Educational News: ESL Students Using I-Pods

This article by Brittany Cooper of KMVT of Idaho discusses the use of Ipods by ESL students to improve their English language skills. It is very interesting. Here is a brief preview:

Currently there are I–Pods in a couple of specialty classrooms and one general class in the school, But the overall goal is to expand this technology.

"Today we're doing Hot Timing and they've practiced that. And they'll chart it," says ESL Teacher Loretta Crockett.

These ESL students are recording passages into individual I–Pods.

Crockett tells the students, "you're the teacher...Now listen to yourself."

The use of I–Pods in the ESL classroom provides a way to improve fluency among english language learners. They can read, record their passage quickly And then check themselves again.

Principal Matt Seely says, "it helps them self–correct so the teacher isn't always correcting them and I think it's a powerful tool."

AIU academy to mix online learning with work

This article is from Post Gazette 

Next fall, students who are interested in attending a cyber charter school will have a new option -- one that combines online learning with workplace experiences.

The Allegheny Intermediate Unit this week announced the formation of the STREAM Academy, a K-12 cyber school that will focus on science, technology, research, engineering, arts and mathematics, during an event at its Homestead headquarters. The event was attended by education and business leaders along with academy and AIU staff.

The new school is an offshoot of the Pennsylvania Learners Online, the online cyber charter school the AIU operates.

Cisco and University of Phoenix Team Up to Deliver New Network Programs for Students

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal

 University of Phoenix today announced an agreement with Cisco that will create new programs dedicated to providing the body of knowledge needed to attain the Cisco CCNA(R) certification. Cisco is an industry leader in network support, and the associate-level CCNA certification is vital to those seeking to enter or advance in the high-growth field of system networking and support.

Job growth for network administrators, network support specialists and computer network architects is projected to grow by more than 20 percent by 2018 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With this opportunity comes a need for highly trained workers familiar with the latest networking technology and systems.

ESL Students Adopt Mobile Education in High Numbers To Learn Writing

This article is from pr Mac
Niles Technology Group, creators of the #1 writing apps for the iPad and iPhone, has seen its share of ESL students steadily rise. ESL students have recognized the importance of writing skills in their academic success and are using mobile technology to improve writing and critical thinking skills. Complete with a live writing assistant and editing services, Niles Technology's ESL apps deliver more writing instructional content and services than any other product in the App Store. 

ESL students face several issues when studying at English-speaking high schools and universities, with one of the toughest being writing. Most students learn to speak English long before before they gain writing proficiency. This often leads to struggles in humanities courses and on standardized writing tests. Niles Technology's ESL apps are all-in-one products that teach students how to think, organize and write essays in English. And to ensure students get it right, a live writing assistant and editing services are available to further improve their work.

Holy Family University helps introduce phones, handhelds to Tanzania village

This article is from philly.com

Getting to the school in a remote Tanzanian village meant 22 hours of travel, including three plane rides and an exceedingly bumpy, four-hour Jeep trek.

But Sister Francesca Onley, the 79-year-old president of Holy Family University, is glad she made the trip.

With money from a United Nations organization, Holy Family teamed with a Stanford University professor to give handheld learning computers and phones to teenagers who live in impoverished conditions who had little previous experience with technology.

"It was good for the soul," Onley said of her journey to the village of Newala in the east African country. "If everybody would do that once in their lifetime, they would realize that no matter how poor they are, they're not as poor as these people.

New Report Urges Online Learning Expansion in Texas

This article is from Texas Insider 

The Texas Public Policy Foundation would like to see Texas follow Florida’s lead in increasing access to virtual schools.

A report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation suggests that virtual education and blended learning both present the opportunity for cost savings and academic gain in Texas.

“At the K-12 level, the potential of virtual education is enormous,” said the report’s author, James Golsan. “Through the use of technology, students in rural districts would have access to the same educational resources as students in more populated areas. Familiarization with technology could prepare students for the work force more quickly.”

Safari Books Online Expands Online Learning Library to Include Thousands of German Language Books

This article is from Enhanced Online News

Safari® Books Online (www.safaribooksonline.com), the on-demand digital learning library for technology, digital media and business professionals, today announced that it has added hundreds of German language books to its existing library of more than 20,000 books and training videos in English for enterprises, workgroups and individuals.

