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In order to advance technologies, a national center will be created by the Obama administration. This center will play a major role in improving learning and teaching in American schools, a White House announcement said.

Education and technology leaders will oversee the Digital Promise center. This board will strive to ensure narrowing of education gap between foreign and US schools, said the White House statement.

This initiative is a part of the Jobs Plan initiated by President Obama. In a speech on September 8th to the Joint Congress session, President Obama said that as a part of this initiative, at least 35,000 schools will see modernization processes initiated. As a part of this, many schools will get high speed internet connection.

President Obama said in his statement that Digital Promise will bring everyone together through its unique partnership. Technology will be used optimally to help teachers teach and students learn and this will be done with the help of researchers, entrepreneurs and educators.

He said that as far as education is concerned, there is no silver bullet. However, technology can play a powerful role and help achieve goals. Digital Promise is a step towards making this possible.

Through the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, the Congress will create this organization that will operate as a non-profit organization on an independent basis. In order to harness the optimum capacity of digital technologies and advanced information that will help enhance education and learning levels, this program will support a variety of development and research initiatives.

This initiative will work in keeping with the major goal of reforming procurement systems that are outdated. This primary goal will ensure that technology entrepreneurs will no longer be prevented from entering the education market, said the statement.

At present, 4.5% of the total amount of $1.3 trillion spent by US annually which amounts to $59.8 billion is being spent on education related technological developments that include use of internet and computer assisted learning.

Companies that could be helped by the Digital Promise initiative include ValveCorp, according to Arne Duncan, secretary of the Education Department. He said this as a part of the initiative announcement at the White House recently.

At the same event, Gabe Newell, founder of the Bellevue, a video game creator based in Washington said that they began creating education related products after noticing that teachers were using their games such as Left for Dead and Portal in classrooms.

He said that the aim of his company is to excite and engage children. This they hope to achieve by modification of some of their popular games to help teachers teach concepts specially in Physics.
Video game industry and software programming concepts can be applied to learning as well as gaming, he said.

He opined that it is important for us to now think about packing and think about how we can progress best. This can be achieved, he said, by striving to balance between challenging a student or gamer and frustrating them.