This year, over 350,000 students from 183 countries registered for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.  Today we are announcing the 124 teams that will represent their countries/regions at the Worldwide Finals in New York City, July 8-13. We have been inspired by the innovation, creativity, and passion demonstrated by so many talented students who have harnessed the power of technology to develop solutions that will help solve some of the world’s toughest problems. We’re also thrilled to see so many teams focusing on Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, and Kinect.  To view all the finalist, please visit: http://www.imaginecup.com/worldwide-finals/2011-finalists-winners

There are so many amazing stories and solutions.  I would like to highlight one, since many of you know I was living in Munich the last three years and supporting the countries in Central Eastern Europe.  I would love to highlight the team from Zagreb, Croatia. Three out of 1,000 children suffer from cerebral palsy and there are not enough physical therapists trained to treat the patients. KiDnect allows a physical therapist to record a specific exercise for a patient, which the patient then repeats. Ideally the program will record and archive the exercises so the doctor can monitor whether the patient is performing them correctly and making progress. The exercises will be perceived as a game that should be completed daily. Connected through the internet, patients in rural areas will also have access to personalized physical therapy exercises. Check out their story:

I am so excited about this next generation of computer scientist, entrepreneurs and leaders who will help us solve some of the world’s greatest challenges!  To hear stories and learn more go to the Imagine Cup You tube channel.

See this Blog Post at: http://www.microsoft.eu/skills-and-education/posts/atc21s-defining-21st-century-skills-cm3l.aspx

In January, Microsoft participated in the largest gathering of Ministers of Education in Europe and around the world at the Education World Forum.  At the forum, discussion of ensuring our students have the right skills to compete in this global economy was top of mind.  In partnership with Cisco and Intel, with the leadership of University of Melbourne we had the opportunity to participate in two ministerial exchange sessions.

During these sessions, the Executive Director, Patrick Griffin gave an update on the progress of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills Research Project, Singapore and Australia highlighted how they are engaging in the project and hope for how the project will influence the work they are doing in their countries and lastly the ministers discussed what are the policy, curriculum and professional development implications of implementing these new types of assessments and teaching interventions in their countries. At the American Educational Research Association Conference in New Orleans the team presented tasks and learning progressions to help students 11, 13 and 15 years old progress in competence in collaborative problem solving and ICT literacy-learning in digital networks.

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project is focused on defining 21st century skills and developing ways to assess them. By achieving this, the project aims to promote the teaching and assessment of twenty first century skills at government, school system, school and teacher levels. By collaborating with other large employers, the companies aim to influence employer hiring strategies to emphasize these skills among new employees. By placing the assessment materials and technical components in the public domain and by making them available to large scale survey strategies, the project aims to influence a broad range of countries by publishing cross national studies of student attainment in twenty first century skills. These three approaches to the transformation of education, government involvement, company employment criteria and cross-national assessments of skill levels will act as a multi-pronged stimulus to curriculum change and enable schools to prepare students for living, working and thinking in the twenty first century.

There are many international and national assessment programs, assessment organizations, NGOs, businesses, research centers and individual researchers working on the specification of 21st century skills. This collaboration does not presume that one form of assessment should be imposed on every community. The goal is not to develop one assessment format. Rather, it is intended that there will be support for conceptual, methodological, and technological advances in assessment that can support the parallel efforts of many organizations and countries. It is expected that the assessment and teaching process developed within ATC21S will provide an exemplar framework that countries and organizations can use or draw upon with confidence. The project also aims to help inform the development of the next versions of cross national benchmarks such as PISA and IEA ICT assessment, as well as other international and national assessments in the next three to five years.  Already PISA has called for tenders to develop both the assessment and delivery platform for one of the ATC21S skills (Collaborative Problem Solving) under development.

The project has been planned to consist of 5 phases:

• Conceptualizing the program and the development of a series of white papers
• Hypothesis formation and development of the assessments and teaching and learning strategies
• Coding and administration development
• Trials of the assessments and teaching and learning strategies
• Dissemination of the output to the greater education community: providing assessment tasks, teaching notes, developmental learning progressions, research papers, and technology to support the classroom as an open and shared source, with everything to be open to the public domain for use.

The project is currently at the coding and administration development phase and hope to enter the trials phase in the end of  the calendar year 2011.  In discussing with the ministers in London, the excitement around this project is three-fold:

• No one has to date defined learning progressions for these 21st century skills. The learning progressions define levels such as the progression from novice to expert.  For example what is a novice, moderate, expert at collaborative problem solving?  Assessments to monitor developing competence and the relevant teaching interventions are needed to help a student grow in competence (and perhaps confidence) in order to demonstrate higher levels of performance and competence.
• Today, most large scale cross national testing programs (e.g. PISA) results take a number of months’ or even years delay’ to provide feedback to systems, teachers and students. In addition they generally do not provide information to teachers on how to intervene or help students develop to higher levels of thinking or competence. Most formative assessments require teachers to observe, rate performance (often on very poor quality rubrics) and then decide on how to intervene. The rubric and the judgment error involved have led to a loss of credibility for this form of assessment, sometimes because of human error but also because of the poor quality of the scoring rubrics. The goal of this project is to create an automated system that as the student is doing the assessments the teacher is notified regarding learning intervention and students receive instant feedback. The project also intends to “background” quantitative data that educational jurisdictions can collect in order to make summative decisions at a system level. The systems will be able to identify the areas in which cohorts of sub groups of students are struggling and make appropriate curriculum change decisions or promulgate investments to increase effectiveness and efficiencies. These decisions will be able to be made in a much reduced time frame.
• This is an international project with researchers and teaching practitioners working in 4 founder countries and possibly 3 associate countries. It will create an international standard and help encourage the learning environment needed to teach 21st century skills.

