President Barack Obama has a pen. He has a phone. And on Tuesday, he wielded an iPad to help make a point about how he hopes to do more for schools without more funding from Congress.<\/p>\n
Obama toured Buck Lodge Middle School in Adelphi, Maryland, where seventh-grade students were using tablets to work on math problems based on the Rover explorer on Mars.<\/p>\n
Obama borrowed a tablet to film his security entourage. “That’s Mike, my Secret Service agent. He never smiles,” he quipped.<\/p>\n
Then he pledged to do more through executive actions and the bully pulpit — the pen and the phone — to modernize classrooms with technology.<\/p>\n
“It makes vivid and real math and science, in a way that is more interesting to the students,” Obama said in a speech after his tour of the school, which is among only 30 percent of schools in the nation with adequate access to high-speed Internet.<\/p>\n
“That’s how it should be for everybody, not just some,” he said.<\/p>\n
The school in Adelphi, a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., bought tablets with money from the $847 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed five years ago.<\/p>\n
With Obama’s efforts to spend more money on education — as well as other programs — having failed to gain traction in Congress, he and the White House have tried to find alternative ways to address issues.<\/p>\n
The Federal Communications Commission said it would spend $2 billion over two years to upgrade Internet speed and quality in 15,000 schools serving 20 million students.<\/p>\n
Obama also secured pledges from private companies to provide more than $750 million in devices, software and wireless service to U.S. students.<\/p>\n
The donations include free iPads for poor schools from Apple Inc, free software from Autodesk Inc, marked-down software from Microsoft Corp, and donations of wireless services from AT&T Inc, Sprint Corp and Verizon Communications Inc.<\/p>\n
“They want educated customers,” Obama said, noting the companies gain an edge by making more consumers familiar with their products.<\/p>\n
“They want customers who are able to get good jobs,” he said.<\/p>\n
Obama said he would ask Congress later this year for more money to help train teachers.<\/p>\n
“Technology is not a silver bullet,” he said. “It’s only as good as the teachers who are there.”<\/p>\n
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