Sunday, November 30, 2008

Lake Living: Two lake-area public schools recognized by U.S. Department of Education

Six North Carolina public schools were recently named 2008 No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon Schools by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

Read more ...

Sex Education by Phua Chu Kang

(It's a bit blue&stupid.. but funny) dun tell me rude just for fun.. enjoy it..SURE LAUGH!! Read the rest ...

Be ready to shovel that sidewalk (really)

Walkers know the sidewalk snow season is almost upon us. This year may be a little easier for local foot travel, thanks to a resolution passed overwhelmingly by Town Meeting this month. The measure consolidates enforcement under the Police Department and asks that it be proactive rather than complaint-based. This means officers out on other business can issue citations for ... Read more ...

The Fuss--Resources for Learning about RSS

I found this listing of rss workshops, tutorials, and information on the University of British Columbia Wiki. The information included in The Fuss really does convey what all the fuss is about when it comes to using rich site syndication feeds to keep up with postings from diverse sources across the Web. Next to using e-mail and search engines in browsers, the ability to acquire and organize rss feeds is a primary information literacy skill for students, instructors, and all others who visit the wonderful world of the Web. At the same site also consult Intro to RSS. (These pages at UBC are maintained by Brian Lamb.) ____JH

_____

IntroToRSS - a long scrolling page with pretensions of primer-hood.

  • What's TheFuss with RSS? - a really long scrolling page of resources and tutorials about [our favorite three letter acronym].
  • Intro
  • Why the fuss?
  • What is RSS?
  • Viewing RSS Content
  • Cookie Time
  • Connecting Learning Objects via RSS
  • Implementations
  • Q&A




Read more ...

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Maine woman loses appeal on vehicle taxes

The state supreme court has denied the appeal of a Dedham woman who failed to register her car and pay excise taxes after living in Maine for two years. Read more ...

South Los Angeles high school still reeling after lockdown

South Los Angeles high school still reeling after lockdown
Manual Arts was locked down Friday after reports of a gunman on campus. Staff and students say there was little communication about what was going on, and many had no access to restrooms or food.

Teachers and students at Manual Arts High School were still reeling Monday after they said they spent up to seven hours with no official information or, in some cases, access to a bathroom or food after a reported gunman was seen on campus.

Concord taps Milton's Hardy

Concord taps Milton's Hardy
After a seven-month search, Concord Academy has named a longtime Milton Academy educator as its next head of school.

Friday, November 28, 2008

online shopping for collectibles gifts

Easy and secure shopping for gifts, DVDs, Christian music, books, collectibles, jewelry, educational toys, games, t-shirts, electronics, computers, software, and more. Browse our online store for bargain prices on top brand names. Read more ...

LectureShare

This site provides a free course management system for students and teachers. The courses can be made private or public. LectureShare is very accessible with easy registration steps and easy-to-use course features which include a Gradebook, Announcements, and Lecture Uploading. Use the Available Courses section to search or browse the courses. Consult the recent review of LectureShare in THE Journal. ____JH

_____
"LectureShare lets instructors post lecture notes to their students, or the world, quickly and easily. Simply create an account, create your course, and in only minutes you can be posting announcements, documents, and media that your students can easily access. There's no frustrating software to learn and no course web page to maintain. We feel instructors time is best spent with students, not struggling with problematic course management software or maintaining their own webpage. We hope to bring a new level of simplicity and flexibility to the course management idea. We currently allow students to aggregate multiple courses under one account and take advantage of course notifications by e-mail, SMS text message, or RSS feed. This is only the beginning and we hope to develop many more features."
Read more ...

Daughter of Chief Justice of Pakistan gets special favors

Daughter of Chief Justice of Pakistan gets special favors
Daughter of Chief Justice of Pakistan gets special favors in her grade 12 exam.Against all rules, Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, gives her additional marks.

Day Trading is High Risk High Reward Investing - Not For the

The stock market can be a way to make or loose large amounts of money overnight. Proper education can help but however you invest in the market there is always some degree of risk. Weather you are making a long term investment on a reputable company or day trading stocks you have never heard of the stock market is risky business. Continue reading ...

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Web-Based Mind Mapping

Web-Based Mind Mapping
Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

______

"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.
 
Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."

Facts About College Grants And More

Facts About College Grants And More
There are thousands of students out there who want to attend colleges because they are able to realize the benefits higher education could do to their future. However, not all of them could afford as going to college could be very expensive not only in terms of tuition alone but all the other expenses that accompanies it as well.

Wayne County news in brief: Man charged with murder in arson

A 25-year-old Belleville man was arraigned in 34th District Court in Romulus Thursday in connection with the Tuesday arson and death of an 89-year-old woman.

Read the rest ...

The West as scapegoat

The modern definition of a scapegoat is similar to that of a fall guy, the one on whom blame is placed, deflecting the blame from the true culprit. Last night we saw the city of Mumbai go up in flames as Islamist terrorists sought out Westerners in the Indian city that most emulates the capitalist system that is both loathed and envied in the Muslim world. Islam is a system that promises or implies success in this world, allowing adherents to go out and take what they want, or their due, from Continue reading ...

