As Microsoft’s Chairman, Bill Gates paints a vision of technology today and how those advancements can improve tomorrow and is a trusted advisor on how we can achieve these goals.
This week Bill Gates testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology on the celebration of the 50th of the Committee. He answered questions ranging from the knowledge gap with students, fundamental problems with teacher professional development, the next big thing in technology, to inspiring kids to learn. Gates’ message is consistent with prior speeches, but reviewing is worthwhile. "It starts with education," he stated.
Also this week, Bill Gates addressed the Northern Virginia Technology Council (March 13, 2008). In this he gave more specific examples about technology available to students today, including the WW Telescope project from MSR and Tablet PCs.
So if you put it on your computer and say hey, I’d like to see that for myself – you just connect up your telescope and boom, there you are. You can acquire information, add that to your database. So software touching all the sciences in a pretty deep way. So with these platforms there will be a huge variation in how creative governments are in applying software to their task, how creative businesses are to apply it to their task, how schools can take this and do new things.
It’s not just a tablet PC there, but it’s also taking the world’s best lectures and getting those online and having students have access to those and really sort of thinking through the difference between the lecture and the study group and how we take that – now it’s a worldwide resource of the best teachers and tie into that.
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My daughter goes to a school where she’s got that tablet PC, no textbooks at all. We’ve already seen it in some areas. For example, encyclopedia, you know, it’s no longer going to the shelf and pulling down the World Book Encyclopedia. It’s going online to Wikipedia or Encarta and getting far, far in depth information. In fact, in some ways, I envy my children when they ask questions I don’t know the answer to at least now I can go over and say let’s look it up. What is the story about that part of history or that type of star formation? We’ll go and learn it together; and that just wasn’t available before. So this empowerment is an amazing thing.
On that tablet we can touch the screen. We have a pen. We can write. We can have the handwriting be recognized and so that’s another form of natural interaction.