Vision

Our vision is a community where youth are ignited with a passion for science and technology education and innovation, where the past and present achievements of African Americans are recognized and celebrated by all, and where a quality education is accessible to everyone.  The community we envision sets expectations, encourages, and rewards lifelong learning and promotes a sense of ownership, personal responsibility, community involvement, and pride for our future.

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – President Barack Obama

Keeping a watchful eye on the future…
PRIDE Museum strongly encourages the use of innovative technical devices for the educational empowerment of youth. Parents are stretching their budgets, with good cause, to find ways of providing expensive gadgets to their students, with expectations of academic success, convenience, and social status. The ability to have access to world news, information and educational tools in the palm of their hands is an advancement that today’s youth can leverage for increased awareness and education. However, without parental supervision, the device can be viewed as just another bling – an expensive pacifier – and it quickly becomes a distraction to class and homework. As parents, we must make it our business to know exactly how the tool is being used. Many of us find ourselves in the dark about the extent of use, and a disturbing fact is some adults are simply not implementing parental controls, monitoring or using the countless tracking methods available to us. It is our responsibility to know the exact times, volume and frequency of texts, tweets, outgoing and incoming calls, online games, music and video downloads that occur. Make sure their time online is used for empowerment and not spent on pure amusement.

The future success of youth is determined in part by their adaptation to learning through the use of mobile devices and social media in instruction. This further prepares students to be active and constructive participants in the highly connected world in which they already live and will soon work. The National Educational Technology Plan – U.S. Department of Education, describes new models of teaching and learning in which students and teachers are virtually connected to one another, to colleagues, to fellow students, and to a variety of resources that maximize opportunities for anytime-anywhere learning. The mandate for school leaders is clear: this means ensuring that each student has a connectible device—a tablet, a netbook, a laptop, or a smartphone—and further engaging students in the creation of responsible use policies so that they can access social technologies without unreasonable obstacles.

Source: Using Mobile and Social Technologies in Schools: National Association of Secondary Principals http://www.nassp.org/