Obama's Tech Push for Schools Without Funding from Congress

Obama went to 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.

While there he pledged to do more through executive actions and the bully pulpit -- the pen and the phone -- to modernize classrooms with technology.

"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.  "That's how it should be for everybody, not just some," he said.

 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.