Individual subscribers can access the entire library with no limits or can choose the 10-slot option which allows them to put up to 10 books or videos on their bookshelf per month. Workgroup and corporate buyers also have a variety of access options, the most popular of which is the all-access model. The library’s search tool has been augmented to search in both English and German to accommodate all subscribers. And users can read or watch videos from Safari Books Online on their computer as well as on their iPad, Android smartphone, or any other web enabled mobile device or tablet.Titles to be added are from such respected publishers as O’Reilly Verlag, Addison-Wesley Verlag, Markt+Technik Verlag, dpunkt.verlag, Wiley-VCH Verlag (für Dummies) and Microsoft Press Deutschland.

Lab Automation University Online Launches Latest Webinar Series

This article is from the San Francisco Chronicle 

Laboratory managers and other lab professionals who are looking to automate their labs will soon have a chance to make that process a little easier.

Starting in April, Lab Automation University (LAU) Online will be running a series of webinars titled "Managing Lab Automation" in order to provide lab professionals with the basis for understanding and applying laboratory automation technologies to their work.

Bright Spots Shine in Online Blended Learning

This article is from Forbes 
A month has passed since the first-ever national Digital Learning Day. Given the excitement generated from teachers and others tuning in to the National Town Hall meeting and given today’s National Leadership Summit on Online Learning up on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. that iNACOL sponsored, I thought it was worth noting some great examples that weren’t highlighted during the day’s festivities. To our friends in the field, these examples are familiar, but they remind us that what is so exciting about technology is the power that it holds to move our education system toward a student-centric model of learning where students can move at their own path and pace to boost student outcomes.

Online learning opportunities in Colorado

This article is from Colorado Education

“A full-time Online Education Program in Colorado is defined as..."a non-religious, non-sectarian full-time online education program or school . . . that delivers a sequential program of synchronous or asynchronous instruction from a teacher to a student primarily through the use of technology via the internet in a virtual or remote setting."

Online schooling differs from traditional (brick and mortar) schools since classes do not take place in a building, but instead at home, on the road, or wherever an Internet connection can be found. Students take courses online with support from their teacher via phone, online Web meetings, and sometimes even face to face.

MIT's initiative to promote online learning

This article is from The Hindu

Lending a new dimension to online learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has launched MITx, under which selection of its courses will be offered through an online interactive learning platform.

And it encourages students worldwide to take part in the initiative.

MITx course materials are meant to foster learning at an individual pace. It features interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication. MIT officials believe this will help to enhance the learning of their on-campus students as well, supplementing their classroom experience.

VistaGen Therapeutics and Duke University Enter Into Strategic Research Collaboration

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal
VistaGen Therapeutics, Inc. VSTA +3.39% (otcqb:VSTA), a biotechnology company applying stem cell technology for drug rescue, and Duke University, one of the country's premier academic research institutions, have entered into a strategic research collaboration aimed at combining their complementary expertise at the forefront of cardiac stem cell technology, electrophysiology and tissue engineering. The initial goal of the collaboration is to explore potential development of novel, engineered, stem cell-derived cardiac tissues to expand the scope of VistaGen's drug rescue capabilities focused on heart toxicity. The research will be led at Duke, by Dr. Nenad Bursac, Associate Professor in the Departments of Cardiology and Biomedical Engineering, and at VistaGen, by Dr. Ralph Snodgrass, President and Chief Scientific Officer.

School District Embarks On Widespread iPad Program To Close Digital Divide

This article by Christopher Sherman of the Huffington Post discusses educational technology involving the iPad. Here is an excerpt:

A Texas school district is trying to close its digital divide by distributing thousands of Apple tablet computers in a move that could make it the largest iPads program for students in the nation.

McAllen Independent School District in the southern part of the state began distributing 6,800 devices this week – mostly the iPad tablet computers, but also hundreds of iPod Touch devices for its youngest students.

By this time next year, the district says every one of its more than 25,000 students in grades K-12 will receive an iPad or iPod Touch. The district believes it's the largest to try for complete coverage and while Apple would not confirm that, other districts the company noted as having made large investments have not made ones as big as McAllen's.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/27/texas-school-district-emb_n_1305711.html?ref=education

"The Advantages of Online Education for Professionals"

This article by careerealism addresses three of the most prominent advantages of online education for professionals. Here is an excerpt: 

How many hours are left in the day after work?

