sidebar on making a 

school “not school.”)

The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically 

redesigned schools, demonstrating the range of possibilities 

for structuring education. For example, organizing 

education around the demonstration of competence rather 

than seat time opens up a wide range of possibilities. The 

first school district to win the Baldrige National Quality 

Award, Chugach School District in Alaska, achieved 

remarkable gains in student outcomes after mobilizing its 

community to identify the competencies it wanted to see 

in high school graduates and shifting to a performancebased system in which diplomas were awarded on the 

basis of performance on the district’s assessment of those 

competencies (NIST, Baldrige 2001). Since that time, 15 

districts and 200 schools have signed up to replicate this 

systemic reform (Re-Inventing Schools Coalition n.d.).

New Hampshire is now moving to a competency-based 

approach to secondary education across the entire state. 

The state’s governor asked his school board to come up 

with the education reforms needed to meet the goal of 

having zero dropouts by 2012. The board focused on the 

issue of unproductive requirements that impede student 

progress: Why, for example, can a student earn a high 

school credit by attending gym class but not for the hours 

spent practicing and performing as part of a gymnastics 

team? Subsequently, the board changed state regulations 

to give students the option of earning credit for graduation by demonstrating their competence 

with respect to the standards stipulated by their school districts. New Hampshire districts are 

still determining how to implement this system, including its implications for funding, teacher 

training, and assessment practices. But a new high school position—the extended learning 

opportunity coordinator—is emerging in schools across the state.

Technology can facilitate implementation of such a competency-based approach to 

education. At the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School in Chicago, teachers use 

a specially designed database to keep track of the proficiency ratings each student has 

earned. Proficiency ratings are updated daily so that everyone—the student, the parent, 

teachers, and the school leader—knows exactly where each student stands relative to the 

competencies required for graduation. (See sidebar on competency-based assessment at 

the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School.)

Making a School “Not School”

The kind of radical rethinking of the nature of schooling 

that technology makes possible is illustrated by 

Westwood Cyber School, located just outside Detroit, 

Mich. Launched two years ago as a dropout recovery 

and prevention program, the Cyber School is the first 

location in the country to implement a British model 

known as the “Not School.” 

Like its British prototype, Westwood Cyber does not 

have traditional classrooms, academic departments, 

courses, or tests. Students use the Internet to work 

almost entirely from home, reporting to the brick-andmortar school building for just two hours a week to 

check in with school staff. The rest of the time they work 

interactively with school personnel and the school’s 

learning management system. Learning activities 

emphasize project-based learning and incorporate 

multiple subject areas. Student projects result in an 

individualized portfolio of creative work that is tailored 

to each student’s interests. Experts (state-certified 

teachers) grade students’ portfolio work products using 

grading rubrics closely tied to state learning standards 

to ensure that students achieve mastery of required 

material within their individualized learning programs.

The Westwood school district, which had been losing 

enrollment, has increased enrollment by 33 percent 

since starting the Cyber School. The school itself has 

retained 90 percent of its students. 
70 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Another way technology can support the reorganization 

of teaching and learning is by enabling more flexible 

student-centered scheduling. At the Huyton Arts and 

Sports Centre for Learning, a secondary school in the 

United Kingdom, for example, learning activities are 

selected and scheduled to fit individual students’ needs 

rather than traditional academic periods and lockstep 

curriculum pacing. 

Extending Learning Time

Another strategy for rethinking how teaching and learning 

are organized involves extending the learning day, week, 

or year. American students spend significantly less time 

in the classroom than students in many other countries, 

and students—especially low-income students—show 

a marked drop in their mathematics and reading 

proficiencies over the summer break. President Obama 

and other policymakers have questioned the logic of 

maintaining a three-month summer hiatus originally 

instituted so that students could provide needed farm 

labor during the critical summer months.

Since 2006, Massachusetts has had an Expanded 

Learning Time Initiative under which schools in lower 

income districts are adding 300 or more instructional 

hours to the school year. A number of charter school 

networks share the belief that extending learning time is 

key to preparing students from low-income communities 

for college, and they are instituting longer school days 

and weeks. Yes Prep schools, for example, run from 

7:30 in the morning until 4:30 each day with additional 

sessions every other Saturday. Yes Prep educators also 

support extending learning time by giving students their 

cell phone numbers so that students can call them during 

the evening to ask questions about homework.

As we seek ways to extend learning time, in addition 

to considering the amount of time students spend in 

school, we should also look at whether we can provide 

engaging and powerful learning experiences through 

other means. For example, we know that students’ lives 

outside school are filled with technology that gives them 

24/7 mobile access to information and resources and 

allows them to participate in online social networks and 

Competency-based Assessment at Young Women’s 

Leadership Charter School

In 2002, the Young Women’s Leadership Charter School 

(YWLCS) in Chicago instituted a radically new system 

for awarding course credit that is helping its students 

master course material, graduate from high school, and 

enroll in higher education at rates far exceeding those 

of demographically similar schools. A nonselective 

public school that serves primarily low-income minority 

students, YWLCS graduated 79 percent of its students 

in 2005, a figure 1.5 times higher than Chicago Public 

Schools’ overall 52 percent graduation rate that year.

School leaders have implemented a system for student 

assessment that moves away from tying credit to seat 

time. Instead, the school recognizes the continuous 

nature of student learning by awarding credit for specific 

competencies demonstrated at any point in a student’s 

high school career.

With a commercial partner, the school developed a data 

system designed specifically for use in a competencybased program. Throughout the year, YWLCS teachers 

evaluate student work and go to the system to assign 

each student a proficiency rating of High Performance, 

Proficient, or Not Yet Proficient for each key learning 

objective associated with the class. Students earn credit 

for classes in which they demonstrate proficiency on at 

least 70 percent of academic course outcomes.

The data system uses the proficiency data that teachers 

enter to create a dynamic record of each student’s 

progress that is updated daily and is accessible to 

teachers, parents, and students. Teachers can use the 

data system to target their instruction and remediation 

strategies for current students. In addition, students can 

use their own data to identify the courses they are not 

yet proficient in and work with their teachers to develop 

a plan for mastering unmet standards. 

If students demonstrate a competency after the end 

of the year has passed, future teachers can update 

students’ proficiency ratings in the data system to reflect 

what they have learned since the conclusion of a course. 

YWLCS compiles information from the data system 

into formal reports of student achievement, converting 

proficiency ratings into grade point average equivalents, 

to ensure that its graduates’ competencies are 

recognized by colleges, sources of financial aid, 

and other external parties. This competency-based 

approach is producing results: 90 percent of YWLCS 

students who graduated in 2009 were accepted to 

college or another postsecondary option. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 71

communities where people from all over the world share ideas, collaborate, and learn new 

things. Our education system should leverage students’ interest in technology and the time 

they currently spend learning informally outside the regular school hours to extend learning 

time in a way that motivates them even more.