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Obama: costly stimulus needed to jolt economy

Obama: costly stimulus needed to jolt economy
President-elect Barack Obama promised on Monday to jolt the faltering U.S. economy with a costly stimulus package next year and introduced the team that will help him navigate the global financial crisis.

Bristol Official Warns Of Fiscal Disaster For Urban Schools

Bristol Official Warns Of Fiscal Disaster For Urban Schools

Warning that education in Connecticut's cities faces impending disaster, the chief of the Bristol school system is calling on state lawmakers to suspend standardized testing, shorten the school year and ...


DiRT: the Digital Research Tools Wiki

This Wiki page will be of continuing value to researchers at many levels--students, instructors, and librarians. The purpose of the site is to provide short evaluative descriptions of useful software. The software is listed in categories (from Authoring to Mapping to Utilities for easy browsing. The resources are also searchable. ____JH (Via Jane Park's post in Creative Commons.)

_____
"As digital information proliferates, researchers need tools to find, organize, manipulate, analyze, and share it. But how do you keep up with the hundreds of tools that can help you to be more efficient and innovative and find the ones best for you? Digital Research Tools (DiRT) brings together snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers--professors, students, think-tankers, teachers, librarians, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks--do their work better. We do our best to keep our reviews clear and straightforward rather than full of jargon. We also group tools into categories so that researchers can identify relevant ones more easily. We cover a range of software, including tools to help you manage and share your bookmarks, create bibliographies, analyze and visualize texts, brainstorm, collaborate, collect data, etc. Although we generally prefer tools that are free (open source is even better), we also cover software that comes with a price tag (if seems to be worth the money)."

"The Digital Research Tools team currently includes academic librarians with expertise in the humanities, science, and business. We welcome new contributors--contact Lisa Spiro at lspiro@rice.edu if you're interested."

Read the rest ...

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Another Listing of Sites for OERs

Tony Bates' listing of OER sites adds yet another useful selection to an ever-growing collection of annotated listings. ____JH

 "Whatever happened to learning objects? Well, they've been replaced (or rather swallowed up) by open educational resources. Increasingly, more and more institutions are making online educational resources and course materials available free of charge for educational or non-profit purposes. So will content be free in education in the future? I think this deserves a blog entry to itself! (to come). In the meantime, I list here web sites that provide access to free material." Continue reading ...

Teachers' Domain

Teachers' Domain
Teachers' Domain is a one-stop site for collected media resources from public television. Registration is required, but is free. The site is divided into Teachers' Domain for K-12 resources and Teachers' Domain College Edition for higher education resources. The materials in Teachers' Domain can be searched by keywords or browsed under broad subject areas. To switch from the K-12 to the College Edition click on the "Change Editions" link at the bottom the the search page. ___JH

_____

"Teachers' Domain is an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from the best in public television. These classroom resources, featuring media from NOVA, Frontline, Design Squad, American Experience, and other public broadcasting and content partners are easy to use and correlate to state and national standards.

Teachers' Domain resources include video and audio segments, Flash interactives, images, documents, lesson plans for teachers, and student-oriented activities. Once you register, you can personalize the site using 'My Folders' and 'My Groups' to save your favorite resources into a folder and share them with your colleagues or students.

Teachers' Domain strives to strengthen teacher knowledge by providing innovative teaching methods that incorporate technology in the classroom and inspire students to learn."



Bush plans to become a librarian after retirement

Bush plans to become a librarian after retirement
Laura Bush the American first lady addressed to a Spanish magazine that President Bush will work as a librarian after retirement and she will return to her previous educational/lectureship field and she will also make effort for the rights of Afghan Women.

Web Science

This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)

_____
"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."

"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."

Continue reading ...

Monday, November 24, 2008

Biographical information on Lawrence Summers

NAME -- Lawrence H. Summers. AGE-BIRTH DATE-LOCATION -- 53; Nov. 30, 1954; New Haven, Conn. Read the rest ...

Bristol Official Warns Of Fiscal Disaster For Urban Schools

Warning that education in Connecticut's cities faces impending disaster, the chief of the Bristol school system is calling on state lawmakers to suspend standardized testing, shorten the school year and ...

Read the rest ...

Raleigh County School Receives Exemplary School Status

Raleigh County School Receives Exemplary School Status

This is the third time the Academy of Careers and Technology made the grade. Story by Alicia Suka Email Other Stories by Alicia Suka BECKLEY- -- It's a three-peat performance for teachers and students at a ...


Sunday, November 23, 2008

Maryland Says Schools Improving

The number of Maryland public schools that met federal No Child Left Behind standards rose significantly in the 2007-2008 school year, state education officials said Friday.

Continue reading ...

UC and Cal State warn that fees may increase

UC plans a 9.4% hike, not including books and housing. Cal State seeks to avoid a 10% increase by obtaining more public funding.

California's two public university systems are warning that student fees could increase about 10% next year, and maybe more, if the state's dire budget situation does not improve. Continue reading ...

