Digital Education - Education Week

Educators Use Mobile Devices More Than General Public

2012-05-24T23:04:05Z

School principals and district administrators are more likely than the general public to be adopters of smartphones and tablet computers, according to a new report based on data from the 2011 Speak Up survey.

Principals and administrators are also more likely to use those devices than the teachers and librarians they oversee, the report says, though teachers are also more frequent users of those tools than the general public.

Further, technology use habits were found to effect both sets of populations' outlook on using those devices in education.

"For many of us, we cannot truly appreciate the value of a new technology tool until we have realized a direct benefit from its use in our personal or work life," said Julie Evans, the president and CEO of Project Tomorrow, the Irvine, Calif.-based nonprofit education research organization that conducts the Speak Up survey, in a statement. "That's the same for educators."

Evans led a Capitol Hill presentation of the report's findings on Wednesday.

The report, based on data from the broader Speak Up survey that reached more than 400,000 students, parents, and educators, found 70 percent of district administrators and 64 percent of principals had personal access to mobile devices, compared to 54 percent of teachers and 53 percent of librarians. Roughly half of principals and administrators have personal access to tablet computers, compared to just over a third of librarians, and just over a quarter of classroom teachers.

According to the separate Pew Internet and American Life project, just over 40 percent of Americans have smartphone access, and just 10 percent have access to tablet computers.

Administrators who used smartphones or tablets were found roughly twice as likely to consider a bring-your-own-technology approach for students at their campuses, pilot such a policy, or work in a school or district that provided students mobile devices for educational use.

Teachers, meanwhile, were found to have more favorable views on a wide range of digital content formats if they used digital content of any format in their teaching lives.

- Ian Quillen

STEM Video Game Challenge Winners Announced

2012-05-23T18:13:08Z

The 28 student winners of the second annual National STEM Video Game Challenge were announced Tuesday, punctuating a competition that received roughly six times as many entries as it did in its inaugural season.

The student winners included 17 teams in all across middle and high school categories. Short videos on each winning game are available at the competition's website, and a video summary of the competition follows here:

The challenge, a joint effort of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media, also awarded six prizes of $10,000 worth of design consulting to college students and professional educators who designed their own games.

More than 3,700 entries were submitted in the student category, up from 600 in the challenge's inaugural year. The competition was first launched in the fall of 2010 with the goal of sparking interest in science, technology, engineering, and math, also known as the STEM fields, through educational video game design.

- Ian Quillen

Report Sets K-12 Broadband Goals for 2014-15

2012-05-21T21:14:45Z

A new report released today from the State Educational Technology Directors Association outlines four key recommendations for creating ubiquitous, equitable broadband access for K-12 schools. The report, called The Broadband Imperative, builds on a 2008 report from SETDA about broadband needs.

"Technology is no longer a nice-to-have," said Christine Fox, the director of educational leadership and research for SETDA in a webcast press briefing about the report on Monday. Broadband should be seen as a utility that is necessary for education, rather than an "add-on" she said. That access to the Internet is necessary in order for education to mirror the society in which students will go on to pursue jobs, she added.

The four recommendations are as follows:

1. Schools in the 2014-15 academic year should be able to provide at least 100 megabytes per 1,000 students and staff for an external Internet connection, and at least 1 gigabyte per 1,000 students and staff for an internal wide area network.
2. In addition to providing broadband within schools, the federal government, states, and districts should also assume responsibility for ensuring broadband access outside of schools—in homes, as well as public places such as libraries and community centers.
3. State leaders should provide a vision for expanding adequate and ubiquitous broadband access to schools, libraries, and community centers. This could mean working with a state broadband network or working with school districts directly to leverage federal and public-private partnerships to achieve those goals.
4. The federal government should provide funding for broadband access to help support statewide networks, schools and districts, community centers and libraries, as well as home access for low-income families.

Schools also need to keep in mind that they are no longer planning for just 1-to-1 environments, but 1-to-many, said Fox, from SETDA, as many students now have multiple devices that they expect to be able to use to access the Internet, such as smartphones, tablet computers, and laptops.

The SETDA report provides an important step to achieving adequate broadband access by setting a specific goal for how much broadband schools and districts should have in place by a specific date, said Karen Cator, the director of the office of educational technology for the U.S Department of Education, who also attended the Monday briefing in Washington.

"We need to figure out how to leverage all of [the different broadband strategies] to make sure that every school and every home has access to broadband," she said.