One way to do that is through online learning, which allows schools to extend learning time by 

providing students with learning on demand anytime and anywhere, dramatically expanding 

educational opportunities without increasing time spent in school. With online learning, 

students can gain access to resources regardless of time of day, geography, or ability; receive 

personalized instruction from educators and experts anywhere in the world; and learn at their 

own pace and in ways tailored to their own styles and interests. Moreover, it enables our 

education system to leverage the talents and expertise of our best educators by making their 

knowledge and skills available to many more learners.

In addition, all these benefits can be realized through online learning at considerably less cost 

than providing students with additional in-person, classroom-based instruction by extending the 

school day or year.

As schools implement online learning, they should ensure that students’ learning 

experiences address the full range of expertise and competencies as reflected in standards 

and use meaningful assessments of the target competencies. For example, online 

collaborative environments or virtual worlds can facilitate the participatory nature of learning 

in addition to providing opportunities for content knowledge. State education agencies can 

provide leadership and technical assistance in this area, and educators also should look to 

their peers for best practices.

Removing Barriers to Secondary and 

Postsecondary Graduation

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. There is no way to achieve this 

target unless we can dramatically reduce the number of students who leave high school 

without getting a diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education. A 

complex set of personal and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave school 

or to disengage from learning, and no one strategy will prevent every separation from the 

education system.

Many students report that dropping out of school is a gradual process of disengagement that 

can be reversed with more relevant learning experiences and social and emotional interactions 

at school (Bridgeland, Dilulio, and Morrison 2006; Rumberger and Lim 2008). Technologybased programs and resources, including online learning, tutoring and mentoring, and social 

networks and participatory communities within and across educational institutions, can provide 

both. They also can give students guidance and information about their own learning progress 

and opportunities for the future. Specifically, students need to know what is expected of them 
72 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

as they move from middle school to high school and from high 

school to postsecondary education. Other practices supported 

with technology also can help address the problem.

First, there is the issue of identifying students’ difficulties 

early and providing extra support where needed. Support 

should start as early as possible, before children enter 

school, and should become intensified for those students 

who need it as they move through school. From the point 

of high school entry, every student could have a learning 

dashboard indicating whether or not his or her course 

enrollments and performance are on track for high school 

graduation and qualification for college entry. Such a system 

could make “smart” suggestions about options for fulfilling 

requirements, including the possibility of earning credits for 

courses taken during the summer, in alternative programs, at 

community colleges, or online.

When prevention fails and students quit attending school 

for a period of time, we must have multiple options for 

reconnecting them with the education system. Such students 

often become discouraged about their prospects for being 

able to earn the credits needed for graduation or have an 

aversion to returning to a school where they will be in classes 

with younger students rather than their original cohort. (See 

sidebar on adult learning resources in the Learning chapter.)

Increasingly, secondary students are taking courses online to 

earn credit for courses they initially failed or missed because 

they were not attending school. Such courses can be taken 

under any number of arrangements—independently in the 

evening, during summer sessions, in a night school, or during 

the school day with a member of the teaching staff, who 

provides encouragement and support as the student works 

with the online material.

In Walled Lake Consolidated School District in Michigan, 

for example, students can recover course credits through 

online summer school courses. The summer credit recovery 

program has worked so well that the district is developing 

a plan that will allow students to stay in high school while 

working by attending class in their brick-and-mortar school 

for four hours a day and taking their other two required 

courses online at their convenience. (See sidebar on 

expanding learning opportunities through blended learning.)

Expanding Opportunities Through 

Blended Learning

Walled Lake Consolidated School District in 

Oakland County, Mich., is turning to online learning 

to offer students a wider range of educational 

opportunities very cost-effectively.

In 2008, Walled Lake began offering its summer 

school credit recovery classes online. The district 

enlisted the help of its teachers to review various 

offerings and selected an online learning provider 

whose curriculum was comparable to that of district 

courses. Walled Lake enrolled 300 students in 

these online courses and also provided face-toface meetings with district teachers twice a week 

to help students with course material and track 

their progress. This blended strategy lowered the 

district’s costs of providing each summer school 

course by nearly 50 percent, reducing the cost per 

student from $194 to about $102.

Inspired by this success and students’ positive 

experiences with online learning, Walled Lake 

plans to begin allowing high school students to 

take both online and classroom-based courses 

during the school year. Students will continue to 

attend school at least four hours per day, but they 

may elect to enroll in up to two online courses 

each semester. As with its summer school courses, 

Walled Lake students’ online learning experiences 

will be supported by biweekly interactions with local 

teachers. This blended learning arrangement will 

accommodate students’ diverse learning styles 

and desire to work before or after school in 

ways that were not possible with full-time 

conventional instruction.

Walled Lake is also partnering with a local 

community college to make postsecondary 

education a reality for more of its high school 

students. Under the experimental agreement, 

11th- and 12th-grade students may choose to enroll 

concurrently in high school and college, completing 

some college coursework online and some on the 

college campus, facilitated by the flexible scheduling 

system described above. The district will continue to 

claim full-time-equivalent funding for each student 

and will pay students’ tuition for courses taken at the 

community college during their high school years. 

This arrangement will enable Walled Lake students 

to complete an associate degree just one year after 

high school graduation.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 73

Another example is provided by Tarrant High School in Alabama. Tarrant students are 

taking advantage of ACCESS (Alabama Connecting Classrooms, Educators, & Students 

Statewide), the state’s online learning program, to take courses before or after school or 

in the summer in order to recover credits for courses they failed or to graduate earlier. The 

school’s principal believes that ACCESS has been a significant factor in raising her school’s 

graduation rate from 66 percent in 2006 to 80 percent in 2008. Research conducted in the 

state of Washington has concluded similarly that online credit recovery can help increase 

graduation rates (Baker et al. 2006).

Reaching Our Goal

5.0 Productivity:

Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage 

of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of 

time, money, and staff.

To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:

5.1 Develop and adopt a common definition of productivity in education and more relevant 

and meaningful measures of outcomes, along with improved policies and technologies for 

managing costs, including those for procurement.

Education has not incorporated many of the practices other sectors regularly use to 

measure outcomes, manage costs, and improve productivity, a number of which are 

enabled or enhanced by technology. As other sectors have learned, we are unlikely to 

improve outcomes and productivity until we define and start measuring them. This starts 

with identifying what we seek to measure. It also requires identifying costs associated with 

components of our education system and with individual resources and activities so that the 

ratio of outcomes to costs can be tracked over time.

5.2 Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit leveraging technology 

to improve learning, starting with our current practice of organizing student and educator 

learning around seat time instead of the demonstration of competencies.

