Intel is congratulating itself in turning out three million teachers who have completed training through ‘Intel Teach to the Future’, a professional development program designed to help teachers effectively integrate technology with learning. Equipped with the skills required to develop digital literacy, creativity, higher-order thinking, communication and elaboration, Intel expects these teachers to transfer their skills to the tens and millions of students they come in to contact with.
Intel also proposes to expand the program into Nigeria through the New Partnership for African Development initiative, and to South Korea where the program will serve as the main component of the government’s professional development plans.
So far, the program appears to have produced some promising results. Studies revealed relative increases in the use of technology activities among those teachers who had completed the program as well as increased use of technology for lesson planning and preparation.
Intel Chairman Craig Barrett said, Working together, governments, educators and industry can advance the learning process and transform education around the world.
Intel surely deserves credit for the work it does to encourage teachers to bring technology into the classroom. It has provided teachers with resources that would otherwise have proved inaccessible. It is also reassuring to know that, as a result, more students will leave education with the technological astuteness the workplace will require of them.
