Have you Heard About PROJECT RED?

It is a fact that many of our country's high shcool students enter college with inadequate skills. The National Education Computing Conference (NECC) posted a press release saying the Project RED coalition has launched their new Project RED initiative, an effort to put technology on a more stable basis within the challenging environment of education funding.

The lead author of this project and CEO of The Greaves Group, Tom Greaves said, "We all have anecdotal stories about how technology works and saves money while improving teaching and learning. But we need a full-bore national study to investigate cost-savings and revenue enhancement at the state level."

Project Red's team will research the schools in its database of approximately 3,000 K-12 technology-rich schools. The characteristics of technology use to transform learning will be analyzed to create a model for other schools. The technology-transformed schools that have at least 95 percent of their students using a computing device with Internet access will also be studied to determine what cost savings schools realize when they use technology as part of their everyday teaching and learning.

Most states know how much money is spent on remedial courses for these students - costs that frustrate state legislators because they feel they are paying for educating the same students several times. One of the bright spots in technology's investment pay-off has been the ability to reduce costs while improving both learning and attendance through online credit recovery courses.

This will revolutionize the way we look at technology - not as a cost, but as a way to personalize learning and to change the way students learn by making technology-assisted learning among recognized best practices, rather than an exception.

Technology holds the promise of allowing us to re-engineer our educational system. Project RED's importance has been recognized by a number of national education associations, including National School Boards Association (NSBA), American Association of School Administrators (AASA), Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and Software Information Industries Association (SIIA).

The technology-transformed schools are defined as any elementary and secondary school where students have consistent daily access to the Internet. Go to ProjectRED.org to find out if your schools are already included inthe program. -- Rocco Basile