To realize the full potential of technology for improving performance and increasing 

productivity, we must remove the process and structural barriers to broad adoption. The 

education system must work to identify and rethink basic assumptions of the education 

system. Some of these include measurement of educational attainment through seat time, 

organization of students into age-determined groups, the structure of separate academic 

disciplines, the organization of learning into classes of roughly equal size, and the use of 

time blocks.
74 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

5.3 Develop useful metrics for the educational use of technology in states and districts.

Current data on the use of educational and information technology in our system consist 

of records of purchases and numbers of computers and Internet connections. Very 

little information on how technology is actually used to support teaching, learning, and 

assessment is collected and communicated systematically. Only by shifting our focus 

to collecting data on how and when technology is used will we be able to determine the 

difference it makes and use that knowledge to improve outcomes and the productivity of our 

education system.

5.4 Design, implement, and evaluate technology-powered programs and interventions to 

ensure that students progress seamlessly through our P–16 education system and emerge 

prepared for college and careers.

The United States has a long way to go if we are to see every student complete at least a 

year of higher education or postsecondary career training. Achieving this target will require 

dramatically reducing the number of students who leave high school without getting a 

diploma and/or who are unprepared for postsecondary education. A complex set of personal 

and academic factors underlie students’ decision to leave school or to disengage from 

learning, and no one strategy will prevent every separation from the education system. 

Collaboration between P–12 and higher education institutions and practices supported with 

technology are crucial to addressing the problem.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 75

R&D: Innovate and Scale

The model for learning presented in this plan assumes that we will develop, adopt, and 

ensure equitable access to a technology-based education system that provides effective 

learning experiences, assessments, and teaching and a comprehensive infrastructure for 

learning to support both formal education and all other aspects of learning. It also assumes 

we will incorporate many of the practices other sectors regularly use to improve productivity 

and manage costs and will leverage technology to enable or enhance them.

In the past, we have relied on public education entities and private companies to develop 

technology resources and tools for learning. In both these sectors, however, incentives are 

provided for developing discrete products and services without regard for how they work 

as parts of a system or for research on their effectiveness. Public education entities can 

mandate use of their products and services. Commercial enterprises gain market share 

through compelling value propositions, effective marketing, and broad distribution channels. 

But research on the effectiveness of learning technology typically comes after products 

and services have been deployed—when it is too late to result in major improvements—if it 

comes at all.

If we are to achieve our goal of leading the world in education, we must be leaders in the 

design and implementation of a more effective education system. To that end, this plan calls 

for a new approach to R&D for education that focuses on four areas:

 • Continuing to provide competitive grants for scaling up innovative and evidence-based 

practices through the Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund (i3).

The i3 program provides funding for grants that are awarded to schools and nonprofit 

organizations for scaling innovations that improve K–12 education. There is a particular focus on 

the identification of evidence and increasing the level of understanding of what strategies and 

innovations work for what students under what circumstances.

 • Transferring existing and emerging technology innovations from such sectors as 

consumer, business, and entertainment into education.

The Department of Education will promote the inclusion of innovative thinkers in consumer, 

business, and entertainment technology in federally funded convenings and collaborations 

with educational technology specialists. 

 • Supporting and sustaining the education R&D that is currently happening at the 

National Science Foundation, especially through its cyberlearning initiatives.
76 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

In June 2008, the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning published Fostering Learning in the 

Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge, a comprehensive report on 

the role technology can and should play in STEM learning. For 2011, the NSF has established 

a new multidisciplinary research program to fully capture the transformative potential of 

advanced learning technologies across the education system. The Cyberlearning Transforming 

Education (CTE) program’s investments will focus on anytime, anywhere learning, 

personalized learning, and using technology to advance our fundamental knowledge of how 

technology and learning sciences can come together in learning and assessment.

 • Creating a new organization with the mission of serving the public good through R&D 

at the intersection of learning sciences, technology, and education (Pea and 

Lazowska 2003).

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (P.L. 110-315), passed in August 2008, authorizes 

establishment of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital 

Technologies (also called the Digital Promise). The center is authorized as a 501(c)3 that 

would be able to accept contributions from the public and private sectors to support the R&D 

needed to transform learning in America. 

The National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies would 

support research at scale, facilitating the participation of educators, schools, and districts 

as partners in design and research. It would also promote transparency and collaboration, 

encouraging multiple researchers to work with the same data and interoperable software 

components and services. Its unique charter is to identify the key research and development 

challenges in the education field and coordinate the best combination of expertise 

for addressing them. These characteristics, along with an emphasis on public-private 

collaboration, distinguish the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital 

Technologies from existing centers that help state and local education entities identify and 

implement established best practices in learning technology. The center’s work would also be 

distinct from field-initiated research on the effectiveness of technology-based interventions. 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers an example of how 

such a research agency can promote work that builds basic understanding and addresses 

practical problems. DARPA sponsors high-risk/high-gain research on behalf of Department 

of Defense agencies, but it is managed and staffed by individuals from both industry and 

academia who are experts in the relevant research areas. DARPA program officers are given 

considerable discretion, both in defining the research agenda and making decisions about 

the funding and structuring of research. 

In a similar manner, the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and 

Digital Technologies should identify key emerging trends and priorities and recruit and 

bring together the best minds and organizations to collaborate on high-risk/high-gain 

education R&D projects. It should aim for radical, orders-of-magnitude improvements by 

envisioning the impact of innovations and then working backward to identify the fundamental 

breakthroughs required to make them possible.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 77

Through the funding of rapid and iterative cycles of design and trial implementation in 

educational settings, the national center can demonstrate the feasibility and early-stage 

potential of innovative tools, content, and pedagogies that leverage knowledge, information, 

and technology advances at the cutting edge.

The center should also ensure that teams working on each individual project share 

developments, progress, best practices, and outcomes with each other to take advantage of 

key findings and economies of scale and to ensure integration and interoperability between 

projects when desirable. The national center will need to work closely with representatives 

of private industry to develop clear memoranda of understanding concerning the terms for 

precompetitive fundamental research. 

The national research center can focus on grand challenge problems in education research 

and development. “Grand challenge problems” are important problems that require 

establishing a community of scientists and researchers to work toward their solution. 

American computer science was advanced by a grand challenge problems strategy when 

its research community articulated a set of science and social problems whose solutions 

required a thousand-fold increase in the power and speed of supercomputers and their 

supporting networks, storage systems, and software. Since that time, grand challenge 

problems have been used to catalyze advances in genetics (the Human Genome Project), 

environmental science, and world health.

To qualify as grand challenge problems suitable for this organization, research problems 

should be

 • Understandable and significant, with a clearly stated compelling case for contributing to 

long-term benefits for society

 • Challenging, timely, and achievable with concerted, coordinated efforts

 • Clearly useful in terms of impact and scale, if solved, with long-term benefits for many 

people and international in scope

 • Measurable and incremental, with interim milestones that produce useful benefits as 

they are reached.

