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Only about 41 percent of young people in the US currently earn a college degree. President Barack Obama has pledged to change that. By 2020, President Obama wants that number to climb to 60 percent and technology will play a central role. Moreover, he has promised to close the education gap so that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and careers.

In November 2010, the Obama administration put forward a broad plan to leverage technology with the intent of revolutionizing education in the US. The National Education Technology Plan (NETP), the brainchild of the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology, calls for applying the technologies Americans use in their everyday lives to the entire education system, thereby improving student learning, accelerating the adoption of effective practices and using data and information for continuous improvement.

"Education is vital to America's individual and collective economic growth and prosperity, and is necessary for our democracy to work," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a letter to the US Congress introducing the plan. "Once the global leader in college completion rates among young people, the United States currently ranks ninth out of 36 developed nations. President Obama has articulated a bold vision for the United States to lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by 2020, thereby regaining our leadership and ensuring America's ability to compete in a global economy. To achieve this aggressive goal, we need to leverage the innovation and ingenuity this nation is known for to create programs and projects that every school can implement to succeed."

The plan notes that students use computers, mobile devices and the Internet to create their own learning experiences outside school and after school hours, and those experiences are often radically different from the experiences they are exposed to in school.

"For example, students come to school with mobile devices that let them carry the Internet in their pockets and search the Web for the answers to test questions," the plan said. "While such behavior traditionally has been viewed as cheating, with such ubiquitous access to information, is it time to change what and how we teach? Similarly, do we ignore the informal learning enabled by technology outside school, or do we create equally engaging and relevant experiences inside school and blend the two."

To support the plan, the Office of Educational Technology has undertaken numerous projects.

One is a communities of practice research project dubbed Community Everywhere. The idea, according to Steve Midgley, deputy director of the Office of Education Technology, is to support the creation of communities of people who share their concern and passion for education. The trick, he said, is not to create new forums and social networks, but to support existing ones in achieving their ends.

"What we're seeing in the education space today is there are plenty of places for people to go, and many are already going there," he said. "What we need to ask ourselves is how do we bring the right resources to communities that already exist? Do they have the right tools? Do they have the right information? What things can we do to help these communities be successful?"

Midgley expressed a theme that appears to be common in the Office of Educational Technology's thinking: Don't recreate the wheel. Instead, support and expand upon the tools that already exist.

The Learning Registry, another Office of Educational Technology project, is a perfect example. The idea behind it is to create a method of tagging learning resources residing in the repositories of federal agencies (like NASA or the Smithsonian Institute) and other non-governmental organizations so they can be effectively found by tools like commercial search engines.

"Online learning resources are hard to find, not because there aren't enough of them, but because there are so many of them," Midgley said. "We need to increase the amount of information about each resource. This is a curation problem. We feel that the reason we haven't cracked this nut is we don't have enough good information about how these resources are being used."

The plan also puts forward some ideas for helping to ensure teachers stay up-to-date on the latest methods and technologies for use in the classroom. For instance, Midgley cited that the MacArthur Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation are working on a project inspired by today's video games: creating badges to reflect achievements. The idea encompasses badge-issuing organizations who award educators badges for proving themselves proficient in certain technologies used in the classroom, similar to the way technology companies like Microsoft certify knowledge workers on their products.

"We're not talking about a mandated set of skills that people would have," Midgley explained. "Anyone that wants to be a badge-issuing authority could issue them and anyone who wants to be a badge learner could earn one."