http://www.internetessentials.com/

http://www.internetessentialspartner.com/downloads/Internet_Essentials_Fact_Sheet.pdf

This fact shoot gives information about how to get a computer for about $150.00 a free Norton Security suite, and
more details about the offier.

Low cost computer is available though this program for about 150,00

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/28/05digital.h31.html?tkn=XSRFsuvC7GROaMXE92c6fwk5iMBhT9XqAM%2Fb&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1
Submitted: September 26, 2011 - 2:37pm
Originally published: September 26, 2011
Last updated: September 26, 2011 - 2:45pm
Source: Education Week
Author: Ian Quillen
Location:
Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC, 20202, United States
In what appear to be the latest moves in a shift of emphasis from financing to facilitating education technology, the Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission this month both have helped launch initiatives that were billed as major breakthroughs but involved the two organizations as agents of collaboration, not primary funders.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski attended as Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp. officially announced its Internet Essentials program, which will give families of students who receive free school lunches access to broadband Internet service for $9.95 a month, before taxes. The move came in response to the FCC's call for Internet providers to offer cheaper access to disadvantaged and underserved students.

At a Sept. 16 White House briefing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan launched the Digital Promise center, a congressionally authorized clearinghouse dedicated to identifying, supporting, and publicizing the most effective education technology innovations.

Links to Sources

New Initiatives Signal Shift in U.S. Ed Tech Leadership

http://www.fosi.org/research/900-who-needs-parental-controls.html

A Survey Of Awareness, Attitudes, And Use Of Online Parental Controls
Findings From A National Survey Among Parents
FOSI believes that a grounding in facts is necessary for proper initiatives, legislation and development of best practices. For our new research initiatives, the Institute will be partnering with renowned research groups to obtain information on the latest trends and behaviors of children online. By doing this, we hope to achieve a basis of evidence on which further projects will be based.
The Institute has high hopes for a future in research that will cover a wide variety of topics, and is thrilled to have worked with Hart Research Associates on our first piece of data, Who Needs Parental Controls? The project would not have been possible without the support of its sponsors, AT&T, Google, Microsoft and Verizon.
Please see below for the Executive Summary and full report, and stay tuned for upcoming features.

Who Needs Parental Controls, Final Report (PDF)
Who Needs Parental Controls, Executive Summary (PDF)
Using Parental Controls? You're not alone. (Infographic PDF)

New Ideas to Advance STEM Education in the U.S.
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2011/0912_stem_education.aspx
EVENT SUMMARY
To ensure future competitiveness in the era of the innovation economy, America's workforce will need to be highly skilled in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Yet U.S. education efforts in these critical areas lag behind those of other advanced nations.
Event Information
When
Monday, September 12, 2011
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Where
Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
Event Materials

Reuters/Anthony Bolante
Contact: Brookings Office of Communications
Email: events@brookings.edu
Phone: 202.797.6105
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On September 12, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a forum about new policy ideas to advance STEM education, workforce training and student recruitment in the United States. A panel of leaders from academia, the administration and the private sector, moderated by Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies, focused particularly on innovative solutions policymakers should consider and implement. Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Rebecca M. Blank, delivered keynote remarks about what the data shows to better inform STEM policy, including the unveiling of a new report, Education Supports Racial and Ethnic Equality in STEM.

Acting U.S. Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank unveiled findings from the Economics and Statistics Administration's (ESA) third and final report on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs and education today at a Brookings Institution forum on advancing STEM education in the United States.

STEM workers are essential to American innovation and competitiveness in an increasingly dynamic and global marketplace. In this third report, we examine demographic disparities in STEM education and find that educational attainment may affect equality of opportunity in these critical, high‐quality jobs of the future.

This report follows an analysis of labor market outcomes and gender disparities among STEM workers. We find that regardless of race and Hispanic origin, higher college graduation rates are associated with higher shares of workers with STEM jobs. But non‐Hispanic Whites and Asians are much more likely than other minority groups to have a bachelor's degree. By increasing the numbers of STEM workers among currently underrepresented groups through education we can help ensure America's future as a global leader in technology and innovation. Press release | Third STEM report

http://www.emergingedtech.com/2011/09/education-technology-is-an-enabler-not-a-magic-wand/
Education Technology Is An Enabler, Not A Magic Wand
by K. WALSH on SEPTEMBER 7, 2011
NY Times Article Calls Attention To The Need To Do A Much Better Job Of Understanding Technology's Role And Potential In Education.