This kind of grand challenge problem strategy has driven innovation and knowledge building 

in science, engineering, and mathematics. The time is right to undertake it to improve our 

education system (Pea 2007).

The following grand challenge problems illustrate the kinds of ambitious R&D efforts this 

organization could lead. Notably, although each of these problems is a grand challenge in 

its own right, they all combine to form the ultimate grand challenge problem in education: 

establishing an integrated, end-to-end real-time system for managing learning outcomes and 

costs across our entire education system at all levels.
78 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

1.0: Design and validate an integrated system that provides real-time access to learning 

experiences tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that optimize learning for all 

learners and that incorporates self-improving features that enable it to become increasingly 

effective through interaction with learners.

Today, we have examples of systems that can recommend learning resources a person might 

like, learning materials with embedded tutoring functions, software that can provide UDL 

supports for any technology-based learning materials, and learning management systems 

that move individuals through sets of learning materials and keep track of their progress and 

activity. What we do not have is an integrated system that can perform all these functions 

dynamically while optimizing engagement and learning for all learners. Such an integrated 

system is essential for implementing the individualized, differentiated, and personalized 

learning called for in this plan. Specifically, the integrated system should be able to

 • Discover appropriate learning resources;

 • Configure the resources with forms of representation and expression that are 

appropriate for the learner’s age, language, reading ability, and prior knowledge; and

 • Select appropriate paths and scaffolds for moving the learner through the learning 

resources with the ideal level of challenge and support.

As part of the validation of this system, we need to examine how much leverage is gained 

by giving learners control over the pace of their learning and whether certain knowledge 

domains or competencies require educators to retain that control. We also need to better 

understand where and when we can substitute learner judgment, online peer interactivity and 

coaching, and technological advances, such as smart tutors and avatars for the educator-led 

classroom model.

2.0: Design and validate an integrated system for designing and implementing valid, 

reliable, and cost-effective assessments of complex aspects of 21st-century expertise and 

competencies across academic disciplines.

The multiple-choice tests used in nearly all large-scale assessment programs fail to meet 

the challenge of capturing some of the most important aspects of 21st-century expertise and 

competencies. Past attempts to measure these areas have been expensive and of limited 

reliability. Technology offers new options for addressing the multiple components of this 

challenge. For example, technology can support

 • Systematic analysis of the claims about student competence (including competence 

with respect to complex aspects of inquiry, reasoning, design, and communication) 

intended by academic standards and the kinds of evidence needed to judge whether or 

not a student has each of those aspects of competence;

 • Specifying assessment tasks and situations that would provide the desired evidence; 

 • Administering complex assessment tasks capable of capturing complex aspects of 

21st-century expertise through the use of technology; and
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 79

 • Developing and applying rules and statistical models for generating reliable inferences 

about the learner’s competencies based on performance on the assessment tasks.

Promising R&D applying technology to each of these components of the grand challenge 

is ongoing, but the pieces have yet to be integrated into a single system that is applicable 

across content domains and that is cost-effective to implement. In addition to system 

development, solving this grand challenge problem will require studies to demonstrate the 

validity of the new assessments and their usefulness for both making formative instructional 

decisions to improve learning and summative evaluative decisions for purposes of 

establishing competency and accountability. 

3.0: Design and validate an integrated approach for capturing, aggregating, mining, and 

sharing content, student-learning, and financial data cost-effectively for multiple purposes 

across many learning platforms and data systems in near real time.

To meet the education and productivity goals articulated in this plan, learners and their 

parents, educators, school and district leaders, and state and federal policymakers must 

use timely information about student-learning and financial data to inform their decisions. 

Today, these data are maintained in a variety of digital formats in multiple systems at local 

and state levels. As the processes of learning, assessment, and financial management and 

accounting move into the digital realm, education data systems and education research 

have become exceedingly complex in terms of scale, heterogeneity, and requirements for 

privacy. Still, we must create systems that capture, curate, maintain, and analyze education 

and financial data in all scales and shapes, in near real time, from all areas where learning 

occurs: school, home, and community. This must be done in a manner fully consistent with 

privacy regulations.

Although underlying technologies for exchanging data sets exist, education does not yet 

have the kind of integrated Web-enabled data-sharing system that has been developed for 

the health-care, telecommunications, and financial sectors. Such a system must be capable 

of dealing with both fine-grained data derived from specific interactions with a learning 

system and global measures built up from that data, and it must be able to collect, back up, 

archive, and secure data coming from many different systems throughout a state. It must 

also be capable of integrating the financial data essential for managing costs. Addressing 

this challenge will require:

 • A data format to represent learning and financial data;

 • A service to discover and exchange data;

 • A data security standard for the service;

 • A specification, test suite, and reference implementation of the service to ensure vendor 

compliance; and

 • Best practices to guide the deployment of such services.
80 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

4.0: Identify and validate design principles for efficient and effective online learning systems 

and combined online and offline learning systems that produce content expertise and 

competencies equal to or better than those produced by the best conventional instruction in 

half the time at half the cost.

Research labs and commercial entities are hard at work developing online learning systems 

and combined online and offline learning systems that support the development of expertise 

within and across academic disciplines. Although we have isolated examples of systems 

producing improved learning outcomes in half the time, we have yet to see this kind of 

outcome achieved within the K–12 system and particularly in those schools where students 

need help the most. In addition, in both K–12 and higher education, we have yet to see 

highly effective systems that can be brought to scale.

We have evidence that learning can be accelerated through online tutoring, restructuring 

curricula, and by providing guiding feedback for improvement throughout the learning 

process. Further, we know that the current “packages” of learning that define semester and 

yearlong courses are generally arbitrary and a result of long-standing tradition rather than of 

careful studies. Achieving twice the content expertise and competencies in half the time at 

half the cost through online learning systems seems very possible, but it will require careful 

design, development, and testing. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 81

References

Ancess, J. 2000. The reciprocal influence of teacher learning, teaching practice, school 

restructuring, and student learning outcomes. Teachers College Record 102 (3): 

590–619.

Baker, D. B., J. T. Fouts, C. A. Gratama, J. N. Clay, and S. G. Scott. 2006. Digital Learning 

Commons: High school seniors’ online course taking patterns in Washington State. 

Seattle: Fouts and Associates. http://www.learningcommons.org.

Balfanz, R., and N. Legters. 2004. Locating the dropout crisis: Which high schools produce 

the nation’s dropouts? Where are they located? Who attends them? Baltimore: 

Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At-Risk, Johns Hopkins 

University. http://www.csos.jhu.edu/crespar/techReports/Report70.pdf.