At vocational schools, suspensions are down

While the number of students who have been suspended from public schools over the past few years has remained relatively constant, some local districts - particularly vocational technical schools - have bucked the trend and cut their rates, sometimes sharply. Read more ...

Expelled Student Sues Classmate Over Accusations of Plagiarism

A student expelled from Central Connecticut State University for plagiarism claims he was wrongly accused, and that another student really copied his work.

Read more ...

Saturday, November 22, 2008

UC and Cal State warn that fees may increase

UC and Cal State warn that fees may increase
UC plans a 9.4% hike, not including books and housing. Cal State seeks to avoid a 10% increase by obtaining more public funding.

California's two public university systems are warning that student fees could increase about 10% next year, and maybe more, if the state's dire budget situation does not improve.

Radio Host Has Drug Company Ties

Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, a psychiatrist, earned income from drug makers that he didn’t report on his show. Continue reading ...

Open Fire Academy Takes Firefighter Education Mobile

The Open Fire Academy, International launched it's new mobile site. Now students and instructors can access their classes and participate using their web-enabled cell phone or pda, as if they were at a computer. Visit the service at: http://m.openfireacademy.org from your mobile device. Read the rest ...

Friday, November 21, 2008

No hint on school funding plan

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland gave little hint of how he intends to fix Ohio's unconstitutional school-funding process at a forum last night on financing public education. Read more ...

Zimbabwe: School System Crumbles

Stanley Kwenda Harare Glen View 5 Primary School in one of Harare's high-density suburbs is deserted.

Read more ...

Panel approves closure of 6 schools

Panel approves closure of 6 schools
The Boston School Committee last night approved vacating six elementary school buildings next year and expanding other academic programs as it tries to cut costs and improve school quality.

Guard Richardson eager for Illini signing day

Guard D.J. Richardson still looked forward to signing his letter of intent with Illinois basketball today, the first day of the early signing period.

Read the rest ...

Thursday, November 20, 2008

SF Bay Area Mayors Announce Coordinated Policies to Accelerate Establishment of EV Infrastructure; Better Place to Enter US Market in California

Better Place introduced a second EV prototype to work with its infrastructure: the Better Place Rogue, based on the Nissan Rogue crossover SUV. Click to enlarge. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums announced a nine-point policy plan to establish a pervasive infrastructure to transform the SF Bay Area into the “Electric Vehicle (EV) Capital of the US”. In conjunction with the news, Better Place announced that it would enter the US market with Read the rest ...

State legislators taking high-paying higher education posts (Sun-Sentinel)

New Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom, R-Destin, has been hired for a $110,000-a-year job as a vice president for Northwest Florida State College -- the latest in a string of legislators to take high-paying higher education posts at schools they have some hand overseeing. Continue reading ...

Solon suggests sex education for bishops (Philippine Daily Inquirer)

MANILA, Philippines—Join sex education workshops and orientation sessions. Continue reading ...

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Education workers to take unpaid leave

South Carolina Education Department employees must take five days of unpaid leave by the end of June - the latest example of how agencies around the state are dealing with the slumping economy - officials said ...

Read more ...

Web Science

Web Science
This article in the Online Newsletter of the Association for Learning Technology reports on the initiative to establish a new concentration of science and scholarship focused on how the Web functions and how to improve Web operations. ___JH (Thanks to TL Infobits for this reference.)

_____
"To promote Web Science and explore its emerging agenda, a joint endeavour between the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was set up in 2006, called the Web Science Research Initiative (webscience.org). WSRI’s mission is to foster the fundamental advances required for the Web’s continued growth. In particular, WSRI is focusing on steering the development of the Web Science discipline, running a series of workshops and looking at the lines of an academic curriculum for teaching Web Science. There will be an International Web Science Conference held in Athens, Greece, in 2009 – hopefully the first of many – as well as a new journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science."

"Web Science is not just modelling the current Web. It is about engineering new infrastructure protocols by using scientific and technological tools from many disciplines to understand the human society that uses them, to create beneficial new systems – which may involve extremely radical thinking about both technology and society (Shneiderman 2007). Such new engineering must respect the invariants of the Web experience: decentralisation to avoid bottlenecks and allow increases of scale; serendipitous reuse of information; fairness, openness and trust. In this way, the Web will remain a technology that enhances human society, and supports human aspiration."


White community adapts to Obama reality

White community adapts to Obama reality
Worried by racial tensions churned up by the U.S. presidential election, teachers at one U.S. high school braced for the worst in their majority white community the morning after Barack Obama was elected the country's first black president.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Chomsky at the bit

Let's set aside the sticky little journalistic concept of objectivity for a minute, shall we? After all, when you listen to famed linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky, you're going to hear powerful arguments from one side: his. But you'll also get his thoughtful and impassioned reasons why he thinks he's correct. Read more ...

Back Pain Relief - How to Get It

Is There A Treatment? At one time or another everyone is looking for some back pain relief, whether they have had chronic pain issues, an injury, or an accident. The right treatment for that back pain depends on several factors including the cause of the pain, the severity of the pain, and the health and [...] Continue reading ...

Making new preparations

To watch the crowd in the president's office at Northeastern University yesterday, one could easily have thought they were celebrating good news, but that would have been mistaken. Read more ...

