"Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is teaching his own kids how to code"

From Pando Daily:

Ashton Kutcher’s doing it. Will.i.am’s doing it. Chris Bosh’s doing it. Britain’s doing it. And now, US Secretary of State Arne Duncan and his kids are doing it.

Everyone’s learning to code!

As Pando has previously reported, billionaire backers are funding a huge lobbying effort — Code.org — to get programming taught in schools. But, while this organization is painstakingly chipping away at state policies, in some cases district by district, it turns out the Educator in Chief was already on board.

Arne Duncan said as much during an edtech privacy summit today where he announced federal guidelines on how to treat educational data collected from students (more on that tomorrow). As he explored the pros and cons of technology in the classroom (pro: empowers teachers, con: invasion of privacy), he let a personal detail slip.

This is something we think about a lot at home, with our 12-year old daughter and 10-year old son. Ours is not a low-tech home, although my kids, correctly, claim they have a pretty low-tech dad since they have to share my iPad, and because my wife and I limit their non-educational screen time. We’ve been learning to code together, though they are ahead of me.

Arne Duncan is teaching his kids to code and trying to learn himself in the process. Given the Secretary of Education helps set federal policies and programs for the nation’s primary, secondary, and postsecondary schools, this isn’t a trivial point....MORE