US Department of Education appoints Director of Education Technology

Karen Cator, a career educator, has been appointed as the US Education Department’s first Director of Education Technology. It’s a further signal that the Obama administration is taking educational ICT very seriously.

Cator will launch the first draft of a National Education Plan in the next couple of months. Ahead of that, she made a keynote speech in New York on 1 December where she said:

Technology will be in play in every aspect of the education reform agenda.

The speech set out four key focus areas:

• Learning: Enabling unprecedented access to high-quality learning experiences. Everyone, including English Language Learners and students with disabilities, should have increased access to meaningful, well designed, and readily available learning experiences, throughout their lives.
•  Assessment: Measuring what matters and providing the information that enables continuous improvement processes at all levels of the education system. Students, teachers, parents, and administrators should have access to the kinds of data that can enable better instructional decisions and provision of educational resources.
• Teaching: New ways to support those who support learning. Technology can enable mentors, coaches, and peers to better support learning both in and out of school. Teachers can benefit from resources provided through technology and from anytime-anywhere professional interactions, including collaborations to share and refine effective techniques and resources.
• Productivity: Redesigning systems and processes to free up education system resources to support learning. In an era of scarce resources, education systems need to take advantage of new technological and content solutions to reduce spending tied to inefficient systems and processes. This effort includes more effective approaches to education R&D to increase the pace of innovation and the scaling of effective practices.

More details of what’s ahead in the National Education Technology Plan are here, and there’s an article covering the speech in eSchool News (you have to register, but it’s free).