Obama May Delay Education Overhaul

Critics of the Bush administration's education policies had hoped that putting a Democrat in the White House would mean dramatic changes, including the potential scrapping of the No Child Left Behind law and ...

Read more ...

Monday, November 17, 2008

College Loan Corporation and Regent Form Strategic Alliance

Frederick, MD (Vocus) June 25, 2007 -- www.regenteducation.com [Regent Education], the leading provider of financial aid management software solutions for higher education institutions, today... Continue reading ...

Stanford Engineering Everywhere

Stanford is making core courses in computer programming and engineering available for free to non-registered students. This offering is a fine opportunity for self-guided students and for students and instructors in other institutions to share Stanford's intellectual resources. ___JH (Thanks to Free Culture News for this reference.)
____

"For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford's most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford's undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering."

Example:

Introduction to Computer Science | Programming Methodology



Instructor: Sahami, Mehran







This course is the largest of the introductory programming courses and is one of the largest courses at Stanford. Topics focus on the introduction to the engineering of computer applications emphasizing modern software engineering principles: object-oriented design, decomposition, encapsulation, abstraction, and testing.
Programming Methodology teaches the widely-used Java programming language along with good software engineering principles. Emphasis is on good programming style and the built-in facilities of the Java language. The course is explicitly designed to appeal to humanists and social scientists as well as hard-core techies. In fact, most Programming Methodology graduates end up majoring outside of the School of Engineering.

Prerequisites: The course requires no previous background in programming, but does require considerable dedication and hard work.
Course Image


Read the rest ...

Drexel University Leader in Education Named Penn Educator of the Year

Read the rest ...

Father and 14-year-old son write about rare bird

Father and 14-year-old son write about rare bird
The lead author of an article about finches nesting on a Peruvian glacier in a scholarly bird journal is affiliated with the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Guard Richardson eager for Illini signing day

Guard Richardson eager for Illini signing day

Guard D.J. Richardson still looked forward to signing his letter of intent with Illinois basketball today, the first day of the early signing period.


Report cites mistakes in L.A. Unified's handling of suspected child molester

No current employee is directly blamed. Administrators refuse to disclose what disciplinary action was taken in the case of Steve Thomas Rooney.

A confidential investigation into how a suspected child molester was assigned to a Los Angeles Unified School District middle school has concluded that no current employee was directly to blame, even though several made mistakes. The report itself has been criticized, as has the response of the district, which declined to disclose what, if any, disciplinary action resulted. Read more ...

Write Or Die V2.0

Write Or Die V2.0
Anyone who has more writing to do than motivation to get it done should check out Write or Die from Dr. Wicked, who claims to “put the ‘prod’ in productivity.” Write or Die is a lovely little web application that implements the Psych 101 principles of Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement to get the [...]

Anyone who has more writing to do than motivation to get it done should check out Write or Die from Dr. Wicked, who claims to “put the ‘prod’ in productivity.” Write or Die is a lovely little web application that implements the Psych 101 principles of Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement to get the writer’s ass in gear.

The writer sets a word count goal, a time goal, whether they want the grace period to be Forgiving, Strict or Evil, and then chooses the level of negative consequences: Gentle, Normal, Kamikaze, or Electric Shock (sadly, that one’s not actually selectable). Then the writer just has to start typing words in the box until the goals are met.

If writing stops, the negative consequences begin. In Gentle Mode, a little box pops up reminding you to keep writing. In Normal Mode, a really grating song starts playing and you will have it in your head for the remainder of the week. And in Kamikaze Mode, if you stop writing, your text begins deleting itself. A little bit evil, but it could certainly help anyone with procrastination issues.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image credit


Saturday, November 15, 2008

An intellectual makeover for Iran women

Reporting from Tehran -- In her eyes, they are all daughters and sisters. The waifish 18-year-old, already married and a mother, but with a hunger to learn.

Read more ...

Education workers to take unpaid leave

Education workers to take unpaid leave

South Carolina Education Department employees must take five days of unpaid leave by the end of June - the latest example of how agencies around the state are dealing with the slumping economy - officials said ...


Helping kids understand family finances

Not long ago, Marcelo Felisberto overheard an exchange between his two sons that made him glow with pride. Continue reading ...

Pearson Education's OnMicrosoft Podcasts Provide New Learning Tool

Pearson Education's OnMicrosoft Podcasts Provide New Learning Tool

Friday, November 14, 2008

LectureShare

This site provides a free course management system for students and teachers. The courses can be made private or public. LectureShare is very accessible with easy registration steps and easy-to-use course features which include a Gradebook, Announcements, and Lecture Uploading. Use the Available Courses section to search or browse the courses. Consult the recent review of LectureShare in THE Journal. ____JH

_____
"LectureShare lets instructors post lecture notes to their students, or the world, quickly and easily. Simply create an account, create your course, and in only minutes you can be posting announcements, documents, and media that your students can easily access. There's no frustrating software to learn and no course web page to maintain. We feel instructors time is best spent with students, not struggling with problematic course management software or maintaining their own webpage. We hope to bring a new level of simplicity and flexibility to the course management idea. We currently allow students to aggregate multiple courses under one account and take advantage of course notifications by e-mail, SMS text message, or RSS feed. This is only the beginning and we hope to develop many more features."
Read the rest ...

