AT&T on Monday announced that it is relaunching its AT&T Aspire program designed to help students graduate from high school and prepare for college and careers. AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson announced the news during a keynote address at this year’s Building a Grad Nation Summit, where he revealed that the nation’s No.2 wireless carrier has pledged $250 million over the next five years to its AT&T Aspire program. ”AT&T Aspire works toward an America where every student graduates high school equipped with the knowledge and skills to strengthen the nation’s workforce,” Stephenson said. The program will include a wide range of efforts, many of which will focus on providing under-served communities with technology and more modern educational tools. AT&T’s full press release follows below along with a video about the program.

AT&T Announces Quarter-Billion-Dollar Expansion Of Education Commitment

‘Socially Innovative’ Approach To Increase High School Graduates, Boost Workplace Readiness; New Study: Graduation Rates Improve, But Dropouts Remain Too High

Washington, District of Columbia, March 19, 2012

As access to skilled workers becomes increasingly vital to the U.S. economy, AT&T is launching a quarter-billion-dollar campaign to help more students graduate from high school ready for careers and college, and to ensure the country is better prepared to meet global competition.

AT&T Aspire, already among the most significant U.S. corporate educational initiatives awith more than $100 million invested since 2008, will tackle high school success and college/career readiness for students at-risk of dropping out of high school through a much larger, “socially innovative” approach. Social innovation goes beyond traditional philanthropy – which typically involves only charitable giving – to also engage people and technology to bring different approaches, new solutions and added resources to challenging social problems.

The greatly expanded effort centers on a new, $250 million financial commitment planned over 5 years. AT&T Aspire will build on that commitment by using technology to connect with students in new and more effective ways, such as with interactive gamification, Web-based content and social media. The company will also tap the innovation engine of the AT&T Foundry to look for fresh or atypical approaches to educational obstacles. Finally, AT&T Aspire will capitalize on the power of personal connections in the form of mentoring, internships and other voluntary efforts that involve many of AT&T’s approximately 260,000 employees. The Aspire effort already has impacted more than one million U.S. high school students, helping them prepare for success in the workplace and college.

“AT&T Aspire works toward an America where every student graduates high school equipped with the knowledge and skills to strengthen the nation’s workforce,” AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said while announcing the extended commitment during a keynote address at the second annual Building a Grad Nation Summit. The Washington, D.C., event convened by America’s Promise Alliance (www.americaspromise.org/), Civic Enterprises (www.civicenterprises.net/home.html), The Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University (www.every1graduates.org/), and the Alliance for Excellent Education (www.all4ed.org/) brings together nearly 1,200 U.S. leaders to discuss progress and challenges in ending the high school dropout crisis.

Lacking a high school degree is a serious issue in the United States, where one in four students – more than 1 million each year – drops out, according to a March 19, 2012, report by Civic Enterprises, the Everyone Graduates Center, America’s Promise Alliance and the Alliance for Excellent Education. AT&T is the lead sponsor of this report. Education experts believe that the lack of a high school degree significantly worsens job prospects in a rapidly changing, increasingly sophisticated job market.

And, if dropouts find jobs, they earn less. On average, a high school dropout earns 25 percent less during the course of his or her lifetime compared with a high school graduate and 57 percent less than a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree.[1]

The situation poses a serious risk to American competitiveness as corporations struggle to find talent, especially in the math and sciences fields. The dropout rate, along with inadequate training and education, is keeping many high-paying Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) jobs from being filled. And the situation is expected to worsen as STEM jobs grow a projected 17 percent by 2018. Workers in these positions typically earn 26 percent more than those in non-STEM positions.[2]

Although the problem is serious, there are signs of progress according to the report issued today:

• The high school graduation rate increased by 3.5 percentage points nationally from 2001 to 2009.
• In 2001, the rate was 72.0 percent; by 2009, it had risen to 75.5 percent. From 2002 to 2009, six states experienced large gains in their graduation rates; 14 states made moderate gains; andfour states made modest gains. (Note: 2002 was the first year that state data became available.)
• And the number of “dropout factory” high schools (a high school where 12th-grade enrollment is 60 percent or less than the 9th-grade enrollment three years previously) dropped from 2,007 to 1,550 from 2002 to 2010 – a 23 percent decrease.

The new and expanded AT&T commitment builds on the work AT&T Aspire has completed in the last four years. AT&T and the AT&T Foundation have invested more than $100 million in Aspire since 2008 – and more than $923 million in education since 1984. AT&T and the AT&T Foundation’s total community giving amounted to $2.2 billion from 1984 to 2011.

