Update

White House, Publishers Team Up to Use Ebooks to Reach Low-income Kids

While much of what we report on is about games and learning, sometimes technology moves aim to connect young people with more traditional learning.

That’s the idea behind an ambitious new program announced a couple weeks ago by President Obama to open up thousands of ebooks to students for free.

The goal of the program, Obama said, is to “harness and take advantage of the amazing technological revolution that has taken place to help young people learn, help young people succeed, help young people read.”

The announcement is part of a larger technological program announced 2 years ago called Connect Ed. The goal of the program, reiterated at the April event in DC, was to ensure “every school in America has a great Internet connection and great wireless.”

The program has included commitments from Internet service providers and others to offer $2 billion in new service and upgrades and the FCC has also committed $2 billion to assist in boosting the Internet infrastructure in schools.

The ebook announcement is the first, but from what Department of Education and White House officials have said, not the last investment in content to use this online infrastructure.

Major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Penguin Random House said they would make available $250 million worth of ebooks for low-income students.

The project is also a partnership with the New York City Public Library, which is in the process of developing an app for mobile devices so students can access these free resources.

The NYPL president Tony Marx called the new initiative an “important program, which will have tremendous social benefits in terms of literacy, and will mark a groundbreaking shift in how publishers provide e-books to the public. The program is certainly in line with the Library’s mission to make information – and by extension opportunity – available to all, and we look forward to working with the White House on this and other projects in the future.”

The app is expected to be released soon and the full program of free ebooks should hit mobile devices in the early fall.

The announcement was also an acknowledgement that although access to computers and even libraries themselves may be difficult for some low-income children, many families have access to smartphones and tablets.

In a White House blog post about the program, Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer, and Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, pointed out that recent research found nearly half of households making less than $30,000 had access to a mobile device.

“[A]s that number grows, particularly with the help of the private-sector commitments of ConnectED and schools’ own adoption of digital tools, it presents an opportunity to support kids who want to continue learning beyond the classroom walls, in their own homes and communities after school,” Smith and Muñoz wrote. “As we continue to broaden access to online resources both inside and outside of the classroom, we also are working to pair that access with quality content that can help them develop a life-long love of learning.”