Philadelphia's Chinatown seeks to keep out casino

Philadelphia's Chinatown seeks to keep out casino
Many who live and work in the city's small but vibrant Chinatown were dismayed and angered, but not surprised, when state and city officials backed a proposal to move a planned slot machine parlor to their doorstep.

Online Masters Degree In Education Online Master's In Educat

An accredited online colleges master's degree in Education and Educational Leadership is designed to provide an opportunity to study those who can not attend on campus classes. Continue reading ...

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Britain's Leading Educational Paper in£5 Million Relaunch

Britain's Leading Educational Paper in£5 Million Relaunch
(PRWEB) November 10, 2006 -- Britain's leading educational newspaper, the Times Educational Supplement launches in a new format today boosted by a£5 million revamp that covers the print...

Education Center Online Celebrates Black History Month - Offering Online Education for People of All Races

Education Center Online Celebrates Black History Month - Offering Online Education for People of All Races

In poor economy, expect surge in applications to state schools

In poor economy, expect surge in applications to state schools
Q. Do you think that applications to state universities will be up this year with the economy in such trouble? What should a high school senior in the process of applying to college expect this year, given the current financial mess?

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Economic Crisis Hits Colleges In Pennsylvania

The economic crisis is making deeper inroads into higher education. As students scramble to find loans to pay for college, colleges in Pennsylvania are scrambling to find money for financial aid while staving off budget cuts. Continue reading ...

Decision may threaten Mo. school workers' benefits

A new decision from the Social Security Administration could jeopardize retirement benefits for thousands of Missouri public school employees. Read the rest ...

DiRT: the Digital Research Tools Wiki

This Wiki page will be of continuing value to researchers at many levels--students, instructors, and librarians. The purpose of the site is to provide short evaluative descriptions of useful software. The software is listed in categories (from Authoring to Mapping to Utilities for easy browsing. The resources are also searchable. ____JH (Via Jane Park's post in Creative Commons.)

_____
"As digital information proliferates, researchers need tools to find, organize, manipulate, analyze, and share it. But how do you keep up with the hundreds of tools that can help you to be more efficient and innovative and find the ones best for you? Digital Research Tools (DiRT) brings together snapshot reviews of software that can help researchers--professors, students, think-tankers, teachers, librarians, corporate intelligence gatherers, and other inquisitive folks--do their work better. We do our best to keep our reviews clear and straightforward rather than full of jargon. We also group tools into categories so that researchers can identify relevant ones more easily. We cover a range of software, including tools to help you manage and share your bookmarks, create bibliographies, analyze and visualize texts, brainstorm, collaborate, collect data, etc. Although we generally prefer tools that are free (open source is even better), we also cover software that comes with a price tag (if seems to be worth the money)."

"The Digital Research Tools team currently includes academic librarians with expertise in the humanities, science, and business. We welcome new contributors--contact Lisa Spiro at lspiro@rice.edu if you're interested."

Continue reading ...

Certain Qualifications Can Achieve Student Loan Forgiveness

by Michael Geoffrey In the vast majority of cases, individuals who decide to take out student loans in order to pay for the expenses the incur while getting their college education will have to start making payments on those loans six months are they have graduated from college. Even though there are some ways to qualify for student loan forgiveness, this is not like asking for forgiveness from your mother when you were a kid. In order to qualify for student loan forgiveness you will have to me Read more ...

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Quantum Leap in Education -- Fast, Free and Personalized

A Quantum Leap in Education -- Fast, Free and Personalized
South Pasadena, CA (PRWEB) March 4, 2008 -- www.FreeWorldU.org [Free World U], the interactive Web site plus live teachers that provide the material needed to educate a person from preschool through...

What? Me Remember?

What? Me Remember?
Yes, today is Remembrance day. If you ride Public Transit here in Toronto, city of Light, you will notice a complete absence of those little red poppies. Nobody much wears them here. Why should they? They are symbols of the dead white male culture of oppression that our aristocrats have worked so hard to destroy from within. Canada is a racist shithole, afterall. The last time I watched the CBC offering about Canadian military history, it was a documentary about some bloke from Alberta who

High school students head to the polls -- not as voters, but as volunteers

More than 4,200, some not even old enough to vote, work at L.A. County polling places through a program that gives them a first-hand look at the election process.

Amy Cohen was a bit nervous after the doors opened Tuesday at the Studio City church where she was volunteering for the first time as a poll worker. She is 18, a first-time voter, and the long line of people waiting to exercise their right to vote included her mother and brother. Plus, her father was working at the poll too. Read more ...

Monday, November 10, 2008

Three hate messages at Simmons prompt inquiry

Boston police and the FBI are helping Simmons College public safety officers to investigate three recent incidents of students receiving threatening hate messages at the college's dormitories, police and college officials said. Read the rest ...