This NY Times Internet article, "In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores" has been getting a lot of attention this week. The article discusses a U.S. school district that invested roughly $33 million in education technologies as a result of a ballot initiative in 2005. The focus of the article's first page or so is that reading and math test scores have stagnated in the district, while at the same time they improved statewide (in all the other districts, where there was no infusion of technology dollars). It is easy to read this as an inference that technology does not improve the quality of the education.
Based on the headline, or a brief look at some of the Internet commentary circulating about the article, many readers may come to the conclusion that it is a categorical defamation of the ed tech movement. It is not. The article goes on to provide a lot of insights and relevant facts for consideration when pondering the issue of whether or not technology can improve education. It is very much worth the read if this is a topic you are interested in. It is proper to question the value and return of these large investments.
Computer technology is not a magic wand. This perception, while it may sound rather absurd when stated so plainly, has been a thorn in the side of technology managers for decades. Employees and managers of organizations and institutions of all types and sizes seem to think that throwing technology at business problems instantly improves efficiencies and yields myriad other benefits. Technology is a tool, a potentially powerful enabler, and with proper planning and implementation it can produce many benefits, but it does in fact require planning, and so much more, in order to make the investment pay off.
The potential of education technology is still so far from being realized, and too often dollars are spent without proper oversight and planning. Many technologists and educators will welcome and applaud these types of thought-provoking news pieces on education technology. Hopefully people who come across the article will give it more than just a brief scan, and look beyond the provocative title and introductory paragraphs. It would be nice to think that the impact of Mr. Richtel's piece will be more positive than negative, and that it will help to open some eyes and minds to a closer look at this unrealized potential.
Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Let's stop misspending education technology dollars
8 Great TED Talks About The Future Of Education And Teaching
Check out the (Education) Reform Library from The Foundation for Excellence in Education

(Summer 2011) http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16509

The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City

reviewed by Noel S. Anderson - August 15, 2011

Title: The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City
Author(s): Pauline Lipman
Publisher: Routledge, New York
ISBN: 0415802245, Pages: 224, Year: 2011
Search for book at Amazon.com


"Public education" is a contested term. Sure, residents of the United States have access to schools without cost, and each of the 50 states have some provision in their constitution for public education. Yet the belief that public schools will continue to be the domain of just government or that "public education" will not disappear altogether is increasingly becoming a naïve assumption. Across the country, cash-strapped states and struggling municipalities are engaging in partnerships with private companies to manage crucial public services. The city of New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, closed down its public schools and repurposed them into charter schools. In fact, currently, New Orleans is the largest charter school experiment in the country, with the majority of its public schools being outsourced to private companies and not-for-profits.

From public housing to public parks, from bridges and tunnels to parking meters, entities that were once the sole domain of government are being doled out to companies who, put simply, extract private profit from our public tax dollars. With more private companies controlling public services, questions arise as to whom or what is really accountable to the public? And more broadly, what is "public" anymore?

These questions should not be relegated to armchair debates but require real and thoughtful answers since they impact the everyday lives of everyday people. Refreshingly, Pauline Lipman, a professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in her new book, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race and the Right to the City is attempting to seek answers, as she probes the ways in which the changing urban landscape has shaped (re-shaped) urban education.

Lipman examines urban political economy through the lens of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism describes a political, social and economic phenomenon, where, as a consequence, public services shift increasingly into the hands of private companies. Under the neoliberal enterprise, government does not "become smaller" or disappear, necessarily, as conservatives or neoconservatives would hope, but it becomes the conduit for private investment and services. Subsequently, the welfare state is challenged and democratic procedures are usurped as the public becomes less involved in the distribution and oversight of government services, like public schools. In sum, the "public good" becomes more identified, defined and directed by the private sector.