In addition, representatives from states and school districts, including Jeff Mao, the learning technology policy director at the Maine Department of Education, and John Miller, the assistant director of the office of instructional technology for the West Virginia Department of Education, shared their experiences with broadband networks and technology needs in their respective states.

All the participants in the briefing talked about how the Common Core State Standards will provide an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration between states, much of which will depend on having a strong broadband connection.

- Katie Ash

Praise for Digital Reforms From Jeb Bush-Led Foundation

2012-05-21T19:40:34Z

Several efforts aimed at increasing access to digital educational resources were highlighted in a roundup issued Friday from the Foundation for Excellence in Education that also praised recent policy actions in 12 states.

Michigan, Georgia, and Tennessee's governors were all complimented for recent legislative action on the digital learning front, while Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, was criticized for vetoing an online learning accountability measure. (Jason Tomassini wrote more in-depth about the Michigan and Arizona measures on the Marketplace K-12 blog.)

While advocates for education technology have repeatedly insisted their cause is not political, including foundation founder and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican, its mention alongside choice-related reforms noted in Arizona, Ohio, and South Carolina—all signed by Republican governors—is an odd juxtaposition and could further suspicions. In most states, school choice is considered a conservative cause.

The Digital Learning Now initiative is co-headed by the Alliance for Excellent Education and its founder, former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, a Democrat.

Wise, who spearheaded the first annual Digital Learning Day, has been visible alongside Obama administration education officials several times as it lent support to Digital Learning Now's educational vision.

- Ian Quillen

Online Foreign Language Program Replaces Teachers

2012-05-18T20:52:26Z

When are the layoffs of three teachers in a mid-size school district in Colorado regional (and maybe even national) news?

Answer: When those teachers are replaced by an online-learning program.

While the decision of the 6,200-student Eagle County school system in Colorado to use Aventa Learning software to replace the services of three foreign-language teachers appears largely budget driven, it's sparked teachers and their supporters to come to the defense of the whole field of face-to-face teaching, according to the Vail Daily newspaper.

And although many online-learning proponents insist virtual education can only be effective if it is used to enhance teachers—not replace them—there persists a widespread and at times justifiable fear among teachers that it will eventually replace them.

Folks like Joel Rose, the brainchild behind the School of One program, will tell you their work involves rethinking the way the teaching force is organized, a subtle way of saying they believe with adaptive technology you can teach effectively with a smaller number of fully certified instructors (but also a higher number of teaching assistants).

We're also by no means seeing a first in Eagle County, with relatively recent research telling us that principals are often interested in exploring online-learning options despite misgivings about quality, largely due to budget pressures.

What is the answer, then, in the public relations war for online and blended learning?

Perhaps it is for the field—or a portion of it—to adopt a new moniker that enables casual observers to delineate between programs geared toward improving instruction and those geared toward providing a cheaper version of academic triage. There's very little similarity between the educational approach of a school that can afford to infuse adaptive learning software and 1-to-1 computing tools into a fully staffed classroom, and one so cash strapped that it uses an admittedly less dynamic online-learning option to replace teachers it can no longer afford to pay.

Yet, given the nomenclature, it's entirely possible for educators to read about the Eagle County school system and develop a bad impression of a completely dissimilar situation, like the blended schools run by Rocketship Education in the San Jose, Calif., region, for example.

The field might also benefit from more diverse leadership. Currently, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL, has the unenviable task of acting as the main advocacy group for a ballooning number of virtual education groups that have increasingly disparate interests. Consider alone the difference between a private company like K12 Inc., which reaches hundreds of thousands of students through a variety of public and private school pathways and models, and the Virtual High School Global Consortium, which is essentially an online-learning version of a communal farm, where participating schools share the labor and the results.

And lastly—and this might sound radical—those companies and organizations that do specialize in methods of online learning that promise to reshape the teaching force should embrace that identity publicly, rather than dancing around it. It might not be popular, but it would erase a lot of speculation. And often, people are more afraid of the bad things they think might happen than those they know will occur.

Otherwise, the sins of a few programs will continue to affect the reputation of many; sins that, as online learning supporters know, can be uncovered with a click of a mouse.

- Ian Quillen

Report: Ed-Tech Movements Gaining Steam

2012-05-15T21:01:23Z

Many of the shifts pushed for by ed-tech advocates are indeed occurring, according to the fourth annual K-12 edition of the Horizon Report series from the Austin, Texas-based New Media Consortium, or NMC.