AT&T Aspire will build on that success by focusing on:

• Technology
  • Collaborating with innovators, educators and other companies at the AT&T Foundry innovation centers (www.att.com/foundry) to blaze new ground in developing solutions to improve education. For example, the company will sponsor challenges or contests for mobile application developers to create cutting-edge solutions to complex problems in our educational system. A June “hackathon” in Palo Alto, Calif., is the first scheduled education/technology development event.
  • Expanding strategic alliances with organizations that specialize in developing and marketing new interactive learning tools which better engage today’s students.
  • Incorporating gamification, the Internet, video and social media into educational programs.
  • Enabling students in underserved communities to explore careers before graduation through internships in areas related to 21^st-century skills.
  • Collaborating on a revolutionary nationwide initiative with GameDesk (www.gamedesk.org/), pioneers in game-based and digital learning, aimed at transforming traditional instruction and equalizing education for all students.
• People
  • Because AT&T employees have asked for more opportunities to engage with students and contribute to their success, AT&T will launch the Aspire Mentoring Academy later this year. The academy will enable employees to help students at risk of dropping out of school succeed in the classroom and in life.
  • Building on the success of AT&T’s first Job Shadow initiative (www.att.com/gen/corporate-citizenship?pid=11547) with Junior Achievement (www.ja.org/), the next evolution for Job Shadow will create a program in which employee-student teams learn work/life skills, explore real business problems and form lasting relationships. The initial Job Shadow initiative already has involved 100,000 U.S. students.
  • AT&T employees will provide skills-based mentoring, which pairs them with students based on shared interests to encourage and support career path development.
  • Inspiring more AT&T customers, companies and stakeholders to step up to the challenge of addressing the education crisis.
• Communities
  • Deepening the financial commitment to local education-focused groups that deliver results.
  • Especially groups that embrace social innovation, focus on 21^st-century skills or focus on STEM disciplines for students in underserved communities.
  • Making local contributions to community organizations that specialize in helping students and improving the quality of education.
  • For details on Aspire grant applications, visit www.att.com/education-news  and click on the “Aspire Local Impact RFP” option.

“It will take all of us working together and supporting the hard work of the education community to continue to improve graduation rates and preparedness for careers and college,” Stephenson said. “American business has an enormous stake in the success of our students. It’s time to commit more innovation and resources to the task.”

In a special January event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller announced that the Cupertino-based company was looking to change the textbook industry with iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. McGraw Hill Education believes that the new iPad, which was announced on March 7th, will truly revolutionize education. According to Vineet Madan, McGraw Hill’s vice president of new ventures, the discounted iPad 2 will now allow more schools to deploy iPads to their students for education. “I’ve long thought that the tipping-point price for a tablet is between $200 and $300,” Madan said in an interview with TPM. “Now that the entry-level iPad 2 has dropped by $100, and it’s now $399 for a 16 gigabyte version, we’ll see much more uptake. The iPad 2 still a phenomenally powerful device [and] our content performs incredibly well on that device. At the same time, we can build better things for new iPad.” Read on for more.

Madan believes the new iPad changed the game completely, thanks to its high-resolution Retina Display and 4G LTE support. “Think about LTE,” Madan said, “You could be anywhere and can immediately pull up all sorts of high-res, data-rich content. You can stream it instantaneously and you don’t have pulling down gigs and gigs of content and storing it on the app locally.”

The VP also took some swings at Android tablets while praising the iPads battery life. “Battery life is another huge factor that many people don’t think about, including those behind some of the Android tablets,” he said. “When you’re thinking about learning, you don’t have to worry about charging device in between every class.”

All in all, Madan believes it’s a good time to be in school. “There’s never been a better time to be a student, whether that’s K through 12 or in higher education,” he said, “The access to learning materials, the access to content through the web, the access to resources is not something many of us could have even considered five years ago, and I say this as a father of three young children.”

Apple announced its new digital textbook product last week during a press conference in New York City and some analysts are already viewed the company’s efforts as an early success. According to Global Equity Research analyst Trip Chowdry, Apple sold approximately 350,000 iBooks textbooks within the first three days of availability. Using Global Equity’s third-party tracking system, Chowdry also estimates that Apple’s iBooks Author tools was downloaded 90,000 times during the same period, AllThingsD reports. Those numbers would certainly be impressive, but Apple has not announced any numbers with regard to its new iBooks textbooks product. It is also unclear what percentage of Chowdry’s estimates went to students and what percentage went to curious iPad owners looking to sample Apple’s new interactive textbook product.