Banks, J., K. Au, A. Ball, P. Bell, E. Gordon, K. Gutiérrez, S. Heath, C. Lee, Y. Lee, J. Mahiri, 

N Nasir, G. Valdés, and M. Zhou. 2006. Learning in and out of school in diverse 

environments: Life-long, life-wide, life-deep. Seattle: NSF LIFE Center and 

University of Washington Center for Multicultural Education.

Barron, B. 2006. Interest and self-sustained learning as catalysts of development: A learning 

ecology perspective. Human Development 49 (4): 153–224.

Bennett, R. E., H. Persky, A. Weiss, and F. Jenkins. 2007. Problem solving in technology 

rich environments: A report from the NAEP Technology-based Assessment Project, 

Research and Development Series (NCES 2007-466). U.S. Department of 

Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC.

Berry, A. M., and S. E. Wintle. 2009. Using laptops to facilitate middle school science learning: 

The results of hard fun. Gorham, ME: Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

Black, P., and D. Wiliam. 1998. Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom 

assessment. London: King’s College.

Black, S. E., and L. M. Lynch. 2003. The new economy and the organization of work. In The 

handbook of the new economy, ed. D.C. Jones. New York: Academic Press.

Borko, H., V. Mayfield, S. Marion, R. Flexer, and K. Cumbo. 1997. Teachers’ developing 

ideas and practices about mathematics performance assessment: Successes, 

stumbling blocks, and implications for professional development. Teaching and 

Teacher Education 13 (3): 259–278.

Bound, J., M. Lovenheim, and S. Turner. 2009. Why have college completion rates 

declined? An analysis of changing student preparation and collegiate resources. 

Working Paper 15566, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. 
82 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Bransford, J. D., B. Barron, R. Pea, A. Meltzoff, P. Kuhl, P. Bell, R. Stevens, D. Schwartz, N. 

Vye, B. Reeves, J. Roschelle, and N. Sabelli. 2006. Foundations and opportunities 

for an interdisciplinary science of learning. In Cambridge handbook of the learning 

sciences, ed. K. Sawyer, 19–34. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bridgeland, J., J. Dilulio, and K. Morrison. 2006 (March). The silent epidemic: Perspectives 

of high school dropouts. Washington, DC: Civic Enterprises, LLC, and Peter D. Hart 

Research Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

http://www.civicenterprises.net/pdfs/thesilentepidemic3-06.pdf.

Brown, J. S., and R. P. Adler. 2008. Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 

2.0. Educause Review: 17–32.

Brown, W. E., M. Lovett, D. M. Bajzek, and J. M. Burnette. 2006. Improving the feedback cycle 

to improve learning in introductory biology: Using the Digital Dashboard. In 

Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, 

Healthcare, and Higher Education, ed. G. Richards, 1030–1035. 

Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Brynjolfsson, E., and L. M. Hitt. 1998. Beyond the productivity paradox: Computers are the 

catalyst for bigger changes. Communications of the ACM 41 (8): 49-55.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2007. Table 1: The 30 fastest growing occupations covered in the 

2008–2009 Occupational Outlook Handbook.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ooh.t01.htm.

Childress, S. M., D. P. Doyle, and D. A. Thomas. 2009. Leading for equity: The pursuit of 

excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools. Cambridge: Harvard Education 

Press.

Collins, A., and R. Halverson. 2009. Rethinking education in the age of technology: The 

digital revolution and schooling in America. New York: Teachers College Press.

CoSN (Consortium for School Networking). 2009. Mastering the moment: A guide to 

technology leadership in the economic crisis.

http://www.cosn.org/Initiatives/ MasteringtheMoment/MasteringtheMomentHome/

tabid/4967/Default.aspx.

Campuzano, L., M. Dynarski, R. Agodini, and K. Rall. 2009. Effectiveness of reading and 

mathematics software products: Findings from two student cohorts (NCEE 

2009-4041). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Darling-Hammond, L. 2010. The flat world and education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Dede, C. 2009. Immersive interfaces for engagement and learning. Science 323: 66–69.

Dieterle, E. 2009. Neomillennial learning styles and River City. Children, Youth and 

Environments 19 (1): 245–278.

Dohm, A., and L. Shniper. 2007. Occupational employment projections to 2016. Monthly 

Labor Review. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Duncan, A. 2010 (July). The quiet revolution: Secretary Arne Duncan’s remarks at the 

National Press Club, Washington DC, 

http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/quiet-revolution-secretary-arne-duncansremarks-national-press-club.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 83

Federal Communications Commission. 2009. Recovery Act Broadband Initiatives.

 http://www.fcc.gov/recovery/broadband.

Feng, M., N. T. Heffernan, and K. R. Koedinger. 2009. Addressing the assessment challenge 

in an online system that tutors as it assesses. User Modeling and User-Adapted 

Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) 19 (3): 243–266.

Fisch, S. M. 2004. Children’s learning from educational television: Sesame Street and 

Beyond. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Fishman, B. 2007. Fostering community knowledge sharing using ubiquitous records of 

practice. In Video research in the learning sciences, ed. R. Goldman, R. D. Pea, B. 

Barron, and S. J. Derry, 495–506. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Gee, J. P. 2004. Situated language and learning. New York: Routledge.

Graham, S. 2009. Students in rural schools have limited access to advanced mathematics 

courses. Durham, NH: Carsey Institute, University of New Hampshire.

Gray, L., and L. Lewis. 2009. Educational technology in public school districts: Fall 2008

(NCES 2010-003). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 

Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. 

Gomez, L. M., M. G. Sherin, J. Griesdorn, and L. Finn. 2008. Creating social relationships: 

The role of technology in preservice teacher preparation. Journal of Teacher 

Education 59 (2): 117–131.

Hodapp, T., J. Hehn, and W. Hein. 2009. Preparing high-school physics teachers. Physics 

Today (February): 40–45.

Ingersoll, R. M., and T. M. Smith. 2003. The wrong solution to the teacher shortage. 

Educational Leadership 60 (8): 30–33.

Ito, M. 2009. Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with 

new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Jenkins, H. 2009. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for 

the 21st century. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Johnson, L., A. Levine, and R. Smith. 2009. The 2009 horizon report. Austin, TX: The New 

Media Consortium.

Johnson, L., A. Levine, R. Smith, and S. Stone. 2010. The 2010 horizon report. Austin, TX: 

The New Media Consortium.

Kaiser Family Foundation. 2009. Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds.

http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf.

Kay, R. J. 2006. Evaluating strategies used to incorporate technology into preservice 

education: A review of the literature. Journal of Research on Technology in 

Education 38 (4): 383–408.

Kubitskey, B. 2006. Extended professional development for systemic curriculum reform.

Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Kulik, J. A. 2003. Effects of using instructional technology in elementary and secondary 

schools: What controlled evaluation studies say. Arlington, VA: SRI International. 

http://www.sri.com/policy/csted/reports/sandt/it/Kulik_ITinK-12_Main_Report.pdf.
84 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Ladson-Billings, G. 2009. The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African 

American children. San Francisco: Wiley.

