Dive Brief:

• At the White House last week, the "2016 National Education Technology Plan” was unveiled alongside a new “one-stop” resource website for all Future Ready efforts, containing an increased focus on professional development.
• The plan includes a new Future Ready component from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology that will offer a new set of professional development tools for districts to help schools “become more digitally capable,” eSchoolNews reports.  
• That particular effort will mainly consist of videos for educators and administrators to watch, described as a “personalized playlist of bite-sized videos that will focus on the specific needs of a district.”

Dive Insight:

So will the Obama administration's Future Ready initiative make a dent in efforts to move toward School 2.0? It’s still unclear, though the goal of expanding the conversation beyond gadgetry to address the goals of utilizing technology in the first place is certainly worthwhile. Right now, the number of superintendents who have signed on to the Future Ready pledge is over 2,000, while it was just 1,200 around a year ago. The pledge asks school leaders to create and institute a culture friendly to digital learning in their home districts, and to subsequently share their successful implementation strategies with peers.

Schools have been slow to adapt and experts express ongoing concerns over whether companies are “simply riding [a] wave to turn a profit with products that might not have students' best interests at heart.“ Measuring tech implementation is also tricky, since no general benchmarks exist. As the thinking in some circles goes, too much focus on tech adoption can overshadow the equally important goal of giving students more control in their learning experience.

President Barack Obama’s related 2013 “ConnectED to the Future” initiative is a related plan to ensure that high-speed broadband and wireless are available to 99% of America's schools by 2017, with help from the federal E-Rate program. Multiple reports have confirmed that a lack of funding is the primary barrier preventing schools from connectivity.

Along those lines, the Digital Learning Equity Act of 2015 is widely praised, though not yet passed into law.