...dedicated to...hmmm, we never did figure that one out...
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CDC Issues School Guidelines for SARS David Wahlberg and Julie Chao of the Atlanta Journal-Contstitution report that the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has "developed guidelines...on how workplaces and schools should handle the new flulike disease." In CDC issues school guidelines for virus (link may expire soon), Wahlberg and Chao say the CDC school guidelines say "students who develop a fever or respiratory symptoms within 10 days of exposure to someone with SARS should stay home from school, but they can return if symptoms ease within three days. Exposed students without symptoms can attend school but should be closely observed." See the CDC SARS page and Interim Domestic Guidance for Management of School Students Exposed to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) for the full report. Vouchers Associated Press writer Steven K. Paulson reports in Colorado to Allow Public School Vouchers that "Colorado Governor Bill Owens is expected to sign a bill into law this month that will allow public schools to pay private or religious schools to educate low-income children." In another column on the subject, Colorado Senate Passes Voucher Program, Paulson tells that a state Senate committee accepted a $78,300 check from the Colorado Alliance for Reform in Education on Friday before approved a public-school voucher program the group supports. "If the program is finalized, the money will be used to pay a state-employed administrator." Denver Post education writer Monte Whaley tells of possible roadblocks to implementation of the voucher bill in Voucher program faces legal challenges. Good Education Coverage in the Sunday New York Times Yesterday's Sunday New York Times section, Education Life, carries several good columns about education and special education. A Mother's Journey, Nudging Toward Normal, and The College Hunt all deal with various aspects of special education. Elsewhere in the Times, Sara Rimer writes of a change in focus in Philadelphia schools in Philadelphia Schools Look Within to Improve. Ms. Rimer tells of schools' chief Paul G. Vallas plans for improvement that have moved attention away from the privatization experiments with Edison Schools and others taking over some of Philadelphia's public schools. Summer school, strict disciplinary plans, and a massive building plan are central to Vallas's plans. Washington Teachers' Union Investigation Neely Tucker tells of a phony company that illegally received union funds Washington D.C. in Another Guilty Plea in Teachers Union Probe. Tucker writes
Charter School Study The Boston Globe's Anand Vaishnav reports on a study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University, "Charter Schools and Inequality," that found serious problems with charter schools. In Flaws cited in charter schools, Vaishnav reports that lead researcher Bruce Fuller said, "I do think we're trying to hold the charter advocates' feet to the fire and urging them to either tone down their high promises or become more efficient in attaining resources." Vaishnav reports the study "found that 48 percent of teachers in the average charter school lacked a teaching certificate, compared with 9 percent in traditional public schools. And less than 5 percent of charter school students get federal assistance, although 43 percent apparently qualify." The Fine Art of Grant Writing Before closing up shop here at EdNews, I want to post links to a series of columns by Low End Mac columnist and educator Jeff Adkins about grant writing. So far, two columns on the subject have been posted, Need Macs for Your Classroom? Write a Grant and Writing Your Grant Application. Jeff's advice is applicable beyond just getting Macs in the classroom. It's well-written advice on focusing your ideas and efforts to achieve a successful grant application. If you're into writing grants, you might want to keep an eye on Jeff's Grant Writing Index for future columns. Thanks, Barrie I'd like to add a public "Thank You" here to Barrie Selack for his help with my classroom computer "loan-own" project. We just sent home the 38th computer to a student's home, using one of the six hard drives Barrie donated. SCSI 50-pin hard drives (and sleds for 7300s) are very expensive. Barrie's donation saved me some serious bucks and a whole lot of time and aggravation in doing eBay searches. The columns A Gaggle of LC IIIs: Part 1 and A Gaggle of LC IIIs: Part 2 tell of the program's beginnings. Recently, Annie and I have been able to move up to supplying 7300/180s and 7300/200s as take-home units for my full-time special education students. Annie's bank has begun donating