LeDoux, J. 2000. Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience 23:155–184.

Leu, D. J., C. K. Kinzer, J. L. Coiro, and D. W. Cammack. 2004. Toward a theory of new 

literacies emerging from the Internet and other information and communication 

technologies. In Theoretical models and processes of reading, 5th ed., 1570–1613. 

Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Lieberman, A., and D. Pointer Mace. 2010. Making practice public: Teacher learning in the 

21st century. Journal of Teacher Education 6 (1): 77–88.

Looi, C. K., W. Chen, and F-K. Ng. 2010. Collaborative activities enabled by GroupScribbles 

(GS): An exploratory study of learning effectiveness. Computers and Education 54 

(1): 14–26.

Lovett, M., O. Meyer, and C. Thille. 2008. Open Learning Initiative: Testing the accelerated 

learning hypothesis in statistics. Journal of Interactive Media in Education.

http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/14/jime-2008-14.html

Maxwell, E. 2009. Personal communication to technical working group, Aug. 9, 2009.

Mazur, E. 1997. Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

McKinsey and Company. 2009. The economic impact of the achievement gap in America’s 

schools. New York: McKinsey and Company, Social Sector Office.

Minstrell, J., and P. Kraus. 2005. Guided inquiry in the science classroom. In How people 

learn: History, mathematics, and science in the classroom, ed. M. S. Donovan and 

J. D. Bransford, 475–12. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2003. Remedial education at 

degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2000. Washington, DC: 

U.S. Department of Education.

———. 2005. 2004 trends in academic progress: Three decades of student performance. 

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. 

http://nces.ed.gov/ nationsreportcard/pdf/main2005/2005464.pdf.

———. 2007. Table 192. College enrollment and enrollment rates of recent high school 

completers, by race/ethnicity: 1960 through 2006. In Digest of education statistics: 

2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. 

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2008022.

———. 2008. Table 181. Total and current expenditures per pupil in public elementary and 

secondary schools: Selected years, 1919–20 through 2005–06. In Digest of 

educational statistics: 2008. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. 

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009020.

———. 2009. Basic reading skills and the literacy of America’s least literate adults: Results 

from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) supplemental 

studies. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/getpubcats.asp?sid=032#.

National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. 2008. Measuring up 2008: The 

national report card on higher education. San Jose, CA: National Center for Public 

Policy and Higher Education. http://measuringup2008.highereducation.org.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 85

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Baldrige National Quality Program. 

2001. Chugach application summary.

http://www.baldrige.nist.gov/PDF_files/ Chugach_Application_Summary.pdf.

National Research Council. 2000. How people learn: Mind, brain, experience, and school. 

Eds. J. D. Bransford, A. Brown, and R. Cocking. Washington, DC: National 

Academies Press.

———. 2003. Planning for two transformations in education and learning technology: Report 

of a workshop. Eds. R. D. Pea, W. A. Wulf, S. W. Elliot, and M. Darling. 

Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

———. 2007. Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in grades K–8. Eds. 

R. A. Duschl, H. A. Schweingruber, and A. W. Shouse. Washington DC: National 

Academies Press.

———. 2009. Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. Eds. 

P. Bell, B. Lewenstein, A. W. Shouse, and M. A. Feder. Washington, DC: National 

Academies Press.

National Science Board. 2010. Science and engineering indicators 2010. Arlington, VA: 

National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10. 

National Science Foundation. 2008a. Beyond being there: A blueprint for advancing the 

design, development, and evaluation of virtual organizations. Final report from 

Workshops on Building Virtual Organizations. Arlington, VA: NSF. 

———. 2008b. Fostering learning in the networked world: The cyberlearning opportunity 

and challenge. Report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning. Arlington, VA: NSF.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2008. 21st century 

learning: Research, innovation and policy directions from recent OECD analyses. 

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/39/8/40554299.pdf.

———. 2009a. Education at a glance 2009: OECD indicators. Paris: OECD.

———. 2009b. New millennium learners in higher education: Evidence and policy 

implications. http://www.nml-conference.be/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/NML-inHigher-Education.pdf.

———. 2010. Education at a glance 2010: OECD indicators. Paris: OECD.

Pea, R. 2007 (July). A time for collective intelligence and action: Grand challenge problems 

for cyberlearning. Keynote address for the National Science Foundation 

Cyberinfrastructure-TEAM Workshop.

Pea, R., and E. Lazowska. 2003. A vision for LENS centers: Learning expeditions in 

networked systems for 21st century learning. In Planning for two transformations in 

education and learning technology. Report of the Committee on Improving 

Learning with Information Technology. Eds. R. Pea, W. Wulf, S. W. Elliot, and M. 

Darling. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Pellegrino, J. W., N. Chudowsky, and R. Glaser, eds. 2001. Knowing what students know: 

The science and design of educational assessment. Washington, DC: National 

Academies Press.
86 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Penuel, W. R., S. Pasnik, L. Bates, E. Townsend, L. P. Gallagher, C. Llorente, and N. 

Hupert. 2009. Preschool teachers can use a media-rich curriculum to prepare 

low-income children for school success: Results of a randomized controlled trial. 

Newton, MA: Education Development Center and SRI International.

Perie, M., S. Marion, and B. Gong. 2009. Moving towards a comprehensive assessment 

system: A framework for considering interim assessments. Educational 

Measurement: Issues and Practice 28 (3): 5–13.

Pew Internet and American Life Project. 2007. Information searches that solve problems. 

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Pew_UI_LibrariesReport.pdf.

President Barack Obama. 2009 (March). Remarks by the president to the Hispanic 

Chamber of Commerce on a complete and competitive American education, 

Washington, DC. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-thePresident-to-the-United-States-Hispanic-Chamber-of-Commerce.

Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Consortium. 2008. Effects of preschool 

curriculum programs on school readiness (NCER 2008-2009). Washington, DC: 

Institute of Education Sciences.

Re-Inventing Schools Coalition. n.d. http://www.reinventingschools.org.

Richardson, V., and R. S. Kile. 1999. Learning from videocases. In Who learns what from 

cases and how? The research base for teaching and learning with cases, ed. M. A. 

Lundeberg, B. B. Levin, and H. L. Harrington, 121–136. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Riel, M. 1992. A functional analysis of educational telecomputing: A case study of learning 

circles. Interactive Learning Environments 2 (1): 15–29.

Rose, D. H., and A. Meyer. 2002. Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal Design for 

Learning. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Rumberger, R., and S. A. Lim. 2008. Why do students drop out of school? A review of 25 

years of research. Santa Barbara, CA: California Dropout Research Project. 

http://cdrp.ucsb.edu/dropouts/pubs_reports.htm#15.