Principals and teachers at Finnish schools have realized the need for moving towards more innovative practices in order to support children’s growth as 21st century learners. However, at the school level the development efforts have – so far – mainly rested at the enthusiasm of single teachers. The ATC21S project aims at conceptualizing 21st century skills and even more – to design assessment and learning tasks for their promotion at schools. – together with the ITL research. The participation in the project finely complements our national attempts at systemic changes in our educational system in close international collaboration among schools, universities, companies and educational administration. (The project has also intensive links to Finland’s participation in ITL research aiming at understanding and enhancing innovative teaching practices.), Professor Marja Kankaanranta, NPM, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

To learn more about the ATC21S Project, please visit http://www.atc21s.org; participate in the linked-in community; contact the Executive Director Patrick Griffin or Microsoft Lead Rane Johnson-Stempson.  To learn more about our work with governments around the world visit: Education Leadership Website

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So today, I had the opportunity to host an Microsoft Executive Briefing with the leading eLearning Companies in Australia.  I am so excited by what I learned and what it means for education across the world and specifically in the new five years.  I would like to share with you some thoughts and hope it challenges other governments to think BIG like Australia and I can only hope we in the United States will learn from their lead and follow suite.

In April 2009, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that the government would commit A$43 billion (US$30 billion) to building a broadband network across Australia, calling it “the single largest nation-building infrastructure project in Australia’s history” and promising it would play a role in “turbo-charging Australia’s economic future.” He likened it to Australia’s 19th-century cross-continental railroads—an investment that linked the nation’s sparsely populated inland to its coasts. Considering the economic stakes for Australia, which had lagged behind other nations in broadband access, Rudd said the nation had to bypass private bids to build the broadband network and fund the network through public spending.  In other words, every Australian citizen will have access to state-of-the-art fiber broadband. The social and economic impact of this will be enormous.  The new superfast network will:

• connect homes, schools and workplaces with optical fiber providing broadband services to Australians in urban and regional towns with speeds
  of 100 megabits per second – 100 times faster than those currently used by
  most people extending to towns with a population of around 1,000 or more
  people
• use next generation wireless and satellite technologies that will be
  able to deliver 12 megabits per second or more to people living in more
  remote parts of rural Australia
• provide fiber optic transmission links connecting cities, major
  regional centers and rural towns
• be Australia’s first national wholesale-only, open access broadband
  network
• be built and operated on a commercial basis by a company established
  at arm’s length from Government and involve private sector investment
• be expected to be rolled-out, simultaneously, in metropolitan,
  regional, and rural areas.

Every person and business in Australia, no-matter where they are located, will have access to affordable, fast broadband at their fingertips.  This then leads to what can this mean for education and truly student centered learning.  Education without walls that really enables anytime, anywhere learning 24/7.

What excited me the most is the amazing work happening by the eLearning Companies and the hope I have of them coming to the US market and supporting countries around the world.

B online Learning: http://www.bonlinelearning.com.au:They have an amazing Master eLearning Course where they help companies think through their employee professional development, build customize eLearning programs and look at a comprehensive approach.  All their courses are delivered as fully interactive eLearning and collaborative programs with students supported by a Learning Coach.

Kinetic Education: http://www.kineticeducation.com.au: Focusing on literacy and numerous with an amazing line up of eLearning for Math, Science and English.  If we think about in early learning when students are learning the basics and then they don’t
receive competence but move on to the next grade level and then they continue to fall further and further behind.  Their online learning solutions help students get back on track.

Mediasphere: http://www.mediasphere.com.au/: One of Australia’s largest digital publishers they have eLearning solutions for corporations, governments and education.
I was most impressed by their Powerhouse CAMPUS solution it is much more than just a LMS.  And I hope to see their solution plug into Office 365 for Education very soon…

Training4Work: http://www.trainingforwork.com.au/I love what they do in 1:1 training for employees at companies focusing 3-4 weeks 1-2 hours structured coaching sessions with assessments and training.  At the end of the employees training 50% of the credit goes towards 3 year Bachelor Degree Programs in top Australian Universities.  I can really see the potential once they take this online and use powerful virtual tools like Microsoft Lync to connect trainers with students 1:1 virtually.  With the work I have done in Hawaii, I can see this being a great programs for several of the tourism and retail companies.

Open Universities Australia: http://www.open.edu.au: I love this concept! They work with 18 different universities across Australia and when a student enrolls at Open University they select one of the Universities as the University in which they will receive their diploma and follow program guidelines but a student can take a class from any of the 18 partners if they see a class that may meet his/her needs better.  Everything is online with super high quality classes and professors from the 18 universities.

I wanted to thank the folks for the time they spent with me and I do love Auzzies!

Another area I learned about was the work an Australia NGO is doing in the USA, Australia and with European Schoolnet and 38 countries in the EU creating a Global Learning Resource Connection. This will map education resources, curriculum, learning, national standards and assessments.  You can learn more here-http://www.jesandco.org/weblink-cat-ourprojects/web-cat-glrc
It is super powerful and amazing work.    I am really excited about the possibilities in education in the next 5 years.  Where Australia will go, the innovations in education and how the career training and academic online learning worlds will collide with the need for countries to be more competitive and help students with the skills to be succesful in work and life.  The power of Microsoft Azure, Xbox Kinect and Windows Phone 7 to
help companies like these scale their solutions so they can be utilized all over the world in different modalities and not just in Australia or a few places in the US.  I hope the USA can become as innovative as Australia!  Can we make the jump to scale and not just pockets of innovation?