The report, pre-released to several partnering organizations and selected media outlets today, finds many of these changes have transitioned from the exception to the rule in schools.

For example, online and blended learning models are gaining a much stronger foothold within the nation's schools, thanks in part to financial pressures, the report finds. The bring-your-own-device technology model is also gaining steam in K-12 schools, as is the expectation of students and educators "to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want," it adds.

In its report, the NMC also continued its practice of naming what it considers the six emerging technology trends in K-12 education. Tablet computing this year joined mobile device use, a holdover from last year, as a trend to focus on during the coming year. Game-based learning and personal or adaptive learning environments were tabbed trends set to explode during the next 2-3 years, and augmented reality and natural user interface technologies during the next 4-5 years.

The NMC, a nonprofit collaborative of ed-tech experts from around the world, plans to make the report available for public download on June 14 during its annual summer conference at MIT. More information on how this particular issue in the series was crafted is available on the report's wiki page.

- Ian Quillen

Report: Full-Time Virtual Ed. Lacking Accountability

2012-05-14T20:45:04Z

Although virtual schools continue to grow each year, more research and accountability is needed to foster and support effective online educational environments, says a new report from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education.

"We want to harness all the benefits of technology to really propel student learning ... but at the same time we find the lack of really good information about results and accountability really troubling," said Patte Barth, a co-author of the report and the director of the Center for Public Education, which provides data and research for school board members and other educators, in a conference call with the media.

Full-time online schools have gained 50,000 more students in the past year alone, bringing the total number of students participating in such virtual learning environments up to 250,000, the report said.

However, the research on how successful those schools are is mixed, with the majority of research finding higher dropout rates and lower test scores for full-time online students than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar schools. On the other hand, two small scale studies found that online students actually had higher rates of academic growth, suggesting that online learning can be an effective way of educating students.

One reason behind the low completion rates could be because of the way that online schools are monitoring student participation and progress, said the report. While almost all schools look to final grades as a way to track student progress, only about half of districts with students in online courses track their time spent online or log-in activity. "It's hard to imagine a classroom where they don't take attendance every day," said Barth.

The report also looked at how virtual schools receive funding, which varies from state to state. In some cases, the report said, the funding follows the student from his or her district. In other cases, the student receives funding based on the district where the virtual school operates.

Either way, the report argues, the funding model is not actually based on how much it costs to educate the student in a virtual learning model. "The absence of accounting for the true cost of virtual education leads to a lack of accountability for many virtual schools," said the report.

In addition, keeping track of how many students are in virtual education, and where the funding for that student is going, is difficult to determine, the report said, citing Colorado as an example. In that state, schools receive per-pupil funding based on where each student is on October 1st of each year. However, reports have found that between 30 and 50 percent of students in virtual charter schools leave those schools after October 1st, transferring the cost of their education to their home schools while the virtual schools retain the funding.

Overall, the report offered three recommendations for school board members, educators, and policymakers when pursuing virtual education as an option. Those leaders should demand more information about virtual learning before moving forward with it. Secondly, virtual schools should put systems in place to closely and frequently monitor student progress. And lastly, educators should demand better research and information about how much money it takes to provide a virtual education, how virtual schools are funded, and where that money is going.

Despite the words of caution regarding online learning, Barth insisted that NSBA's Center for Public Education was a supporter of that type of education. "We are very much in favor of it," she said. "It will happen, and it needs to happen. ... What we're trying to do as a center is to send out a note of caution that because something is working in one high school somewhere doesn't mean you can rapidly expand it and expect the same results, and you certainly can't expand it without data collection systems in place."

- Katie Ash

An Up-Close Look at South American Laptop Programs

2012-05-11T20:15:08Z

Remember when the folks from the Consortium for School Networking invited us to Montivideo and Buenos Aires last November to explore some of the world's most progressive 1-to-1 laptop programs and enjoy seasonal high temps in the low 70s?

Yeah, me neither.

But after a week-long visit to observe Uruguay's Plan Ceibal, the world's first nationwide educational laptop program, and some similar developing initiatives in Argentina, CoSn has released a new report detailing the travels and observations of about a half-dozen top officials.

In all seriousness, the document is a good introduction to the giant undertakings going on in Uruguay and Argentina, as well as an explanation of the motivations behind them, and the political realities that make them possible. A central theme is the ability of a more centralized government than our own to enact change more swiftly, as well as a cultural perception of laptops and Internet connectivity as tools in the war against poverty that goes beyond education.