ZaidLearn's OCW + OER Lists

ZaidLearn's OCW + OER Lists
Zaid Ali Alsagoff has revised his OCW/OER list compilation to produce an extremely useful update. Zaid's compilation should be bookmarked for reference by university instructors, students, and support staff. ______JH

______

University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!


- Zaid Ali Alsagoff ( [ZaidLearn]

GOP a dying breed in New England

A generation ago the Republican Party was the dominant political force in New England, populating the region's Congressional delegations with moderates like Connecticut's Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and Rhode Island's John Chafee. Continue reading ...

2 Arizona universities on magazine's best-value list

2 Arizona universities on magazine's best-value list

November 03, 2008, 3:24 p.m. The Arizona Republic Two Arizona schools have made the annual list of 100 Best Values in Public Colleges.


Sunday, November 9, 2008

Web-Based Mind Mapping

Web-Based Mind Mapping
Robin Good writes enthusiastically about the benefits of web-based mind-mapping, with a special focus on MindMeister (which is free in its basic version). Robin also includes links to other mind-mapping tools. The mind maps that I create are most often done with a pencil and a yellow pad, but there are advantages in using a shareable, web-based tool such as MindMeister. From a very, very broad perspective all online educational resources can be viewed as variations of a mind or topic map. _____JH

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"Web-Based Mind-Mapping: Outline, Plan and Brainstorm Ideas Together With MindMeister. If you are looking to find an effective way to collaborate, brainstorm, visualize and plan ideas collaboratively online, much beyond what voice and text chat can do, it is the time you give a good try to the mind-mapping experience.
 
Thanks to unforgettable MasterNewMedia editor Antonella Pastore, who first covered mindmaps in 2004 (!), mindmaps have been on my radar for quite some time, but with the recent advent of online, collaboratively editable mindmaps the opportunities to reap significant benefit from these tools has just exploded.

The great thing about collaborative, web-based mind-maps is the ease with which you can visualize spatially while giving very precise text labels to ideas, tasks, projects and to the relationships between them. These two characteristics by themselves when mixed with ability to watch and edit in real-time the same visual map with others creates a truly effective, useful and memorable way of collaborating productively at a distance."

69 Learning Adventures

Zaid Ali Alsagoff has organized and edited 69 postings from his weblog Zaidlearn at the ePublishing site Scribd. Zaid's eBook provides many links and many valuable perspectives on the worlds of learning that are available on the Web. ____JH

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After a lot of filtering, I have settled for 69 learning nuggets posted on ZaidLearn, which I believe readers might find useful to their own learning. To make it a bit more convenient to find what you are looking for, I have divided the book into six learning galaxies (or themes), which are:
  • Learning
  • Teaching
  • Stories
  • Free e-Learning Tools
  • Free Learning Content
  • Free EduGames

Read more ...

Vacancies as Teachers, Counselor, Librarian, Accountant

Vacancies as Teachers, Counselor, Librarian, Accountant
Sekolah Mentari and Sekolah Mentari Citra are growing national plus schools that offer quality education. Due to our expansion we have vacancies in the following priorities in our preschool, elementary, junior and senior high school levels in Cipete and Bintaro in JUly 2009. Pre School Teacher English Teachers (expatriate to teach English, Literature, Humanities, Science) Bahasa Indonesia Teachers (to teach Bahasa Indonesia, Sastra Indonesia, Social Science, Mathematic, Biology, Physics, Chemi

OER Handbook for Educators

OER Handbook for Educators
The OER Handbook is an excellent resource and will undoubtedly continue to be revised and updated beyond this version one. Coverage includes everything from Finding and Adapting resources to Composing, Sharing, and Licensing resources. ____JH

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"Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom.

Although no prior knowledge of OER[1] is required, some experience using a computer and browsing the Internet will be helpful. For example, it is preferable that you have experience using a word processor (e.g. Open Office[2] or Microsoft Word) and basic media production software, such as an image editor (e.g. Gimp[3], Inkscape[4] or Photoshop).

The handbook works best when there is some sort of OER you would like to create or make available to others, but it is also useful for the curious reader."



Saturday, November 8, 2008

Edmund M. Burke, 80; dean at BC encouraged corporate citizenship

A corporation that moves into a town is just as much a resident as the family down the street, Edmund M. Burke believed, and if the business wants to do well, it should become what he called a "neighbor of choice." Continue reading ...

Appeals court hears case of salt-poisoning child death

Appeals court hears case of salt-poisoning child death

A year after Hannah Overton began serving a sentence of life without parole for capital murder in the bizarre death of a 4-year-old boy, the 13th Court of Appeals was asked to overturn the verdict.


Half of Cambridge Students Say Cheating is Okay

An anonymous study reveals that almost half of students attending England's prestigious Cambridge University have plagiarized a paper; the percentage is even higher for law students.

Continue reading ...

Friday, November 7, 2008

Patrick fills out members of ethics commission

Patrick fills out members of ethics commission
The new ethics reform panel being created by Gov. Deval Patrick will include Republicans and Democrats, government insiders and outsiders.

PLAN test is next week for PCHS sophomores

PLAN test is next week for PCHS sophomores

Port Clinton High School will be offering the PLAN Test for sophomores, 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov.