monitors to the program, allowing us to focus our funds on CPUs and such. We're still on the hunt for 50-pin SCSI drives (2-gig or so), the little rubber feet that all too often are missing from the bottom of 7x00 series Macs and are essential for proper unit cooling, and hard drive sleds. Things like hard drive sleds, PC-to-Mac video adapters, VRAM, L2 cache, rubber feet, and the like sorta eat you up in such a program. But... Tomorrow, a dyslexic third-grader will begin training on his take-home unit. What a contrast from three years ago when we began supplying Mac LC IIIs with a 250-500 MB hard drive and 8 MB RAM. The third-grader's Mac will be a Power Mac 7300/200 MHz with a 1 gig hard drive (Thanks again, Barrie!), 96 MB RAM, 2 MB VRAM, 256 Level 2 cache, and a 15" Dell monitor. Yeah! Devotion for February April 13-19, 2003 Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is Praise Without Ceasing. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals. Send feedback to
Apple iLife Contest for Educators Apple Computer announced the "Apple iLife Educator Awards" yesterday. The contest is to recognize the most innovative uses in the classroom of iLife, Apple's integrated suite of software for digital music, photography, moviemaking and DVD creation. From the Apple press release:
Astronomy Fun
While many entities offer to sell high resolution prints of their space photos, it's amazing how much is available on the net for free. The following is a list of sources of good, mostly free, space shots from my column, Out of this World Desktop Pictures:
Another View on Apple's Role in Education John Ward offers his views on Apple Computer and education in Apple Needs to Reclaim Its Education Heritage on Vectronic's Apple World. Software Update One of my favorite Mac freewares was updated last week. Harry Hooie Creations released anAtlas 2.0 public beta 8. The author hopes this will be the last beta release before the final 2.0 version is released. Briefly, anAtlas contains a database of cities, states, features, etc. around the world and links to a number of useful map and weather links. I did a little more complete review of anAtlas a couple of years ago in Beware: MacIdiot at Work. For the most part, I've avoided posting software updates for well over a year. With the release of Mac OS X, it seemed that educational freeware and quality educational shareware for the Mac died. Under the old Mac OS, we had years and years accumulation of educational applications from which to choose. Many good apps that originally were shareware eventually became freewares as their authors drifted off to other endeavors. The Math Flash Bash and PhrazeCrazePlus are good examples of that. Several shareware houses jumped in a couple of years ago with quick OS X rewrites and imitations of some older sharewares and freewares, but their efforts lacked any serious task analysis of the items they attempted to teach. On September 16, 2002, I made public my views on what was happening in the Mac educational shareware market. I wrote:
I'm not sure if it's a thing where it will just take time for any volume of quality Mac educational sharewares and freewares to accumulate for teachers' use. I find applications such as anAtlas, Bibliographer, Travis East's FractionCalc, Geometry, and TeacherTool, GridX, and Mom's Calendar encouraging. But the apparent decline in quality freeware offerings was one of the things that took the joy out of publishing this site. To give you an idea of the difference, take a look at The Educational Freewares of 2001. Visiting MacUpdate, Version Tracker, Info-Mac, etc., used to be like a kid on Christmas morning. "Wow! It's free and all for me!!?" Software Search Steck-Vaughn shuffled around the words in their spelling lists, dumped the 1996 editions, and nearly doubled the price of the 2002 edition of the special education staple Steck-Vaughn Spelling. I'm not impressed. Their "revision" will actually make things harder for my kids. But...my problem is that I now find I need a cross-platform spelling program that gives recordable practice spelling tests. We're going to have to re-record all 6 elementary levels of tests (36 units per grade level times 6 grade levels equals...arghh). While we've used Roger Clary's SpellTutor for years without major complaint, it's a Mac-only application and Roger had no plans to port it to OS X or Windows that last time I checked with him. Likewise, Jay Lichtenauer's Master Spell is an excellent program, but it doesn't allow recording of words and context sentences and is also Mac-only. I've surfed around but not found a cross-platform program that meets our needs. I'd really like to find something before we begin re-recording 216 different spelling tests! If you know of