It's also free, unlike most CoSN reports that are generally available only to members. Then again, after not inviting us down to South America, it's the least they could do, right?

- Ian Quillen

New Paper Refines Blended Learning Classifications

2012-05-10T21:36:10Z

The Innosight Institute this week released a new white paper in which it takes the previous six categories it created to differentiate blended learning models and, well, blends them.

The 22-page document called "Classifying K-12 Blended Learning" simplifies the work of a previous paper from the institute and emerges with four new models of blended learning: the rotation, flex, self-blend, and enriched-virtual models. That's two down from a previous document released in January of 2011, indicative of a purposeful effort to create a less rigid taxonomy that might not account for the diversity of some blended models.

This new document also includes a new definition of blended learning that makes the stipulation that face-to-face instruction in any blended model must occur outside of a student's residence. This differentiates blended models from fully online models where a student may receive supplemental instruction from a parent or caregiver.

Since the Internet is awesome, there's no need to go over the previous taxonomy. But here's a summary of the refined one:

• the rotation model includes all blended learning models in which students rotate between modalities that include an online component within a singular course;

• the flex model connotes models where instruction is delivered primarily online and students rotate between online and face-to-face study on a customized schedule that varies based on each student's individual needs;

• the self-blend model stipulates any arrangement where students alternate between fully online and fully brick-and-mortar courses; and

• the enriched-virtual model represents models where students on a school-wide model alternate between studying remotely and studying at a brick-and-mortar location.

The classifications represent differences in the structure of blended learning models, but do not have implications by themselves for relative quality, the white paper says.

"Just as a hybrid car can be either efficient or a clunker and still be a hybrid car, blended learning can be both good and bad," the paper reads.

- Ian Quillen

Laying the Groundwork for a Shared Tech. Infrastructure

2012-05-10T18:06:13Z

The 2012 SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit wrapped up on Tuesday, but I am only just now getting a chance to catch my breath and jot down a quick wrap-up of the two-day conference, which was a whirlwind of speakers, sessions, and awards. A couple of notes:

• The CODiEs weren't the only awards bestowed during the event.

Through its Innovation Incubator program, the SIIA awarded its "Most Likely to Succeed" award to Language Express, an initiative to build interactive digital products that teach life skills to 3- to 21-year-olds. The company most recently released The Social Express, a game that uses video modeling to help students learn social skills. Its "Most Innovative" award went to Filament Games, which has produced a series of online games designed to teach students science.

The winners in each category were also the first runners up in the other, and were chosen from a pool of 73 applicants, which was pared down to 10 finalists and two alternates that were subjected to a vote from conference attendees.

In addition, Smart Science Education Inc. won a complimentary year-long membership as a Blackboard Building Blocks partner, which grants the organization access to thousands of clients using the Blackboard Learn software.

• I closed my conference by attending a working group discussion about the Shared Learning Collaborative, an initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, as well as nine participating states. (The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York also fund Education Week coverage.)

The SLC aims to create a large datastore where schools and districts could input student, teacher, school, and district information, as well as content and applications, aligned to the Common Core. The SLC will be built on open source technology with an open applications program interface (API), allowing an infrastructure where multiple systems and databases can interact with each other. The hope is that having the technology infrastructure in place will encourage and enable vendors and developers to create products that work with the infrastructure and use the data available to continually improve themselves. The alpha pilot will launch in nine districts in different states on June 16th.

"We aim to create a shared infrastructure that works with existing technology and saves money," said Stephen Coller, a senior program officer of Next Generation Models at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "This is about community contribution and ownership. We want to foster a broad market with the best technology."

Representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation say they have been very clear about defining what their role in the SLC will be.

"We designed services to fill in the gaps," said Sharren Bates, a senior program officer for College Ready - Next Generation Models with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "We want to build just enough to spark innovation at the product and user experience level."

- Katie Ash

Stepping Up Education, Enforcement on E-rate Provision?

2012-05-09T21:47:41Z

The Universal Service Administrative Company holds its annual compliance meeting this coming weekend for telecommunications companies who supply services to schools and libraries that participate in E-rate. That gathering will likely include an important discussion of the program's Lowest Corresponding Price, or LCP rule.