The term neoliberalism, emerging from the field of political science and subsequently spreading to almost every other discipline, has been used to explain globalization and the behaviors of migrating transnational corporations to the unfettered consumerism of youth and popular culture.

In the field of urban education, "neoliberal reform" has replaced the ubiquitous term "business model," a broad concept that was to blame for corporate-minded school reform efforts in decades past. Back then the business model explained everything, although business models of various types (e.g., Taylorism in educational administration) have shaped public schooling since the age of industrialization in the U.S.

The concept of neoliberalism tends to be so misapplied that it runs the risk of being void of any explanatory power. Every problematic reform effort in education, currently, is collapsed under neoliberal, and the term is becoming a proxy for explaining complex educational policies. Yet, when it comes time to "connect the dots," showing how neoliberalism as the root causes errant policies, the reasoning becomes spurious at best.

Many school reform policies, like school vouchers, for instance, tend to be labeled neoliberal, as if they emerged on the scene in recent years and were promoted by corporate elites. School vouchers predate the emergence of neoliberalism, championed by southern segregationists in order to usurp Brown v. Board of Education and maintain racially separate and unequal schools. In fact, some of the most prominent Christian academies and universities in the south came to life because of voucher programs.

What is glaringly different in present day, however, is that under the neoliberal enterprise, public services, such as public education for instance, are not being informed by private sector concepts but are becoming new markets for companies. While government supposedly gains the administrative efficiency of the private sector to run "bloated and failing" bureaucratic school systems, companies are expanding their revenue streams into the public sector. The underlying belief is that the rationality of the market place will rescue an overburdened welfare state, that the competition of the private sector will transform monopolistic public institutions, and that business-oriented leaders are, well, just plain and simply smarter than the do-gooders running school systems.

Lipman takes issue with this not so recent turn in the urban landscape. She starts her book off by unpacking the ways in which "neoliberal urbanism" has impacted education policy over the last three decades or more. She illustrates in sweeping prose the ways neoliberalism has impacted housing, taxation and governance of schools in urban centers. She takes careful aim at Chicago, as an illustration of mayoral control of schools, also citing Arne Duncan's Renaissance 2010 initiative as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (which morphed into his Race to the Top initiative as U.S. Secretary of Education), as well as the proliferation of charter schools run by private organizations that have transformed how schools are run. She argues that we have moved away from government to governance of public education, with the control in the hands of unaccountable organizations, like corporations and philanthropies.

Despite her energetic analysis of the nexus between political economy, neoliberalism and school reform, Lipman falls short of thoroughly interrogating how the major neoliberal policies for schools, especially the ones being promoted as so called "evidence based" by Secretary Arne Duncan and the Obama administration, do not work. For instance, merit pay (or incentive pay) for teachers has proven not to raise students' test scores, nor improve teacher quality. We have data that shows increasing accountability in schools has not increased the college-going rate of poor and working class youth of color. Charter schools do not produce better results than traditional public schools. Lipman seems to focus laboriously on how the government is handing over schools, which is an important target since it illustrates that profit motives override the concern for the public good. But much of this argument could be bolstered with evidence that business-oriented education leaders are actually not smarter and that they are, in fact, working with a series of broken tools and failed strategies.

Lipman's chapter on venture philanthropy is a great example of how wealth and foundations have sought to shape the education of the most vulnerable. From the establishment of private academies for Native Americans in the 1800s to the creation of higher education institutions for Blacks during Reconstruction, wealthy philanthropists have had their hand in dictating what is the "public good." Yet in the current milieu, philanthropists have stretched their dollars and business ideas to actually direct and oversee public education. This uber-paternalism is unmatched in recent history. And with the public sector continuing to falter, shedding jobs along the way and Wall Street thriving due to generous government support along the way, Goliath seems to be beating David with his own slingshot.

But Lipman, like the rest of us, holds out hope in this book for a transformation of values and of systems, so that everyday people can reclaim the public sphere, public schools, and continue to hold accountable those responsible for governing our everyday lives.







Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: August 15, 2011
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16509, Date Accessed: 9/3/2011 12:41:07 PM