a program that might fit the bill, please let me know. New from SchwabLearning.org This week's featured article on the SchwabLearning.org is Kristin Stanberry's Defining Dyslexia: A Modern Dilemma. A related article, Dyslexia -- An Overview, has been updated. New Orleans School Shooting In what was described as a retaliatory shooting, a fifteen year old student in a New Orleans high school was shot and killed by a gunman using an AK-47 assault rifle. One Killed and 3 Are Wounded at New Orleans School gives brief details of the tragedy. Thursday, April 17, 2003 Report on Cleveland Voucher Program Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporter Scott Stephens tells of a state commissioned study that "found that public school students started out far behind voucher students in reading and math, but eventually caught and surpassed them" in Public school kids edge out voucher peers. Testing Gone Nuts The New York Times Michael Winerip writes of the foolishness of No Child Left Behind testing for severely disabled students in Testing Fad Achieves New Levels With the Disabled. Chancellor Beacon Fired Philadelphia Daily News writer Mensah M. Dean tells of one privatization manager in Philadelphia being replaced. In Chancellor Beacon is fired, Dean tells of Chancellor Beacon Academies Inc., private manager of five of Philadelphia schools, being fired effective June 30. Dean quotes Philly school chief Paul Vallas as saying the school district was "dumping what doesn't work and expanding what does work" Vallas cited failure to maintain a proper presence in its schools and not adequately reducing class sizes and implementing after-school programs as reasons for the termination. Victory Schools Inc., Temple University, and Foundations Inc. were awarded more schools to manage next year. Colorado Voucher Bill Signed into Law As expected, Colorado Governor Bill Owens signed the country's largest school voucher bill Wednesday. Denver Post education writer Monte Whaley tells in Owens signs school voucher bill that voucher opponents say the measure "will help kill financially struggling public schools by taking away needed money," while "supporters said the Colorado law could eventually help 20,000 of Colorado's neediest public school students get the academic help they need in private schools." APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) On the first day this site was published, April 18, 2001, I wrote the following:
It seems somehow appropriate to me in this last update of Educators' News to link to the Astronomy Picture of the Day for Thursday, M106 in Canes Venatici, a spiral galaxy once thought to be just a nebula. (Photo credit: Bernie and Jay Slotnick, Adam Block, AOP, NOAO, AURA, NSF) What a shot! More No Child Left Behind Woes Associated Press writer Kathryn Masterson tells in States Fret Paying for Education Law how various states plan to cope with and even possibly ignore the No Child Left Behind law. Writing of the inadequate funding of NCLB, Masterson states:
Computerworld Series on Macs Several months ago Computerworld magazine began a Mac newsletter to go along with their increased coverage of computing on the Mac platform. Part of their increased coverage has been a series of articles by Yuval Kossovsky about Hunter College's experiences with the Mac. Much of what Kossovsky writes may also be relevant to K-12 Mac users and administrators. Here's what he's written so far:
Mac educators might want to add a bookmark for the Computerworld Macintosh page as it appears to be something that the magazine intends to support for some time to come. We're Outa Here! The time has come to put Educators' News to rest. After two years of publication, the site never quite caught on, nor did it ever consistently provide the kind of sharing among educators that was its original purpose. I still believe there is a niche available for this kind of site, just not this particular site. A static page of links will replace this news page tomorrow, but the Educators' News' archives and features will remain available via the current URLs through February 29, 2004. I plan to continue to update and support the MATH DITTOS 2 shareware series, and will also continue to publish an occasional column or two. My sincere thanks go out to the regular readers and contributors to this site for their support over the last two years. Please stay in touch. I'm not dying, just closing this part of the site:-). Have a great weekend! |
Nebulas are still a favorite, although there's no time for any recreational surfing at school these days, much less time for restroom breaks, lunch, or something I vaguely remember called prep periods. I still hit the | Previous Week |
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