Test scores offer reality check for Villaraigosa's schools

There are some gains but overall the results fall short of the L.A. mayor's original rhetoric suggesting he could deliver rapid improvement. The story was similar at Locke High, a charter school.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa learned a major lesson in school reform Tuesday: It's hard to fix failing schools in Los Angeles, even those under his purview.

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CourseSmart’s eTextbook App for the iPhone

CourseSmart’s eTextbook App for the iPhone
So much excitement about the iPhone! CourseSmart just announced the release of its free eTextbooks application on the App Store. The eTextbooks App allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbooks whenever and wherever they want. “We’ve seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content [...]

So much excitement about the iPhone! CourseSmart just announced the release of its free eTextbooks application on the App Store. The eTextbooks App allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbooks whenever and wherever they want.

“We’ve seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod touch,” said Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart. “It’s important to students to be able to access textbook content in color with the same page layout as a printed textbook and now the eTextbooks App allows them to do that.”

According to the press release, the iPhone App:

Provides any time, anywhere access to the eTextbooks students have purchased online at www.coursesmart.com[link].

–Enables students to easily browse, search, and read thousands of textbooks from their iPhone or iPod touch.

–Preserves the carefully laid out pages giving students quick and easy access to not only the full text but essential content such as diagrams, illustrations and charts.

–Allows students to “stack” all of their textbooks in the “My eTextbooks” personal, online library.

–Students can search for a topic within a single book or across their entire eTextbook stack, view text notes, access the table of contents, zoom in on text, graphs, and scroll through or jump to individual pages.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Zeroes And Ones

One of my last classes at ********* College focused exclusively on US-China trade, currency, interest rates, inflation, deficits and debt. It’s a dense topic to teach in any meaningful way in under two hours, but the reaction of the class afterwards reassured me that what I was trying to get across had been absorbed: they were, to a person, horrified. The long and short of it, as you know, is this: the US economy is worth around $14 trillion. The budget deficit (the difference each year be Read more ...