Helping Students Succeed: What Intel is Doing to Make Learning Engaging

Recently, at a conference on education reform, I heard a state superintendent from one of the country’s highest performing states share a comment I found concerning. He said he believed there would be a tension between meeting more rigorous common core standards and personalizing learning for students to make schools relevant and engaging to learners.

While I have a lot of personal respect for this man, I think his comment reflects a common misperception that our country has to overcome in order for school improvement to succeed. As I sat in the conference room, looking around at a sizeable crowd of over-40-somethings, it occurred to me that educational, corporate and government leaders need to be promoting exactly the opposite message. I think the only way we will have all students meet rigorous standards is to make the learning completely personal, relevant and engaging.

At a time when an overwhelming number of students feel disconnected from school – according to a Time Magazine article, the national high school dropout rate currently exceeds 30 percent – we need to find a way to connect with students, to engage them and keep them in the classroom. Technology will be a critical component of this endeavor.

In this digital era, students are connected as individuals through cell phones, the internet and many participate in large virtual on social networking sites. Technology is so integrated in their lives that, according to a recent factoid, nine out of ten students no longer wear wristwatches as timepieces because they can now access the time through a plethora of other technological devices close at hand. Content is available online, critical analysis and application of content has become more important than content itself as the body of published work available online doubles seemingly overnight. If students check in online but checkout at school-, why are we not doing a better job at using these tools to motivate students in rigorous learning experiences?

Intel is investing in helping teachers become better at technology integration for learning. We offer free professional development to states and districts all over the country. We also have supported the development of technology standards for students, teachers and administrators in the US. Our most recent project is collaboration with Intel, Microsoft and Cisco on how to do a better job of assessment of 21st Century skills in students.

However, I fear that philanthropic efforts by Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, or Oracle will not have the systemic impact we seek until education leaders embrace the opportunity that technology presents in making our students more engaged, and more successful in school. If you need a reason for why that is important – check out a recent McKinsey study that said the United States’ GDP would have been 9 to 16 percent higher – that is, $1.3 to $2.3 trillion higher – in 2008 had U.S. high school graduates attained the average skills of their peers in Canada, Finland or South Korea. In our current economic situation, we can’t afford not to have an educational system where all kids succeed.

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David Stewart talking about Moblin

We have been releasing several videos that were recorded in the Intel booth at OSCON, so if you are just catching up, you can still watch all of the earlier videos:

• Ken Drachnik from Canonical on Landscape for Ubuntu Systems Management
• Sven Dummer from Wind River on Developing Open Source Mobile Applications
• Joseph Hill from Novell talking about Mono
• Glynn Foster from Sun Discussing OpenSolaris

In this video, David Stewart, Senior Manager of the Open Source Product Engineering Team at Intel talks about some of the most important features of Moblin, an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems. David talks about the importance of fast boot, fast shutdown, user experience, graphics advancements, web 2.0 integration, media, power usage and much more.

You can watch more of our open source videos on the multimedia page.

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Intel’s® Atom™ processor CE4100, Gametree.tv and Online gaming, goodbye to consoles?

Intel recently unveiled the Intel® Atom™ processor CE4100, the newest System-on-Chip (SoC) in a family of media processors designed to bring Internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes. Also, Intel has invested $500K in TransGaming a Canada based company which is launching an on demand gaming service called Gametree.tv. If successful could this eliminate the need to buy separate consoles like a PS3 or Wii?

I have in the past paid for subscription services like Netflix and Blockbuster for movie rentals. This makes sense if you are an avid movie watcher and get the convenience of renting by mail, locally or watching streamed. The thought has often crossed my mind on why something like this is not available for games. The current model where you buy a console and then are limited to games for that console only seems too heavy and “unstreamlined”. And if you have a family with teenagers you can relate to having 3 current game consoles (I have a PS3, PS2, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Gamecube, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS and all previous versions of Nintendo consoles) you have to wonder why we can’t have a service that combines these so we don’t have so much hardware to store (except maybe handhelds where the usage model is different).

Also take into account that you buy a game for $40-$50 vs a subscription service that offers a multitude of games seems like a win win for the consumer. Now how about the game companies and publishers?

Granted that each publisher and console company wants their share but maybe by combining their games in a subscription pool there can be cost benefits by getting games to audiences that may have never played their game due to the cost of buying yet another new game. This should be an attractive option to smaller game publishers to get their games to a large audience without having them buy a lesser known game.

We are moving towards an era of consumer electronics that move away from the linear model to a multi streamed internet model with a wide variety of choices like internet, 3d gaming, social media to complement the TV. An online gaming subscription service seems to be where we will be in the future.

Your thoughts?

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