The nation must act with urgency and purpose to ensure all students have access to high quality online learning opportunities. This begins with ensuring all students have the devices and connectivity they need to participate in online learning. As long as the digital divide remains, it stands as a failure of national will that translates into greater educational inequities.

We must also work to improve the quality of online learning itself. Students need – and deserve – courses and lessons that are rich with interactivity and engaging content. Teachers need – and deserve – more support structures to help them succeed in this new form of instruction. We must act with intention to ensure our most vulnerable students are positioned for success, given the challenges they face.

To ensure that upcoming generations can positively leverage online spaces and rise above the ever-present call to division, digital citizenship—encompassing the critical competencies to discern fact from fiction, navigate relationships, and use technology to champion change—must be fostered, beginning in our schools where students already engage with technology regularly. The work to develop digital citizens and future leaders is underway in several states and districts, and there exists numerous ways that the federal government can supply further momentum—setting a national vision around digital citizenship, building the capacity of educators, and strategically investing necessary funds.

Chapter 5 explores the future of work and the types of skills workers need to have in order to be competitive in current and future labor markets, discusses the foundation for digital- age learning, and examines the logistics of implementing digital-age learning. It discusses applications of various educational technologies and provides recommendations for systemic change, such as building transformation plans on a framework (the ISTE Essential Conditions) that describe foundational elements of effective educational transformation. The last section examines the implications of computational thinking in an increasingly technological world.