The rule stipulates that companies supplying services to participants must give a price comparable to that offered for private customers receiving similar services, and was the subject of an investigative Pro Publica earlier this month. The report found that companies had long ignored the rule, and that the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees E-rate, had done little to enforce it.

Now, at a meeting in Atlanta beginning tomorrow, The Universal Service Administrative Company—a private company that oversees the program for the FCC—is expected to present a PowerPoint presentation that includes twelve pages elaborating upon the LCP rule. A follow-up story from Pro Publica suggests the move is in direct response to initial story, despite a statement released by an FCC spokesperson insisting it was the result of discussions dating back to last August.

E-rate is a federal program, funded at about $2.3 billion annually, that helps subsidize school and library purchases of Internet connections and related services. It is funded through the Universal Service Fund, which in turn is funded through a tax fee charged to telecommunications providers that is typically passed on to individual customers. Generally, schools and libraries have all funding requests for projects establishing a connection to an outside service provider approved. Projects enhancing internal connections and infrastructure are typically only approved for E-rate funding in schools with high-need student populations.

The 69-page presentation includes a 12-page section on the LCP rule that explains its definition and purpose, along with an elaboration on a provider's responsibility to offer the lowest corresponding price to any institution it knows to be participating in E-rate. The presentation also describes methods of recourse both for schools and companies who feel the law is being ignored or abused, respectively.

- Ian Quillen

Hewlett Automated-Essay-Grader Winners Announced

2012-05-09T14:33:58Z

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced the winners of its Automated Student Assessment Prize, or ASAP, essay grading competition on Wednesday, after issuing a report last month that found automated essay-graders capable of replicating scores of their human counterparts.

Three teams split the $100,000 in prize money from the Hewlett Foundation, with the trio of Jason Tigg (United Kingdom), Stefan Henß (Germany), and Momchil Georgiev (United States) collecting the $60,000 top award. The 11 contestants comprising the first-, second-, and third-place teams have backgrounds in particle physics, computer science, data analysis, and even foreign service work. But none have educational backgrounds, a departure from the report, in which participants were companies or nonprofits with experience in the educational market.

The Hewlett Foundation, which is underwriting the competition as part of its work to improve assessment methods along with the implementation of Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics, also funds Education Week's coverage of deeper learning.

The concept of using artificial intelligence to grade student writing has long been a polarizing one, even though the practice remains quite limited in K-12 education. Supporters of automated essay-graders say that, when incorporated correctly, they can allow students significantly more writing practice by scoring essays far more quickly than a human evaluator. Opponents contend such tools are still very weak when it comes to evaluating the validity of students' arguments and that they grade essays based mainly upon structure and grammar.

Tom Vander Ark, an educational consultant who is the co-director of the study and competition, said an important differentiation among the three winners is that they used a combination of predictive analytic strategies to drive their software, and not just natural language processing, the field of computer science studying the interaction between human and computer language.

"We think this is important because it's an advancement in the field, [and] it is further demonstration of smart scoring to contribute to state tests that incorporate lots of writing," Vander Ark said in an email.

Developers of the tools themselves at times appear divided over just how contemporary automated essay-graders should be used. For example, British particle physicist Tigg said in a press release that the technology could potentially transform educational delivery methods. But the same press materials also indicated that the winning trio expressed a belief that the technology is still in an early stage of its development.

Hewlett is also planning a competition for automated graders of short answer questions this summer, according to a press release. Like the essay-grading competition, it will be hosted by Kaggle, a platform for data prediction competitions that allows for transparency and discussion of competitors' work.

- Ian Quillen

Sizing Up the Ed. Tech Market

2012-05-08T20:15:16Z

So how big is the K-12 education marketplace, really? Depends on who you ask, according to several researchers here at the SIIA Ed-Tech Industry Summit who presented data they'd collected about the question.

Robert Resnick, president of Education Market Research, said through surveys of educators as well as education companies, his company found that the K-12 education market, including textbooks, technology, supplemental materials, and assessments, totals about $18.3 billion, up from $17.3 billion last fiscal year. Resnick estimates that the market at this point for digital content is about $2 billion.

While the education market generally is a "slow and steady" on, without wild yearly changes, several sub-segments of the market have increased over the past year, including reading and mathematics intervention products, online/digital content, instructional software, and productivity tool software, Resnick added. He also singled out the interactive whiteboard segment of the market, which totals about $2.2 billion, the majority of which are SMARTboards.