For benefit concert, three singers play favorites

For benefit concert, three singers play favorites
Songs that have stood the test of time will test the endurance of three poised professionals who will take a Burlington audience on a musical journey this Saturday, from the arias of opera to the beat of Broadway to the sass of Liza and Judy.

In search for expertise, Harvard looms large

CAMBRIDGE - When Barack Obama sought advice before a critical Senate vote on the terrorist surveillance program earlier this year, he called his friend and former colleague Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. Continue reading ...

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Hard Work U - A FREE Alternative to skyrocketing tuition

At College of the Ozarks, you help to pay for your education in a way that actually enriches your learning! As a full-time student, either in residence or as a commuter taking 12 or more hours, you work 15 hours each week at your assigned campus work station. of over 80 diverse and fulfilling work areas. Read more ...

Peshawar children pay donation to Obama for peace

Peshawar children pay donation to Obama for peace
Peshawar : Pakistani schoolchildren who donated money for US presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign are demanding an end to bombings in the Tribal Areas, calling for the Democrat to “provide us education instead of bombing our land”. “Uncle Obama, we expect peace from you,” read a placard held by the group of nine children who donated $261.

Change is coming to sports, too, under Obama

It will take some time, maybe 1,000 days, to measure the full impact that President-elect Barack Obama will have on the world of sports, but we can already circle a couple of upcoming dates and make some educated guesses about his role in the games we play and watch. Continue reading ...

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

How To (Not) Screw Up The College Apps

How To (Not) Screw Up The College Apps
Here’s another you’d-best-take-note list of screw-ups high school students make when filling out their college applications. There are thirty-six ways to put a dent in your future on this one. Let’s be careful out there, kiddos. Posted by Alexa Harrington illustration: Katy Lemar

Here’s another you’d-best-take-note list of screw-ups high school students make when filling out their college applications. There are thirty-six ways to put a dent in your future on this one. Let’s be careful out there, kiddos.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

illustration: Katy Lemar


Healing America's sick schools

Healing America's sick schools
What's really wrong with the No child Left Behind law, and what the next president will have to do to correct it.

The Most Popular Online College Degrees

The Most Popular Online College Degrees
To learn more about the new and evolving opportunities for continuing education online, contact the admissions counselors to discuss their options. They know the trends and statisticshelping you choose the program you play for a university degree in a successful future.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Subscribe To The Sentinel

Subscribe To The Sentinel
The Sentinel is a free weekly inspirational/educational email that gives illuminating insights into topics such as liberty, prosperity, philosophy, and economics; provides motivation, direction, and counsel; and is an excellent way to share the critical teachings of liberty with family and friends.Click here to view archives of The Sentinel, and re

A Matter of Utmost Impotence

A Matter of Utmost Impotence
November is International Impotence Education Month

Middle Grades Boost Numbers Meeting Reading Goals Get Best Schools Lists

More Illinois public schools produced high-achieving readers in the middle grades on standardized tests this year.

Read more ...

Women's rights in Saudi Arabia Today

The condition of women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is really pathetic and it is a grim picture.A woman in the social, economic, educational and legal front is no more than a chattel and when we compare a woman in Saudi Arabia with women living elsewhere, she is lagging behind by many generations. Continue reading ...

Monday, November 3, 2008

Md. Keeps Required Graduation Tests

Maryland will not delay a requirement that this year's high school seniors pass standardized tests to graduate, a decision that means thousands of students must boost their scores or complete projects in the ...

Continue reading ...

NY state education commissioner to resign

New York state's education commissioner says he will resign by next June after a 13-year tenure in which he carried out one of the nation's most aggressive and expensive education reform efforts.

Richard Mills said in a statement Saturday that he leaves the system strong enough for new leadership.

The 63-year-old educator has implemented higher standards and expanded standardized testing throughout the state's diverse school districts.

Critics say Mills pushed too many so-called high-stakes tests required for graduation that forced some teachers to teach to the test, instead of providing a thorough understanding of subject matter.

Read more ...

California education leaders told to brace for big budget cuts

Educators say Arnold Schwarzenegger told them to prepare for immediate cuts of $2 billion to $4 billion. They say the governor also plans to keep pushing for a sales tax hike.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told education leaders Tuesday that he would push for a tax hike and deep cuts to schools to help close the state's yawning budget gap, according to several participants in a meeting with him. Read the rest ...

Paul Andrew's E-Learning Resources Guide

Paul Andrew's E-Learning Resources Guide
This is another useful compilation of e-learning resources, well-organized and thoughtfully selected. ____JH (Thanks to OL Daily for the citation.)

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"On this site you will find my favourite links to free on-line services that allow you to provide your students with enhanced learning opportunities which you can then embed into, or link from, your school/college/university's website, course blog or VLE/MLE.

For a site/service to be included here it must be:


  • Free
  • Easy to use
  • Produce high quality resources that can be used on any web enabled platform
Sites & services are arranged into the categories that you can see in the navigation menu the on the left, please click on one to get started.

