weekly news roundup

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Weekly News Roundup

October 14, 2011 | 8:49 AM | By

Brad Parbs

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  • FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Connect to Compete, a new non-profit initiative that brings private industry and the non-profit sector together to help expand broadband adoption and promote digital literacy. The initiative aims to help boost education, health and employment in disadvantaged communities in the U.S. and aims to address some of the obstacles to broadband adoption — in terms of cost, access, relevance, and digital literacy.
  • In order to help address some of the frustrations teachers and students face with school filters blocking YouTube, Google has launched a pilot program that will allow schools to redirect all educational content to YouTube.com/education. The program will also block all YouTube comments and make sure that any videos that show up as “related” are also educational.
  • Google also launched YouTube Space Lab this week, a special channel that, in cooperation with Lenovo, Space Adventures, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Continue reading →
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Weekly News Roundup

October 7, 2011 | 8:58 AM | By

  • Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. The memorials and tributes continue to pour in, and it feels impossible to overstate the impact that he had on shaping our lives — both in and out of the classroom.
  • Education lost another leader this week too: Derrick Bell. Bell was a legal scholar whose 1973 book Race, Racism and American Law was an important textbook in law schools everywhere. He was a founder of critical race theory and an incredible storyteller.
  • The Department of Education released statistics this week on the state of online education among U.S. undergratuates between 2000 and 2008 (PDF). The data finds, not surprisingly perhaps, an incredible increase in the percentage of students taking online classes — from 8% to 20% over that time period. According to the Department of Education data, computer Continue reading →
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Weekly News Roundup

September 30, 2011 | 10:00 AM | By

  • President Obama offered his “back-to-school” remarks this week at Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington DC. The President had a few words of encouragement: “Be the best student that you can be. Now, that doesn’t always mean that you have to have a perfect score on every assignment. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got to get straight As all the time — although that’s not a bad goal to have. It means that you have to stay at it. You have to be determined and you have to persevere. It means you’ve got to work as hard as you know how to work. And it means that you’ve got to take some risks once in a while. You can’t avoid the class that you think might be hard because you’re worried about getting the best grade if that’s a subject that you think you need to prepare you for your future. You’ve got to wonder. You’ve got to question. You’ve got to explore. And every once in a while, you need to color outside of the lines.”
  • Wikipedia announced a cool new project this week that’s bound to please fans of QR codes. QRpedia will allow anyone to access a complete and mobile-friendly version of a Wikipedia article, simply by scanning a QR code with your phone.
  • With the advent of Wikipedia, of course, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are other encyclopedias out there. But the Encyclopedia Britannica sure doesn’t want us to forget, and it’ll soon be available in its entirety as an iPad app. The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg Continue reading →
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Weekly News Roundup

September 23, 2011 | 10:45 AM | By

Marcus Kwan

  • President Obama will release details on his plans to roll back pieces of No Child Left Behind legislation today. States that want to seek waivers for NCLB will have to demonstrate that they have adopted “college- and career-ready standards” in math and language arts and have established ways for measuring teacher effectiveness.
  • Google launched a new channel on YouTube called YouTube/Teachers. The channel will be a resource for teachers to help use YouTube in the classroom. YouTube.com/Teachers is an addition to YouTube EDU, the higher education-focused channel that showcases video-taped lecture content from universities around the world.
  • Apple donated some 9000 iPads to Teach for America this week. The company has been soliciting people to turn in their old iPads to Apple stores in lieu of selling them. Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, sits on the board of directors for TFA.
  • Glam Media says that it’s buying the social network site Ning. No word on how this will impact those teachers who use the site for free under the special deal Ning struck with Pearson. [UPDATE]: Christina Lee from Ning wrote the following in our comments: “We have no plan to change our service and any participation in Glam Media’s ad network would be entirely optional.”
  • As the company announced it would do earlier this spring, Amazon announced that some 11,000 public libraries in the company would now be able to loan e-books for Kindles. Continue reading →
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Weekly News Roundup

September 16, 2011 | 9:24 AM | By

Bert Kimura

  • Pearson, the world’s largest education company announced this week that it had acquired Connections Education, an online virtual school provider. About 40,000 students in 21 states attend the schools, which are funded by the states and districts and free to parents in places where virtual school counts as a public education.
  • On Monday, McGraw-Hill announced that it would be splitting into two companies. One would focus on its education division, now second only in size to Pearson, and the other would handle the company’s financial business, including its ownership of Standard & Poors. On Thursday, the company announced it had led the investment in a first round of funding for Unigo, an online resource for college students. The New York-based startup will now power the student review section of the U.S. News & World Report‘s college rankings.
  • The U.S. Department of Education released new figures on the student loan default rate. No surprise in an economic downturn, the default rates have risen, up to 8.8% in 2009 from 7% in Continue reading →
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Weekly News Roundup

September 9, 2011 | 9:02 AM | By

Bruno Girin

  • Microsoft released the results of 2 STEM surveys this week — one among college students pursuing STEM degrees and one among parents of K-12 students. Among the findings: 93% of K-12 students believe that STEM education should be a priority in the U.S., only half (49%) agreed that it actually is a top priority for this country and less than 24% said they were “extremely willing” to spend extra money to help their children excel in math and science. Of the college students surveyed, nearly four in five STEM college students said they decided to study STEM in high school or earlier. One in five decided in middle school or earlier.
  • According to The Loop, iTunes U, Apple’s lecture-podcast distribution network, has had more than 600 million downloads since it launched in 2007. More than 300 million of those occurred in the last year alone. The most popular downloads come from Open University and Stanford University, each with more than 30 million downloads. More than 30% of the iTunes U traffic is mobile, says Apple, and more than 60% of iTunes U users come from outside the U.S.
  • Google wrapped up another Summer of Code this week. The program, now in its seventh year, had participation from 1115 university students from 68 countries. As part of Summer of Code, they wrote code for 175 open source organizations began writing code for 175 open source organizations. Summer of Code gives college students a chance to do real world work and to mentor with others in the open source community.
  • National Louis University became the first university to offer a Groupon on tuition. This week’s daily deal offered a 57% discount on an introductory graduate level teaching course. (I Continue reading →
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