Tech education

Tech education

Tech education

Opening Minds on Ed Tech

By Bill Gates  | April 21, 2016

Every teacher deserves the chance to be phenomenal.

It’s easy to say, and I don’t know anyone who would disagree with the sentiment. But in the history of American education, this vision has proven hard to deliver on. Whenever I talk to teachers, one of their biggest concerns is that they don’t have the tools they need to do their best work. We see the same results in polls of teachers.

I’m optimistic that all of us who are passionate about education can solve this problem. One of the main reasons I’m so hopeful is that advances in technology will make it easier to give teachers the support they deserve. For example, teachers will be able to upload videos of themselves and get advice from their peers, watch the best teachers in the world at work, and get real-time feedback from their students. Software will also help identify which students are having trouble and adjust for their own learning style, leaving teachers more time to focus on the kids who need extra personal attention. (I wrote in more detail about how software will improve education worldwide in last year’s Annual Letter.)

Developers will play a key role in making these advances. I recently had a chance to talk with a number of the leading companies doing this work when I spoke at the ASU GSV Summit, an education-technology conference in San Diego, California. I encouraged them to work more closely with teachers to understand their needs, and to make sure their products deliver measurable results in the classroom. Technology can revolutionize the way teachers and students work together—but only if we base our approaches on evidence about what works.

Below you can read the transcript of my onstage Q&A. I also gave a speech. There’s a lot of exciting work going on in this field, and I definitely left San Diego feeling better than ever about the potential for technology to support teachers and students in a big way.

ASU GSV Q&A

QUESTION:

You have concerns about the pace of change and about whether we’re making adequate impact quickly enough and I’m just curious if you have advice for the entrepreneurs out there as they think about it. How do we accelerate this pace and have bigger impact on the students?

BILL GATES:

Well, in the K-12 area, the way the products are selected, the way money is budgeted for those, over time, that’s really got to change. We’ve got to free up more of the professional development money. We’ve got to get some example products that are clearly so successful that it really opens peoples’ minds to what the role of technology here is. I’d say we’re pretty early in that process.

There are a lot of teachers who are willing to be the pioneers in this area—that’s where we’ve gotten the adoptions so far. There are a lot of cases where we try and go beyond and get a district-wide adoption. We really have to look at why the uptake by the actual usage isn’t quite there, because then that creates something that other people hear about and they’re very, very reluctant.

We do have the benefit though—the digital tools now with the combination of PC, tablet, and cell phone. The three of those we’re close to universality. The idea that the connection was holding things back or access to a device is holding things back—those haven’t gone away, but particularly if some of the experience can be done on a small screen—then even when you get outside the United States the access levels are starting to be a lot higher.

There’s a very positive framework. There’s a sense of need, you know, as people look at those college residence numbers, they look at those completion numbers, and the whole cost equation, higher education is really staring at a tough set of constraints. So that should serve to drive the demand.

QUESTION:

It feels to me like we’re hitting a proverbial tipping point in the embrace of personalization and a better understanding of what adapted means, personalized means. What do you see over the next five years?  What’s your prognosis both in K-12 and for higher ed actually?