Shedd, J. M. 2003. History of the student credit hour. New Directions for Higher Education 122.

Silvernail, D. L., and P. J. Bluffington. 2009. Improving mathematics performance using 

laptop technology: The importance of professional development for success. 

Gorham, ME: Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

Silvernail, D. L., and A. K. Gritter. 2007. Maine’s middle school laptop program: Creating 

better writers. Gorham, ME: Maine Education Policy Research Institute.

Smith, M. S. 2009. Opening education. Science 323 (89).

Squire, L. R. 2004 Memory systems of the brain: A brief history and current perspective. 

Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82:171–177.

Squire, L. R., C. E. L. Stark, and R. E. Clark. 2004. The medial temporal lobe. Annual 

Review of Neuroscience 27:279–306.

Stillwell, R. 2010. Public School Graduates and Dropouts From the Common Core of Data: 

School Year 2007–08 (NCES 2010-341). National Center for Education Statistics, 

Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC. 

http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2010341. 
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology 87

Strudler, N., and D. Hearrington. 2009. Quality support for ICT in schools. In International 

handbook of information technology in primary and secondary education, ed. J. 

Voogt and G. Knezek, 579–596. New York: Springer. 

Thakkar, R. R., M. M. Garrison, and D. A. Christakis. 2006. A systematic review for the effects 

of television viewing by infants and preschoolers, Pediatrics 118 (5): 2025–2031.

Trilling, B., and C. Fadel. 2009. 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. San 

Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Tucci, T. 2009. Prioritizing the nation’s dropout factories. Washington, DC: Alliance for 

Excellent Education. http://www.all4ed.org/files/PrioritizingDropoutFactories.pdf.

Tucker, B. 2009. Beyond the bubble: Technology and the future of educational assessment.

Washington, DC: Education Sector.

Universal Service Administrative Company. 2008. Overview of the schools and libraries 

program. http://www.universalservice.org/sl/about/overview-program.aspx.

U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. 2008. The Higher Education Opportunity Act of 

2008. 110th Cong. 103 U.S.C. § 42. 

U.S. Department of Education, Family Policy Compliance Office. 2010 (May 5). Family 

Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). 

http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. 

2010. Use of education data at the local level: From accountability to instructional 

improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Vedder, R. 2004. Going broke by degree: Why college costs too much. Washington, DC: 

AEI Press.

Vendlinski, T., and R. Stevens. 2002. Assessing student problem-solving skills with complex 

computer-based tasks. Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment 1 (3). 

http://www.jtla.org.

Villegas, A. M., and T. Lucas. 2002. Preparing culturally responsive teachers. Journal of 

Teacher Education 53 (1): 20–32.

Warschauer, M., and T. Matuchniak. 2010. New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing 

evidence of equity, access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education 

34:179–225.

Weiss, J. 2010 (April 17). U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top Assessment 

Competition. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-assessment/resources.html.

Wenger, E., N. White, and J. D. Smith. 2009. Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for 

communities. Portland, OR: CPsquare.

Zhang, T., R. J. Mislevy, G. Haertel, H. Javitz, E. Murray, and J. Gravel. 2010. A design 

pattern for a spelling assessment for students with disabilities. Technical Report #2. 

Menlo Park, CA: SRI International. http://padi-se.sri.com/publications.html.

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology A-1

Appendix A.

How This Plan Was Developed

The U.S. Department of Education initiated the development of Transforming American 

Education in spring 2009 to capitalize on the opportunities created by technological 

advancements and new research on learning that have emerged since the publication of 

the last national education technology plan in 2004. The Department’s goal was to create a 

vision for the strategic application of technology throughout the education system in support 

of student learning and achievement and consistent with the administration’s broader 

education and economic priorities.

In accordance with the White House’s Open Government Directive, public participation, 

transparency, and collaboration were key considerations in developing this plan. Web 

2.0 technology greatly accelerated the plan development process and enabled tens of 

thousands of individuals to learn about and contribute to it through webinars, online forums, 

and an interactive public website through which all interested parties could contribute 

resources, statements, and comments.

Plan development began with interviews with a dozen leaders across the Department of 

Education and at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy to build a deep 

understanding of policymakers’ priorities, goals, and insights into how to make the next 

national education technology plan most effective.

Outreach began with an extensive series of events built around the National Educational 

Computing Conference (NECC) in June 2009. The National Education Technology Plan 

development team led by SRI International conducted five focus groups with teachers, 

school administrators, and members of the Consortium on School Networking (CoSN) and 

the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). Fifty chief technology officers and 

chief information officers from school districts across the country participated in a forum on 

the new plan.

In addition, more than 300 leading educators and educational technology experts 

participated in the ISTE Leadership Symposium. Leadership Symposium participants drafted 

vision statements and action steps that became the basis for the initial Web-based outreach 

event that generated 263 public comments over a two-week period from June 29 to July 12, 

2009, on the National Education Technology Plan temporary website.
A-2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

The input gathered was presented to a technical working group of educators, researchers, 

and state and local policymakers who contributed an extraordinary range of expertise 

to the vision, research, and writing of Transforming American Education. The Technical 

Working Group convened in person at three two-day meetings to craft the plan’s vision and 

recommendations. In addition, technical working group members participated in discussions 

with guest experts during five two-hour webinars to incorporate additional expertise in critical 

issue areas for inclusion in the plan. 

A second version of the National Education Technology Plan website was launched on 

Aug. 29, 2009, to give the public a sense of the themes being considered by the technical 

working group and to allow a wide range of stakeholders to contribute their own resources 

for consideration. During the three-month input period, 22,876 individuals visited the site 

and contributed 572 reports, technology tool examples, case studies, and personal or group 

statements on the plan. The site’s 2,582 registered users included classroom teachers (235), 

students (48), school administrators (48), other school staff (117), district administrators (13), 

professors and other higher education staff (123), educational technology organization and 

nonprofit professionals (118), researchers (52), education consultants (116), technology tool 

and service providers (153), and state and national policymakers (2).

Hundreds of other stakeholders provided valuable input to the national education technology 

plan team throughout the summer and fall. The plan development team held webinar 

discussions with the members of educational technology organizations SETDA, CoSN, 

and NCTET, as well as with education philanthropy leaders. The plan development team 

presented at several education forums and conferences including iNACOL’s Virtual School 

Symposium, NCTET’s Policy Forum, the National Center for Technology Innovation 

Conference, and the Redefining Teacher Education for Digital Age Learners Invitational 

Summit. In addition, two technical working group members led a face-to-face open forum at 

the University of Michigan and a virtual public forum in Second Life.

Finally, to gather perspectives and insights from industry into ways to promote 

unprecedented innovation in education research and development, Assistant Deputy 

Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton and the plan development team 

convened top thinkers from 24 leading technology and educational content providers in a 

day-long summit in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 21, 2009.