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Apple on Thursday unveiled a new version of its iTunes U product from a press conference in New York City. Apple’s Eddy Cue was on hand to reveal a new iOS version of iTunes U, bringing users an iBooks-like interface through which they can access iTunes U content. iTunes U has served 700 million downloads to date, and it has primarily been used for lectures. The new version of iTunes U gives teachers a variety of new tools to create and manage curriculums, and they can also use the app to give assignments to their classes or even stream live content. Students can take notes in the app just as they can in Apple’s new digital textbooks, and courses from a number of universities including Yale and Harvard are currently available. iTunes U for iPad is available immediately for free in the iOS App Store.

Apple may be working on bolstering its educational content in order to drive the adoption rate of iPads in schools. Apple is holding a press event in New York City tomorrow where we will no doubt hear more on what the company has planned for education. “Apple will raise a lot of awareness about digital textbooks and how education is going digital,” Osman Rashid, the CEO of e-textbook software firm Kno Inc. told Bloomberg. The latest reports suggest the Cupertino-based company will unveil “tools that make it easier to publish interactive textbooks,” Bloomberg explained. The new tools should allow writers to publish content on their own, which is similar to what Amazon’s self-publishing service currently provides. Sources speaking to Bloomberg said that teachers might be able to create lessons and workbooks for students and then have their classes complete the lessons on an iPad.

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As revealed in his authorized biography, Steve Jobs figured out the secret to making a truly user friendly television ahead of his untimely passing. But a reimagined TV wasn’t the only revolutionary product Jobs had a hand in that we have yet to see come to fruition. According to several reports, Apple plans to unveil a new product at a press conference on Thursday that it hopes will change the way students use textbook. Read on for more.

Citing unnamed sources familiar with the plans, The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple will reveal a new digital textbook product on Thursday that will give publishers a platform with which to create interactive educational materials optimized for the iPad. The announcement will include partnerships with multiple publishers according to the report, and at least one, McGraw-Hill, has been working with Apple on its new iPad textbook product since June.

According to Walter Isaacsson’s authorized biography, Steve Jobs had been meeting with a number of publishers and he thought all textbooks should be “digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”

Apple will not be the first company to introduce digital textbooks to the market, but it is perhaps in the best position to deliver a product with the potential to succeed on a wide scale. Multiple universities have already begun to test programs that involve distributing iPads to students, and Apple’s tablet is by far the most popular slate on the market today. Additionally, a less expensive iPad 2 model expected to be released when Apple launches its next-generation iPad 3 will make the iOS tablet line even more accessible.

“Who better than Apple to revolutionize textbooks?” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told The Journal. “Everyone, including the industry and universities, have to come together, and this is the kind of thing Apple does really well.”

Remember those rumors about Apple holding a mid-to-late January event in NYC? Well, invites just went out to media, and focus is on education as some had rumored. We’d imagine one of the event focal points to be on reinventing and transforming the textbook industry.

Developing…

Apple has quietly launched a new entry-level iMac that targets education. The new model features a 21.5-inch display like the current base iMac, but the specs are dialed down in order to push pricing to a slightly more attainable starting point. Highlights include a 3.1GHz Intel Core i3 dual-core processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB hard drive and an AMD Radeon HD 6750 GPU. Pricing starts at $999, 11% higher than the last iMac aimed at the education market, and the new model is available immediately to education customers on Apple’s website.

Major textbook publishers, including McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Kaplan, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, have completed a deal with software company ScrollMotion Inc. to prepare their textbook offerings for digital outlets like the iPad. Textbook publishers, having seen the impact of technology and the internet on the newspaper industry, are desperately trying to stay ahead of the technology curve and viable well into the 21st century. Rik Kranenburg, group president of higher eduction at McGraw-Hill had this to say: “Nobody knows what device will take off, or which ‘killer app’ will drive student adaptations. Today they aren’t reading e-textbooks on their laptops. But ahead we see all kinds of new instruction materials.” The Wall Street Jounal, citing a report by research firm Compass Intelligence, predicts technology spending among educational institutions will increase $14.3 billion over a five year period (tracked from 2008 to 2013); a figure publishing companies clearly are not going to ignore. Check out the WSJ article for all the details.

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UPDATE: Couple commenters and other people wrote in… this seems to simply be the older 17″ aluminum iMacs that are discounted for educational institutions.

[Via Giz]

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