21st Century Education: Engaging, Connecting and Transforming with Technology

For hundreds of Manhattan parents, the question of sending their kids to school is where. For one hundred million primary school-aged kids worldwide, the answer is nowhere.

At Day 2 of the Mashable Social Good Summit, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute, discussed the “poverty trap.” Those who are unable to get an education because their basic needs – safe structure, safe water, and food – aren’t being met at school are the same people who need an education to meet their basic needs. The cycle is vicious and even more complex, Sachs said, for countries in conflict.

We’ve got a lot of work to do in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals of breaking the poverty trap for primary school students. But Sachs, who shared the stage with Hans Vestberg, Ericsson President and CEO, and Stéphane Dujarric, Director of News and Media for the U.N. Department of Public Information, is setting the bar higher.

Vestberg projects that in 2016 those with Internet access will increase threefold. We’re moving into what Vestberg calls the “second wave” of the digital era in becoming a “networked society” – a society that Fundly’s social fundraising platform is fundamentally a part of.

In the United States, the big education debate is between laptops and textbooks. But in many communities worldwide, there are no books. Going digital is the obvious answer, Sachs pointed out, and allows for development of and access to differentiated curriculum.

Internet access is more than a technology issue or a social issue. It’s a human rights issue.

With digital tools and Internet access, people can read material – both local and global – that is relevant to them, from environment to disease to education. Many of these communities have already leapfrogged into the 21^st century.

“Technology is completely penetrating rural societies … even the poorest in the world,” Sachs said.
The “Connect to Learn” collaborative effort is on the cutting edge of the movement. Coupled with Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child program (Negroponte spoke at the summit yesterday about his social experiment that will give children laptops to see if they can teach themselves to read), the future is looking bright.

The path, however, is uncharted.

“We need to rethink anything we’re doing,” Vestberg urged.

The future is full of possibility and technology has tremendous transformative potential that transcends the world of education. Doing serious rethinking means reevaluating how we approach communication and how we approach fundraising for the causes we care the most about. Fundly offers the tools in this networked age to engage and reach out to supporters of your cause.

Over $215 million have been raised with Fundly’s social fundraising platform. It’s amazing how things multiply when people connect.