The United States Department of Education has released final priorities and opened the application process for the Investing in Innovation Fund, also known as "i3," a $650 million grant program that's designed to fund "the development of path-breaking new ideas, the validation of approaches that have demonstrated promise, and the scale-up of the nation's most successful and proven education innovations."
Putting your schools through practice sessions is ultimately the best test for determining how effective your crisis response plan will be in a real emergency. Here, a high school and the security expert it worked with share their experiences for holding safety drills with impact.
Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas will be spending about $1.7 million to upgrade video surveillance. According to the recommendation document voted on by the board of trustees, the district's current camera and surveillance system is composed of a group of decentralized cameras and systems "that experience sporadic outages, require costly maintenance, and do not adequately serve district-wide safety and security needs." The new purchase will replace and expand the existing system.
Lightspeed Systems has launched a pair of appliances, named "Lightspeed Rockets," that integrate hardware preinstalled with either the company's Internet filtering or spam-blocking software for schools.
El Paso Independent School District in Texas will be implementing a security appliance strictly intended to prevent confidential data from leaving the network.
An agency in Washington will be offering free emergency notification services until the end of June 2010 to school districts in the state that use the organization's data system.
Detroit Public Schools will be rolling out a $41.7 million public safety plan during the next school year that will include new surveillance technologies and construction of a new $6 million building to house the Office of Public Safety.
An ongoing effort by a Colorado school to "deepen its students' appreciation for the world around them" has led to its being given a fully engineered, fully financed solar panel array to meet the school facility's energy needs.
If there were any doubts about the Obama administration's intentions toward education technology, the United States Department of Education settled them Friday with the release of the first public draft of the National Education Technology Plan (NETP). The 114-page document reveals an intent not only to infuse technology throughout the curriculum (and beyond), but to implement some major--sometimes radical--changes to education itself.
In its first blueprint for educational technology, the Obama administration cites a host of digital-learning approaches it says will make schools better.
Nearly 200 educators representing 25 states and every region of the US met with lawmakers in Washington, DC March 3 to urge restoration of federal education technology funding. The occasion was a summit sponsored by ISTE, CoSN, SETDA, and SIIA. In a statement released by the four organizations ISTE CEO Don Knezek said, "We're encouraged by the shared vision for American schools that are more relevant, engaging, and globally competitive. And we'll continue our work with the Administration and Congress to restore adequate federal funding for education technology programs."
Effective practices focused on student outcomes are the key to middle-grades success, write Trish Williams and Michael Kirst, not a particular grade configuration or curriculum.
Westside Union School District of Quartz Hill, CA, which serves communities in the Antelope Valley about 60 miles north of Los Angeles, reported that it will automate its extensive district timekeeping processes with a solution from workforce management software provider Kronos.
"Children who enter grade school with cognitive and social-emotional delays are at an increased risk for reading problems, academic underachievement, and becoming disengaged or disinterested in school." This assessment, from Janet Welsh, a research associate at Penn State University's Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development, is at the heart of a new intervention program developed by researchers at the school to help families with kindergarteners at risk for poor school performance.
High school students in a rural Texas district have started using videoconferencing to learn and teach as they reach out to the rest of the country using technology-based resources they've created themselves.
Calypso Systems reported this week that it will award more than $120,000 in classroom amplification equipment to K-12 schools through its Be Heard School Grant program. The technologies are designed to distribute a teacher's voice evenly throughout a classroom to provide a more equal learning experience to students, regardless of their location in the room.
Liberty University, an evangelical Christian institute of higher education in Lynchburg, VA, has announced it will make the middle and high school curricula of its Liberty University Online Academy (LUOA) available to financially challenged private schools at no charge.
The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industry, will celebrate its 25th anniversary at the 7th Ed Tech Industry Summit (ETIS), being held May 23 to 25 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Radiant Logic, which sells virtual directory software, has released an updated version of its application suite that adds new security features, as well as functionality for Microsoft SharePoint environments.
Microsoft released a security advisory Monday describing a zero-day vulnerability involving some older Windows versions and VBScript when used with Internet Explorer.
By virtually every measure, electronic learning is experiencing unprecedented growth and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A new analysis and forecast released this month by research firm Ambient Insight bolstered previous research in this area, showing that electronic learning, by dollar volume, reached $27.1 billion in 2009 and predicting this figure will nearly double that by 2014, with academic institutions leading the way.
