Social networking has grown and spread through all ages and fields since its birth in the market about 24 months ago. Everyone, if not the majority, has adopted the social networking fashion.
An interesting article talks about the social networking strategies that middle market companies are implementing these days. Corporate leaders are beginning to see the value in social networking and how it can make business better by increasing business and employee efficiency, decreasing training and development costs. "Employees are actually interested in using social networking; thereby increasing the likelihood of adoption and decreasing the time, budget, and resources required for training and education."
FBI probing school webcam spying case [www.eschoolnews.com]
There has been a case in the new lately of a student suing a school district for spying on them at home with a school laptop. It reminded me of this video of a 1:1 school in NYC.
At about 4:38 in the video you can watch the administrator using this capability. I think it is completely legal inside the school. The whole video is worth watching and its interesting that they included this disturbing clip in an overall very positive piece.
Grassroots/Entrepreneurial Schools in Pakistan [www.hks.harvard.edu]
The Harvard Kennedy School Magazine did a fascinating article about schooling in Pakistan. There are 47,000 private schools in Pakistan. Students in the private schools out performed those in public schools. Most of these schools are run by one educated woman. There was a minimal difference, 2%, if the teacher had post-secondary education.
A new tool called Geogebra has been helping students in graphing their Mathematical equations. This great tool has been suggested by Edoardo Montefusco and has drawn most people's attention.
GeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for learning and teaching. It is a software for all levels of education that joins arithmetic, geometry, algebra and calculus. It offers multiple representations of objects in its graphics, algebra, and spreadsheet views that are all dynamically linked.
Lessons from Teach for America's data for Sugar [www.theatlantic.com]
The Atlantic published an article discussing the 20 years and 7,300 teachers worth of data collected by Teach for America.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching
Its a great article and for this blog post I want to focus on what it says about assessment. When we've discussed assessment on Sugar's Its an Education Project mailing list there was a tendancy to think of it in terms of the high stakes, once a year or less frequent, standardized tests. The results of these tests take months return and they are not all that useful for teachers to use to modify their teaching.
Presentation on Sugar on a Stick to NH Sea Coast Linux User Group [www.tedroche.com]
Last week I went up to Durham and visited the friendly folk of NHs Linux User Group. I had a wonderful time and here is a write up from one of the attendees.
http://www.tedroche.com/blog/2010/02/09/seacoast-lug-caroline-meeks-sugar-on-a-stick Here is the presentation:
If you don't have the resources to translate everything used in your own sites, you can opt to use the Google translator tool in your site. What it does is to add a small widget where the visitor can choose from a dropdown list of different languages and have the Google translator do the work for you. Some of the advantages and disadvantages are listed below.
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