Is it enough to go to college?

Maybe not if you have to commute, but if it simply meant logging on to your school’s website, you could complete a simple reading assignment in the amount of time to watch a television show.

An estimated 6.1 million colleges take online courses, according to a report by the Babson Survey Research Center. The flexibility of online school has allowed working individuals to rise ahead, procuring a better position at a current company or even transitioning into a better working environment. Online education has really changed the game for military families and single parents as well. For these students, taking courses over the Internet really saves time and even money.

Click the link to read the full article! 

Publicly Traded Ed. Companies Are Rare

This article is from Education Week

K12 Inc., the nation's largest provider of online precollegiate education, was launched in 2000 and went public seven years later after raising about $140 million in revenue. Like other companies, it moved from being privately held to being publicly traded to raise more money quickly, increase brand awareness, and accelerate business goals.

The company now works with more than 2,000 U.S. school districts and reported $522.4 million in revenue last fiscal year. "No school district could ever invest what we do and get the productivity we get," said Chief Executive Officer Ronald J. Packard. He said his company invests about $40 million a year in new technology and programs.

GIA: E-learning market will be worth $107bn by 2015

This article is from Virtual College

A rising interest in online learning courses will result in the value of the global e-learning sector hitting $107 billion (£67.47 billion) by 2015, a study has reported.

The investigation, from Global Industry Analysts (GIA), found distance learning is becoming more commonplace due to the development of modern innovations, including broadband internet, digital videos and personal computers.

It is the combination of all of these technologies that has led e-learning to become so commonplace, the company stated.

Columbia University and Semiconductor Research Corporation Breathe New Life into Scalability by Integrating Voltage Regulators Directly onto ICs

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and Columbia University today announced research results that place industry focus back onto voltage regulators as a solution for continued processor scalability. Having just proven a new generation of integrated voltage regulator (IVR) that features energy densities more than ten times that of present state-of-art inductors available on computer chips, the team is preparing to test a second round of prototypes.

The research team is working to solve an industry predicament where the increasing use of parallel multicore processors that enable scaling of microprocessor systems means that many different supply voltages are becoming necessary on modern computer chips. External board-mounted voltage regulators have not kept up with these scaling demands.

Engineering school will open graduate online-learning center

This article is from Diamond Back Online

Beginning next fall, the university will be able to educate dozens more students across the state under one roof with the creation of a new online learning hub.

The engineering school's Distance Education program — which has offered video teleconferencing technology connecting undergraduate and graduate students to the classroom for decades — will soon have a new home on the campus as the Siegel Learning Center in J.M. Patterson, gaining the capability to expand online courses to even more students.

Online learning 'an enabler for teaching'

This article is from Virtual College

Online learning courses have been highlighted as a method of enabling teaching by Thomas Buckley, assistant vice-president of academic services at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

He noted his educational facility is not in a rush to adapt new forms of technology into the classroom, but pointed out some of the benefits of e-learning for students.

Speaking to IT World Canada, he explained online learning must always be viewed as an enabler for education in an academic context if it is to be a success.

Mr Buckley compared online learning systems to the way similar products are used in the private sector in order to boost productivity for businesses.

"If it's not based on sound pedagogy it's like automating a bad business process. You just make mistakes faster," he told the news provider.

The University of Georgia Supports Classrooms of the Future with Bomgar

This article is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal 

Bomgar, the secure remote support solution for the mobile enterprise, announced today that The University of Georgia is using Bomgar's solution to provide secure remote support to both the traditional and mobile devices utilized on its campus. UGA does not require that its more than 34,000 students and nearly 10,000 employees standardize on a particular technology platform, and chose Bomgar for its proven ability to provide support to a wide variety of devices.

A key element in UGA's search for a remote support provider was the University's need to migrate separately-hosted email and calendar applications into a single solution. UGA supports over 100,000 email accounts running on Apple, Linux and Windows machines, in addition to smartphones and tablets on iOS and Android operating systems. Given the number and multitude of devices, it became clear the project needed a strong remote support partner in order to successfully prepare these disparate systems for the migration. UGA's Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) department considered a number of possible options for remote support, but ultimately selected Bomgar when they learned other departments were already using it across campus.