ATLANTA – Most Southern Regional Education Board states rate among the nation’s leaders in K-12 education technology — providing many of the region’s students with the greatest access to technology and online courses.
The results come from the Technology Counts 2008 special report by Education Week, the leading national publication covering K-12 education. Released this week, the report issued letter grades to states based on 14 indicators in three major areas of technology policy and practice: access, use and capacity.
West Virginia — one of the 16 SREB states — rated No. 1 in the nation overall for education technology in the report. The state has been a national leader in online learning for several years. For example, all middle grades students in the state can access foreign language courses online.
Seven of the top 10 highest-rated states are SREB states: third-ranked Georgia (which was No. 1 last year), Virginia at fourth, Kentucky fifth, Florida seventh, Louisiana eighth and North Carolina 10th. SREB states make up a majority of the top 20, including Oklahoma at 11th, Arkansas 13th, South Carolina 16th and Texas 18th.
Thanks in part to the SREB Educational Technology Cooperative, which brings together education technology leaders from the 16 SREB states regularly for training and collaboration, nearly all SREB states have state virtual schools that provide online courses to middle grades and high school students.
"Education technology no longer is the future in our states — it’s the present," said Bill Thomas, the director of the Cooperative. "The challenge now is to build on these successes and use technology to improve student learning to even greater extents. The future prosperity of our region depends in part on this work."
Working with SREB states, the Cooperative created the nation’s first standards for online learning, which are the basis for brand-new international standards adopted by the North American Council for Online Learning.
SREB recently received a $320,000 grant from the AT&T Foundation to help member states improve training and boost the supply of high-quality online teachers in K-12 schools. All SREB state virtual schools and their state departments of education are participating in the SREB High-Quality Online Teachers initiative, led by the Cooperative.
In other results from Technology Counts, West Virginia ties for the nation’s highest rating in student access to technology, and Virginia is second-highest. A remarkable 100 percent of West Virginia fourth-graders have access to computers and 97 percent of eighth-graders, and many SREB states rate high in this measure.
For more information on the Technology Counts report or your state’s progress in education technology, please contact SREB Communications. The full report is online at www.edweek.org.
SREB, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, advises state education leaders on ways to improve education. SREB was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislatures to help leaders in education and government work cooperatively to advance education and improve the social and economic life of the region. SREB has 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Each is represented by its governor and four gubernatorial appointees.