International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology, iCTLT 2010, has attracted nearly 2000 registrants from three dozen countries. Co-hosted by ISTE and the Singapore Ministry of Education, the exciting program runs from March 2-6 and includes visits to "future schools" as well as workshops, "learning trails," and a rich exhibition hall.
NEC Display Solutions has rolled out two high-light-output LCD projectors designed for use in education, the NP 2200 with a brightness of 4,200 ANSI lumens and the NP 1200 with a brightness of 3,700 lumens.
Sonar Studios is attempting to take classroom stereoscopic projection to a new level with a system that combines two high-brightness, high-resolution LCoS multimedia projectors and integrates them with a self-contained, turnkey presentation suite.
Samsung Techwin this month introduced the SamCam 860, a 1.4 megapixel classroom document camera. The SamCam 860 also incorporates a number of video features for both capture and play.
Educational video game maker Tabula Digita will begin holding its 2010 Megabowl tournaments March 12 in New York City. The three statewide tournaments, to be held this spring in New York, Texas, and Florida, will bring together elementary and middle school students from throughout each state in video game competitions that will challenge, above all else, their skills in a variety of mathematical topics.
Three Texas school districts have recently moved to Certica Solutions' Certify software for internal data certification. Humble Independent School District (HISD) and Lamar Consolidated Independent School District (LCISD), both in the Houston area, and San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) said they chose Certify to improve the quality of the data reported to Texas Education Agency (TEA) under state reporting laws.
Cornwall-Lebanon School District of Lebanon, PA has deployed Panopto's CourseCast, a capture tool designed to record live presentations, such as classroom lectures and student presentations, in a searchable digital format. Panopto makes CourseCast available to educational institutions free of charge through its Socrates Project.
A new report describes the New York City school system’s efforts since 2002 to close large comprehensive high schools and replace them with 200 new small schools.
Few analyses have been conducted on past state efforts to overhaul teacher-tenure policies, concludes a report that recommends ways states, districts, and unions might approach the issue.
On average, fewer than half of the American Indian and Alaska Native students in 12 states graduate from high school, says a report released last month.
Living in poverty before age 5 can have a critical impact on children’s earnings trajectories 30 years later, according to a study in the January/February issue of Child Development.
Not all low-performing schools are alike, says a new report that offers a framework to help educators, policymakers, and advocates direct attention to the schools that need it most.
But the drive by some schools to offer the college-level classes to more and younger students has raised some eyebrows and led to worries that the standards for the program might be lowered.
The ads—produced by the Connecticut Education Association—show teachers hard at work preparing for class, meeting with parents and often putting in many hours behind the scenes.
A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project focuses on the ways Americans access news. According to the report, an "overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms on a typical day" including broadcast, print and online sources. Thirty-seven percent of internet users in the study "contributed to the creation of news" through comments, tagging, writing posts, linking, etc, slightly more than the 33% of cell phone users who accessed news from their mobile phone.
Congratulations to long-time ISTE member and winner of ISTE's first annual Public Policy Advocate of the Year, Dr. Sheryl Abshire, on her appointment to the federal governing board of the Universal Services Administrative Company (USAC). Among its duties, the USAC oversees the e-rate program. Abshire is the Chief Technology Officer for Calcasieu (LA) Parish Public Schools.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $15 million to a new Harvard University program designed to help build the capacity of state and school district leaders to analyze and use data for improving student achievement.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last week to take up an issue stemming from the case of a California teacher and her husband who were wrongfully accused of child abuse.
The Philadelphia school district has transferred some students involved in attacking Asian students at South Philadelphia High School to disciplinary programs or other schools.
Los Angeles’ board of education has voted to reject a number of applications from charter school operators, choosing instead to hand control of nearly 30 schools to nonprofit educational groups.
The union is filing a complaint against Gov. Linda Lingle, claiming that she didn’t fulfill a commitment to use the state’s savings to end school closures because of furloughs.
The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether a Massachusetts special-needs school violates federal disability laws by disciplining students with electric-shock therapy.
As a Colorado math teacher was being hailed a hero for tackling a school shooter, there was growing evidence the school missed a chance to head off the attack.
Civil rights groups sued the Los Angeles Unified School District and California last week, claiming thousands of teacher layoffs will deprive inner-city children of their right to an education.