Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom.

Some critics already are denouncing the effort as a blatantly self-serving maneuver to break into the big educational market. But proponents of selling cellphones to schools counter that they are simply making the same kind of pitch that the computer industry has been profitably making to educators since the 1980s.

“This is a device kids have, it’s a device they are familiar with and want to take advantage of,” said Shawn Gross, director of Digital Millennial Consulting, which received a $1 million grant from Qualcomm to conduct the research.

"We haven't figured out how to leverage Web 2.0 yet" in schools, Bower said. Instead of pushers and producers of content knowledge, he added, teachers must become pullers and directors.

"When an administrator says, ‘Show me the proof,' just point at the current state of schools," Bower said. "If we're not engaging these kids, they're not learning.

TCEA panel says Web 2.0 marks a complete shift from the old models of instruction ... and schools need to shift accordingly

How do you select books to read? Do you use the jacket cover? Word of mouth? Reading lists? Which comes first, reading a book or watching a movie made from it? We believe it does not have to be an 'either-or' choice. Similar to movie trailers, video book trailers are short, minute and a half to two-minute videos that introduce the basic storyline. They differ from book reports captured on video in that in these productions the story is re-enacted with artistic and creative decisions made by the director as to what parts of the story are presented.

According to William Rust, research director for the IT research and consulting firm Gartner, there is a new digital divide occurring in schools. Whereas this divide used to refer to whether or not students had access to technology, now it concerns whether schools are using technology effectively to achieve results.

Regarding the changing nature of learners, Gartner believes that so-called "digital natives" will demand, and need, new types of learning experiences.

"The biggest shift we're seeing right now is student preference shifting from print to digital resources," Rust noted. "It's all about the web."

However, while students and the administration may be embracing the practical upsides of the switch to gmail – great value, savings and reliability – faculty at Lakehead haven’t come under Google’s spell. In late 2006, the Lakehead faculty union filed a grievance with the university, now under arbitration, asserting that the e-mail system fails to protect their privacy and academic freedom. At the heart of the complaint is Google’s status as a U.S. company. Because Google is subject to American law, Lakehead will not be able to protect the contents of faculty’s e-mail from the U.S. government, which under the U.S. Patriot Act can compel Google to hand over data without even allowing the company to inform Lakehead that the transaction took place. Noting that Lakehead was the first school in North America that asked faculty, as well as students, to use an outsourced e-mail service, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has taken up the case. “If a faculty member knows that any e-mail they write, by virtue of it being handled by Google, could be subject to access and seizure by U.S. security agencies, they might be much less willing to share views with their colleagues” said CAUT Executive Director James Turk. “As we’ve seen all too often, very innocent things can attract the interest of American security officials.”

On April 22, 2009 he was officially designated as the United Nations Environment Program Goodwill Ambassador (UNEP) and received the ‘Earth Champion’ award for his commitment towards the environment and his work on public environmental awareness. On Friday June 5, 2009 he released internationaly his new movie, "Home", a movie about the dangers human activities create to planet earth. On the night of the release many theaters offered screening for free and a giant open-air screening on Paris champ-de-mars drawed 20 000 spectators. Beautiful aerial photography, an omnipresent music score and great post-production make this movie more emotional than most previous movies about the subject. The simultaneous TV broadcast of the movie on France 2 TV channel draw more than 8 million people, more than a football match featuring France's national team (this is very unusual to beat a football match with the national team). The following sunday, at European Elections, ecologists made an unexpectedly high score and failed short of being France's second political party. Although the poll did predict that the ecologist would make a big score at these elections, they underestimated it widely. On the night of the elections, many political commentators expressed concerns that the movie screening may have had an immense effects on the results of the elections.