Technical assistance insures that schools linked to this growing testbed can take full advantage of its innovative resources. Curriculum integration engages children with the questions, ideas, and principles that inform advanced scholarship and professional practice. Assessment evaluates how well young people study with advanced media and guides efforts to implement the basic strategy of change. Community involvement supports participating children while they are out of school and draws parents and other adults into the program. Implementation of this program has begun.
Advanced media introduce new causal forces in education.
New technologies are not merely a good to distribute, but a force to employ. In concept, networked multimedia can make the richest, most powerful resources of our culture available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in principle this change should have greatest relative value to those who presently have least access to the fullness of our culture. All children will benefit, but the least advantaged children can benefit the most. Reform efforts nurturing small, effective schools, committed to equity and engagement, are fast becoming the norm of good pedagogical practice. A networking infrastructure for education, designed to enable teachers and students in these schools to employ, at low cost and large effect, the full range of powerful educational tools, cultural resources, and social services available electronically, will enable such schools to provide comprehensive yet compelling opportunities for their students more surely and efficiently.