John Richards, the president of Consulting Services for Education, presented the results of his company's survey of the K-12 education market, which found that the technology segment of the market totaled around $7.5 billion in 2009-10, which includes content, instructional support, platforms and administrative tools, and "special markets" such as special education. This year's version of the survey is still collecting data for those of you reading this who work managing ed-tech companies.

- Katie Ash

CODiE Winners and the History of the Universe

2012-05-08T19:38:22Z

In conjunction with its annual Ed-Tech Industry Summit this week in San Francisco, the Software & Information Industry Association today announced the winners in the educational technology category of its 2012 CODiE Awards, which annually recognize some of the best new product development in the industry.

This of course leaves us observers scouring the names on the winners list in an attempt to identify some trends. And after looking at this year's 29 winners in all, the best analogy I can come up with is a primitive explanation of the Big Bang Theory. (And no, not the sitcom that has seized unilateral control of the airwaves on TBS and UPN).

If you think of the ed-tech industry like the universe, what began as the big bang of computers entering the classroom has become increasingly disparate and fragmented. That's not to say that the industry's diverse players don't work together, but the industry itself is expanding and decentralizing. And if you look at the three biggest awards given—those for best overall education solution, best K-12 solution, and best post-secondary solution—you'll find five different companies offering five unique services (there's a three-way tie in one category).

But at the same time, as the universe expands, it organizes itself into galaxies of stars, planets, moons, and other matter circling around a hub of mass. Similarly, it appears more winners this year are coming from major players like Discovery Education, Blackboard, Pearson, and especially McGraw-Hill, as innovators from the fringe are courted or absorbed by bigger competitors. (McGraw-Hill took three categorical awards, the only company this year to secure more than one.)

So what happens next? Some say the universe will expand forever, with galaxies speeding apart from each other at increasing rates. Others suggest it will slow, stop, reverse, and eventually collapse in on itself, leading to a new big bang and a new universe. And still others believe there are parallel universes similar to our own, perhaps even coexisting in the same space but another dimension, but with no crossover between their reality and ours. Kind of like Mac and PC users.

While you're pondering that, be sure to check back here for more of Katie Ash's live SIIA coverage from San Francisco.

- Ian Quillen

Idaho Education Chief Defends Reforms

2012-05-08T18:05:39Z

To kick off the second day of the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit, keynote speaker Tom Luna, the superintendent of public instruction in Idaho, spoke about the myriad of education reforms passed last year that is re-shaping everything from what classrooms look like to how teachers are compensated in that state.

"I believe that there's an inseparable link between a high-quality education system and a growing, robust economy," said Luna. "You cannot have one without the other."

Looking at the education statistics in Idaho before the reform, 92 percent of the state's students graduated from high school, but only 46 percent continued on to postsecondary education. Of that 46 percent, 40 percent needed remediation upon entering higher education, and only 38 percent went on to a second year of postsecondary education. As it is, only 34 percent of Idahoans have a postsecondary degree, while 60 percent of jobs require one. That, said Luna, was one of the main impetuses for the comprehensive reform.

In addition to the economic and academic reasons for reform, the fiscal climate of education funding in the state required a change, said Luna. "We had to make deep cuts, and we realized we were in a recession that was deeper and longer than any of us had ever been in before," he said. "We had to be willing to spend the money that we have differently. That is a hard call to make for education."

So what is changing in Idaho? For one, in three years, every high school in the state is scheduled to be a 1-to-1 computing environment. Whether that will be laptops or tablets is yet to be seen, but every high school teacher and administrator in the state is supposed to receive a laptop this year to undergo a year's worth of professional development. Next year, those devices will start rolling out to high school students. The initiative is fully funded, said Luna, but how it will be implemented is still being worked out. The state has set aside $4 million per year for professional development, and $100 million to be spent on technology over the next 10 years.

In a controversial turn of events, the education reforms also eliminated tenure and collective bargaining for teachers, while implementing a pay-for-performance system. "We know that the most important asset is the quality of the teacher in the classroom," said Luna. "And we must have a system to make sure that every student has the highest quality teacher every year in every classroom." Eighty-five percent of teachers are supposed to receive some kind of bonus, either for working in a hard-to-fill position, taking on a leadership role within the school, or for hitting academic targets. Each teacher is eligible for up to an $8,000 bonus per year.

Luna wrapped up his comments by emphasizing that while technology is an important part of the reforms, it is not a silver bullet for education. "Technology is not replacing teachers," he said "Technology is replacing chalk."

- Katie Ash