With the popularity of electronic reading devices on the rise, and a handful of colleges set to pilot Amazon.com’s Kindle DX this fall, a new eBook reading device from New York-based Interead, called the COOL-ER, offers a less expensive alternative that its creator, Neil Jones, says educators could find appealing. “I thought about what readers need from an eBook
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Cheaper eBook reader challenges Kindle – Maya T. Prabhu, eSchool News
The Department of Education, starting this week will allow anyone with a federal student loan to apply for a program which will cap monthly payments based on income, and forgive remaining balances after 25 years. Loans can even be forgiven after 10 years for those in the public service. Eligibility for the income-based repayment (IBR) is determined by the size of the loan, and income of the borrower
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New Program Can Help Manage or Eliminate Student Debt
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained more than $100 billion for education, including $40 billion to stabilize state education budgets and $5 billion in discretionary money for incentive grants. The law calls for states to pursue reforms in four areas (raising academic standards, rewarding effective teachers, improving struggling schools, and collecting data on student and teacher performance), and Education Secretary Arne Duncan has warned that he will withhold stimulus dollars from states that don’t follow through. But since the ARRA was enacted in February, many states’ budget woes have gotten worse, and states such as California, Texas and Ohio are contemplating deep cuts in education programs and widespread teacher layoffs to balance their ailing budgets.
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What’s The Best Use Of Stimulus Money?
Clearly, we have to preserve jobs and drive school improvements. Let’s do a little experiment about trying one but not the other. Imagine if we use the stimulus funds to help a school district buy all the necessary materials to implement a solid, content-rich curriculum that has been shown to provide students with a high-quality comprehensive education, but then we fail to prevent massive teacher layoffs in the district, which means class sizes rise to unmanageable levels.
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Randi Weingarten responded to What’s The Best Use Of Stimulus Money? on July 2, 2009 03:34 PM
As frontline educators, we know a child is more than a test score. We go to work every day for the privilege of educating the next generation of lawyers, plumbers, farmers, educators, engineers and, yes, presidents, while at the same time striving to make public schools centers of excellence. Yet, under the main federal education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, students are viewed as test scores at the expense of preparing them with 21st century skills, while states are playing games with academic standards in order to meet their annual benchmarks
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Dennis Van Roekel responded to What’s The Best Use Of Stimulus Money? on July 23, 2009 01:24 PM
The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software. “What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project
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$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC – David Talbot, Technology Review
General education courses as students know them now are undergoing change.A team of UA instructors and software programmers is currently developing an online writing course that will soon be paired with general education classes across campus. The course will be introduced as a one-credit supplement to the typical three-credit general education class. It is intended to provide an interactive and self-paced online environment in which students’ writing skills are diagnosed and improved
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UA adds writing credit via online learning to gen-ed system – Ben Korta, Daily Wildcat
The OU’s concept of distance learning began a genuine revolution in access to higher education that continues four decades onThe Labour prime minister Harold Wilson described the creation of the Open University in 1969 as the greatest achievement of his premiership. Four decades later, on the Open University’s 40th birthday, Wilson seems not only right, but right in ways he could not have imagined. In 1969, when only 5% of Britons got a higher education and more than half of UK employees had no qualifications, the OU was a hugely innovative idea.
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Online Learning History: The Open University – 40 today, and a genius for our times – UTV
Mobile internet and social networking have found their way into the everyday lives of those on campus but have not yet followed university students and teachers into the classroom, a think-tank has claimed. A report published today by Demos argues that technology needs to become better ingrained into universities’ thinking about teaching and the student experience. It came as the Government announced a new task force that will aim to make UK higher education the first choice across the world for online distance learning.
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Online technology revolution stops at classroom doors, report says – Rebecca Attwood, Times Higher Education UK
UK universities need to make better use of technology or risk losing their pre-eminent standing in global education, according to research for education body Jisc.“Technology is changing universities as they become just one source among many for ideas, knowledge and innovation. But online learning tools and open access also offer the means for their survival,” says the report.
The meta analysis showed that “blended” instruction – combining elements of online and face-to-face instruction – had a larger advantage relative to purely face to face instruction or instruction conducted wholly online. The analysis also showed that the instruction conducted wholly on line was more effective in improving student achievement than the purely face to face instruction
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US Dept of Ed Study: Both Blended and Online Learning Better than Face to Face