A draft plan was released on March 5, 2010, and posted for online feedback on http://www.

ed.gov/technology. After two months of public comment, all input was reviewed by the plan 

development team and used to inform the final revision of Transforming American Education.

The Department extends its thanks to the thousands of individuals who shared their expertise 

in developing this vision for transforming the future of American education with technology.
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology B-1

Appendix B. Contributors

We extend our deepest thanks to the members of the National Education Technology Plan 

technical working group for their extensive contributions to the plan’s vision for the future of 

education:

Daniel E. Atkins, University of Michigan

John Bennett, Akron Public Schools

John Seely Brown, Deloitte Center for the Edge 

Aneesh Chopra, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Chris Dede, Harvard University

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Louis Gomez, University of Pittsburgh

Margaret Honey, New York Hall of Science

Yasmin Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

Maribeth Luftglass, Fairfax County Public Schools

Roy Pea, Stanford University

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

David Rose, Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)

Candace Thille, Carnegie Mellon University

Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education

Plan development was directed by Barbara Means of SRI International with the support 

of Marianne Bakia, Kate Borelli, Judy Brooks, Ed Dieterle, Austin Lasseter, Hannah Lesk, 

Jeremy Roschelle, Linda Shear, Susan Thomas, and Andrew Trotter. Linda G. Roberts 

served as a senior advisor to the plan development team. 

Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology C-1

Appendix C. Acknowledgments

We extend our appreciation to the thousands of individuals who participated in the numerous 

discussions, focus groups, presentations, webinars, public forums, and Web-based comment 

events that were held throughout the plan development process. A summary of the activities 

through which stakeholders contributed input is provided below. Our special thanks go to those 

who organized outreach efforts that helped gather valuable insights from across the field.

Policy Interviews

U.S. Department of Education

Joseph Conaty, Director, Academic Improvement and Teacher Quality Programs

Tom Corwin, Director, Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Analysis Budget Service 

John Easton, Director, Institute of Education Sciences

Cheryl Garnette, Director, Technology in Education Programs, Office of Innovation and 

Improvement

Alan Ginsburg, Director, Policy and Program Studies Service

Laura Johns, Office of Educational Technology

Jenelle Leonard, Director of School Support & Technology Programs

Martha Kanter, Under Secretary

Ray Myers, Office of Educational Technology

Hugh Walkup, Office of Educational Technology

Joanne Weiss, Director, Race to the Top Fund

White House 

Aneesh Chopra, Associate Director and Chief Technology Officer, White House Office of 

Science and Technology Policy

Kumar Garg, Policy Analyst, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

National Organizations

Anne Bryant, Executive Director, National School Boards Association

Michael Cohen, President, Achieve

Dane Linn, Education Division Director, National Governors Association

Gene Wilhoit, Executive Director, Council of Chief State School Officers
C-2 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Technical Working Group Webinar Discussants

Equity Issues in Technology-supported Learning

Mark Warschauer, University of California, Irvine

Open Educational Resources and System Redesign

Michael Horn, Innosight Institute

Elliot Maxwell, Consultant to the Committee for Economic Development

Reconceptualizing Assessment

Robert Kozma, Kozmalone Consulting

Jim Pellegrino, University of Illinois, Chicago

Enhancing Productivity

Rich Kaestner, Consortium on School Networking (CoSN)

Supporting Teachers with Technology

Barry Fishman, University of Michigan

Bill Penuel, SRI International

Ann Renninger, Swarthmore College 

Steve Weimar, Math Forum

Outreach Events

State Educational Technology Directors Grantee Meeting

May 5, 2009

142 registered participants

ISTE Leadership Symposium at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 28, 2009

207 registered participants

ISTE CIO/CTO Forum at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 29, 2009

50 participants

Focus Groups at the National Educational Computing Conference

June 29-July 1

59 participants

SETDA Member Webinar

Aug. 24, 2009
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology C-3

Silicon Valley Industry Summit

Sept. 21, 2009

Agile Mind, Linda Chaput

Apple, John Couch

Blackboard, Jessie Woolley-Wilson

Carnegie Learning, Steve Ritter

Cisco, Ned Hooper

Dell, Mark Horan

George Lucas Educational Foundation, Steve Arnold

Google, Maggie Johnson

IBM, James Spohrer

Hewlett-Packard, Phil McKinney

Intel, Eileen Lento

KC Distance Learning, Caprice Young

McGraw-Hill, Randall Reina

Microsoft, Stephen Coller

NeXtAdvisors, Michael Moe

Teachscape, Mark Atkinson

Oracle, Clare Dolan

Pearson, Doug Kubach

Scholastic, Margery Mayer

SMART Technologies, Nancy Knowlton

Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy

Texas Instruments, Melendy Lovett

VIP Tone, Robert Iskander

Wireless Generation, Larry Berger

NCTET Policy Forum

Sept. 25, 2009

30 participants

CoSN Member Webinar

Oct. 6, 2009

72 registered participants

Webinar with Philanthropy Leaders

Oct. 6, 2009

Cisco 21st Century Schools Initiative, Bill Fowler

HP Global Social Investment, Jim Vanides

Intel Foundation, Wendy Hawkins

MacArthur Foundation, Craig Wacker and Connie Yowell

Microsoft Partners in Learning, James Bernard and Mary Cullinane

National Geographic JASON Project, Caleb Schutz

New Tech Network, Monica Martinez

Oracle Education Foundation, Bernie Trilling

Pearson Foundation, Kathy Hurley and Mark Nieker
C-4 Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology

Public Forum at the University of Michigan

Oct. 21, 2009

75 participants

NCTET Member Webinar

Oct. 26, 2009

Exploring New Modalities for Learning Conference

Oct. 30, 2009

SETDA Leadership Conference

Nov. 1, 2009

Second Life Public Forum

Nov. 5, 2009

200 participants

ISTE100 Meeting

Nov. 9, 2009

25 participants

iNACOL Virtual School Symposium

Nov. 16, 2009

National Center for Technology Innovation Conference

Nov. 17, 2009

Summit on Redefining Teacher Education for Digital Age Learners 

Dec. 8, 2009

Technical working group members Daniel E. Atkins, Barry Fishman, Roy Pea, and 

Brenda Williams played an important role in reaching out to various stakeholders. We 

also extend our deep thanks to those who helped convene and gather input from the 

community, including Patricia Anderson, Karen Billings, Leslie Connery, Christine Fox, 

Tracy Gray, Jenelle Leonard, Don Knezek, Keith Krueger, Susan Patrick, Paul Resta, Mark 

Schneiderman, Irene Spero, and Mary Ann Wolf. 

The Department of Education’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for 

global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and equal access.

www.ed.gov