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Mobile Beacon (www.mobilebeacon.org), a leading provider of low-cost 4G mobile broadband service exclusively to the education and nonprofit sectors

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a non-profit organization that is breaking the mold for science and engineering students. Textbooks simply cannot cover every topic relevant towards academic studies and have troubles with outdated information within a couple of years. LANL has allowed students to have monthly video chats with researchers discussing new topics and breakthroughs in science. This develops a fresh, interactive way to grasp material instead of burying your head in the boring, conventional textbook.

This is admittedly NOT nonprofit related.  But I thought some of you might be interested to know you can get Windows 7 Professional for just $30 from Microsoft.   If you're running Vista, BUY THIS NOW. Windows 7 runs noticeably faster in my experience than Vista on the same hardware. If you're running Windows 7 Home, it's not as big of a deal (if you're on XP, it can get messy to upgrade. Ask me if you have questions). Andy

A local non-profit awards Houston students with computers to help with education. Comp-U-Dot takes donations in the form of computers and refurbishes them, later giving them away to students. If it weren't for these refurbished computers these students would not have word processing, spreadsheet, or internet capabilities.

Students at Western Connecticut State University had a class project where they helped 3 local nonprofits. They helped introduce new forms of social media that would help them create a web presence. Social media strategies were also given.

This article describes the advances that public schools have made in technology in the classroom, and also charts who has access and who does not. For example, how many computers per student are available in one school may vary considerably to a similar school in a poorer district.

My final bookmark in my series on the use and future of technology in government funded public education. Talks about teaching using tech tools they already have like webcams, audio recorders, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools in their quest to boost the literacy in their students.

Blended Learning, which combines online distance learning and traditional classroom education for K-12 discussed in this article, has potential, but needs help to reach its "full potential".  My favorite quote in the article is: " 'There is a significant risk that the existing education system will co-opt online learning as it blends it into its current flawed model-and just as is the case now, too few students will receive an excellent education,' the report states."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting up 2 million to a company which will make a facebook app that supports college students. It aims to provide a unity among students which can bolster success through social networking.

It's greta to see how many students are benefitting from such projects

New Brunswick isn't worrying about high unemployment in their information techonolgy sector. What NB is really struggling with is there lack of skilled workers in the field and not being able to attract such workers. Low population growth and low post-secondary graduation rates is a big factor, but NB Information Techonolgy Council C.E.O. says that making IT more attractive to students when they are in high school and earlier is the key to getting skilled workers in the sector.

A very interesting tutoring tool for younger students and mathematics. It's an electronic lecturing tool being pioneered in Los Altos, California. Bill Gates has nothing but compliments and holds this new program in high regards. Through this electronic lecturing, teachers are able to monitor their student's progress without having to get up and check on each student individually.

With the recent news that more e-books were brought than paperbacks in February, its no surprise that Amazon is allowing the Kindle to borrow e-books from more than 11,000 libraries across the U.S. in working with OverDrive, a huge supplier of e-books for public schools and libraries. Students and non-profits will now have greater access to e-books, but the limit on checking out books is a concern with HaperCollins announcing a new policy that requires e-books to expire after being check out only 26 times.

I did some volunteering with this organization this past weekend. A group of about 50 students from Grand Valley went and disassembled over 230 computers. CompRenew Environmental recycles old electronics (tvs, computers, microwaves….basically anything with a plug) and keeps them from going into landfills. They then refurbish the electronics and sell them, or they disassemble them and sell the parts, or just recycle them. All of the money they get from the recycled electronics goes to education in over 44 countries. CompRenew is a really neat company. Hopefully their idea will spread and more cities will be able to recycle old electronics.

Goodwill and MacMedia both have related recycling / refurbishing interests around the state: http://www.goodwillwm.org/donate/computer-recycling--reuse and http://www.macmedia.org/care.html, respectively.

Responsibly recycle your electronics.

Our apps in the classroom going to help children or hinder there learning, researchers want to try out using ipads part of the students lesson plan.

It,s important to releazie the sitaution in which we were few before technology arrived. A decade ago, access to technology was limited and wiring schools was one of the nation's highest education priorities. Ten years of substantial investments have vastly improved this picture. therefore, this article has discusses the importance of technology in significan ways. According to the Secretary's Fourth Annual Report on Teacher Quality, virtually every school with access to computers has Internet access (99%), compared to only 35 percent of schools in 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.