District CIO

President Barack Obama plans to visit Manor (Texas) New Technology High School, technology entrepreneurs and middle class workers Thursday during his trip to the Austin area. The president’s visit to the Texas state capital is among the first pit stops in his “Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity" tours.

Gregory R. Wolf, the executive director of research computing platforms at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, will join UMass Medical School as chief information officer in March.

The media is reporting that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking a lead role in a Silicon Valley SuperPAC organized by his former college roommate, Joe Green. Sources say that the group will focus on education and immigration reform, two issues that are crucial to Silicon Valley, which needs a healthy pool of talent to stay competitive.

Oregon focuses much of its scarce educational resources on the achievement gap while the skills gap widens. Oregon has the worst dropout rate for white students in the nation. Expanding career technical education is an effective way to improve our abysmal graduation rate, prepare students for middle-class jobs, and support manufacturing and innovation that drives our economic engine.

Investments in advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) are also critical to attracting and retaining high-wage jobs that grow our revenue base to fund schools and social services.

Shawnee State University (Ohio) Outreach Services is helping middle school students in Portsmouth by offering tech-driven programs to 10 participating schools. The programs provide a safe place for homework centers, intensive mentoring in basic skills, drug and violence prevention counseling, and helps middle school students prepare for college preparatory courses in high school.

Students and faculty members at the Academy of Information Technology & Engineering met faculty from other school districts this week to discuss the school's online learning program. The program, run by the Virtual High School Collaborative, provides the magnet school with several hundred courses for students to take from teachers across the globe, including 21 advanced placement courses.

Utah ranks No. 1 when it comes to state policies dealing with online education, according to a new national study. The "Beehive State" was the only state to receive an overall "A" grade, according to the Digital Learning Now Report Card, a pro-digital nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

As education leaders and state legislators are considering approaches to fixing South Carolina's education system, several people are already hard at work shaping the future of education. One of those people, Nathan Yon, says his new school opening this fall focuses on a combination of traditional and online learning.

The Post Falls (Idaho) School District's learning opportunities have been boosted by two technology-related grants totaling nearly $200,000, including a $150,000 grant from the Idaho State Department Education to hire two curriculum and technology integration specialists.

Each morning, students head to classrooms to learn the day's lessons, but one school is providing children with the same education in a different environment. California Virtual Academies, or CAVA, provides students with the same K12 curriculum they'd have in a public school, but they access it online.