Alternatively you can search this site using the search box at the top right of each page or click here to access the Sitemap."


Sunday, November 2, 2008

Informal Education

Informal Education
To state the obvious: Education is not just the formal classroom/teacher/textbook parts of one’s life. There’s also the being out in the world part, away from homework and exams, and continuing to deposit new information and ideas in one’s head. That’s an important phase, because unless you’ve managed to figure out how [...]

To state the obvious: Education is not just the formal classroom/teacher/textbook parts of one’s life. There’s also the being out in the world part, away from homework and exams, and continuing to deposit new information and ideas in one’s head. That’s an important phase, because unless you’ve managed to figure out how to get paid to go to school, at some point your formal education will com to an end, they will ask you to leave, and someone chucklehead will tell you to get a job and stop with the learning already. Which means that the majority of your life will be spent in the less formal, self-educating phase.

There are several ways to accomplish this independent knowledge absorption. Taking an interesting class or two is great if you have some extra time and superfluous cash. A cheaper option is removing yourself from your standard routine and spending a Saturday afternoon in a new place. Unfamiliar terrain and new input is good for the brain and you’re bound to learn something. And there’s my other favorite informal education option: books, which are free if you go to the library.

I adore books, and libraries are as close to a Cathedral Moment as I get. I spent my childhood and into my twenties collecting books. Before I hit thirty, I’d used up all the bookshelf space in my house. Because I refuse to end up an old woman surrounded by unsafely leaning stacks of books, that meant no more buying books or asking for books as gifts.

That’s a turn of events which would have sucked a lot more if I hadn’t re-discovered the public library. Now I’m a total library spaz and my husband makes fun of me for having the Seattle Public Library’s Web page as my browser’s homepage. I obsessively check my holds list and my checked-out items. I’m a dork I know, but it’s free books. How can you not love free books?

Penelope Trunk just wrote a post about how to not waste time by making bad book choices. Knowing your book likes and dislikes and what hasn’t worked for you in the past is good information to keep track of. However, I would also like to add a simple piece of wisdom my book-addict stepmother imparted to me.

First let me point out that my stepmother (who is not evil and whom I love very much) reads more books than I do, easily three times as many, possibly even four times as many. When I asked her once, in a cheerful and casual tone, if I could see her life book-list (all the books she’s read thus far) so I could copy it down and get some good book ideas, she laughed at me (not with me) and asked if I really thought I was ready for that. Which scared the crap out of me and I have never laid eyes on her list, nor have I ever asked to see it again. With any luck, she’ll die before I do and I’ll finally get a chance to look at the thing.

Enough with my morbid sense of humor; here’s her wisdom. I told her once that I tended to never give up on a book I’d started—I keep reading even if I’m not enjoying it. Some people can just read a few chapters, decide the book is not for them, and be done with it. Once I start, I feel like I should slog on through in case the wonderful bits are hidden in the last paragraph. My awesome stepmother said that she rarely gives up on a book. She said, “Even a book I really don’t like can teach me something.” My stepmother doesn’t tend to fill a room with words, so there’s not a lot to choose from. But that particular sentence is one of my favorites.

Other Book Lists (Not My Stepmother’s) With Which to Informally Educate Yourself:

Century of Books
The Guardian UK Observer’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
The Hugo Awards 1946-2008
The Hungry Mind Review’s 100 Best 20th Century Books
Library Journal’s Most Influential Fiction of the 20th Century

The Man Booker Prize List 1969-2007
Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books
Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels
The National Book Awards 1950-2007
National Book Critics Circle Award 1975-2006
Orange Prize for Fiction 1996-2007
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1981-1995
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1996-2007

And here’s the be-all, end-all mother lode of book lists: The Booklist Center. It will overwhelm you in less than five minutes but it’s totally worth it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington


Adult education

Adult education is the practice of teaching and educating adults. This often happens in the workplace, through 'extension' or 'continuing education' courses at secondary schools, at a college or university Read more ...

In the 2008 election, time to party like it's 1773

When the Boston Tea Party's presidential candidate Charles Jay went to register to vote in Florida this summer the clerk at the elections office wasn't sure what to do. Read the rest ...

Saturday, November 1, 2008

In the 2008 election, time to party like it's 1773

When the Boston Tea Party's presidential candidate Charles Jay went to register to vote in Florida this summer the clerk at the elections office wasn't sure what to do. Read the rest ...

Adult education

Adult education
Adult education is the practice of teaching and educating adults. This often happens in the workplace, through 'extension' or 'continuing education' courses at secondary schools, at a college or university

Hayden Panettiere wants your help!

Hayden Panettiere wants your help!
By Honey Gillard Hayden Panettiere no longer wants you to “save the cheerleader”, instead she wants YOUR help to “save the whales”. Just one-year after the ‘Heroes’ star stirred up much trouble in Japan by partaking in various anti-whaling rallies and initiatives, the actress has got back on ‘anti-whaling’ boat, this time asking for you to [...]

Texas Schools Plan to Alter High School Grading System

In an attempt to create a standardized GPA measurement, Texas' higher education commissioner proposes to modify the weighted grading system for advanced courses.

Read more ...