Today's educational system needs a complete overhaul--and technology is precisely the agent to accomplish this change, according to the speakers at Intel Corp.'s fourth annual Education Visionary Conference. Held May 18 in Washington, D.C., this year's event was titled "Educators Driving Change in Communities: Creating New Uses for Technology and Impacting Economic Development."

Ten leaders in the ed-tech field gave rapid-fire talks to school, government, and business officials from around the country. Attendees included representatives from Dell, Futurekids, IBM, Michigan's Freedom to Learn laptop initiative, Microsoft, Pitsco, Riverdeep, Scholastic, Schoolnet, SMART Technologies, and eSchool News.

Though Intel convenes the yearly meeting to help its business partners better serve education, many of the day's messages were targeted as much to educators as to vendors. And although the conference theme of using technology to transform education was to be expected in a meeting of companies from the high-tech sector, the speakers offered compelling evidence of the need for such a change--along with examples of how successful schools already have made this transition.

Susan Patrick, the director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education, began the talks with a now-familiar stump speech cataloging some alarming statistics: Only 68 percent of American students graduate from high school--and just 26 percent of those who go on to college make it to their sophomore year.

"We are so trapped in the memory of what school was like for us," Patrick said. "When we were students, the world outside of school looked like the world inside school. Now, it does not.

"The paper-based system does not make any sense to kids who are coming up in school," Patrick added. "Is our educational system geared toward innovation? Do we want an 18th-century model or a 21st-century model for our schools? The 18th-century model is the one we have now."

She continued: "The ed-tech community loves the term 'integration.' But our schools need transformation, not integration."

Simply integrating technology into instruction, Patrick said, "accepts the existing environment, the existing instructional model. ... We need to build instruction for personalized, customized learning for every student's needs.

"With technology," she said, "I see that happening every day."

'Embedding' technology into learning

Texas Education Agency Director of Educational Technology Anita Givens, foreground, and Susan Patrick, director of ED's Office of Educational Technology were among the panelists at Intel's 4th Annual Visionary Conference in Washington.