ORU at The White House

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 14, 2016

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Stephanie Hill, Director of University Relations & Communications
Office: 918.495.7337, Mobile: 918.720.5548
sthill@oru.edu

Tulsa, OK – Oral Roberts University’s Dean of the College of Education is spending today at the White House. Dr. Kim Boyd along with Gerald Lander, ORU’s Director of Educational Technology, and Diane Boyd, a parent, are attending the White House Ed Tech Summit. ORU is the only institution from Oklahoma invited to attend.

The summit is focused on preparing future teachers to engage students in using technology in appropriate ways that leads to transformative and creative learning. It’s focused around four principles aligned with the National Education Technology Plan published by the U.S. Department of Education.

1. Focus on the active use of technology to enable learning and teaching through creation, production, and problem solving.
2. Build sustainable, program-wide systems of professional learning for higher education instructors to strengthen and continually refresh their capacity to use technological tools to enable transformative learning and teaching.
3. Ensure pre-service teachers’ experiences with educational technology are program-deep and program-wide rather than one-off courses separate from their methods courses.
4. Align efforts with research-based standards, frameworks, and credentials recognized across the field.

About 50 people are attending and have taken the challenge to commit to working on making changes to the teacher education program to ensure institutions are achieving the four principles.

“I’m excited to be able to represent ORU at this summit,” said Dr. Boyd. “ORU is committed to using technology to prepare future teachers. The new Global Learning Center will allow us to see how augmented and virtual reality among other technologies will transform the learning experience for students of all ages.”