HP’s Solution Suite For Schools

…..The new SchoolCloud allows educators and students to access their files and applications from any computer via a virtual desktop.  It combines “infrastructure, software and professional development tools designed specifically for education,” according to HP, including onsite professional development designed to help educators teach with the tools.  It also provides reports that allow teachers and administrators to correlate grades and other data with software and system usage.  According to HP, the system will also help school and district IT departments consolidate hundreds or thousands of desktop computers onto far fewer servers.  One district already using SchoolCloud for this is New York’s Hudson Falls Central School District, which has been able to reduce its desktop management burden considerably by using the system, according to the district’s director of information technology, Greg Partch.  “We went from managing 1,400 computers to 10 servers,” Partch said in a statement released today.  “We’re seeing a huge savings in help desk support, maintenance time and costs.”

…..MultiSeat is a thin client solution that runs off Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010.  Using the system, up to 10 students can share a single host computer with their own monitors and input devices.  The HP MultiSeat t100, expected to debut in 2010, is about the size of a pack of playing cards and is designed to allow schools to provide computer access for students at a lower ongoing cost per student, with a power consumption of 2.5 watts……TeachNow is a software tool designed to help educators create and distribute lesson plans.  Using a drag and drop interface, TeachNow lets teachers create lessons by dragging files and other elements onto a lesson topic then push materials out to students’ computers.  “Teachers also can share digital lesson plans across schools or even districts,” according to HP.  “All the materials for a lesson on biology or history could be prepackaged and passed from a veteran to a first-year teacher.”…..

Reference : http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/11/17/hp-launches-education-cloud-service.aspx

The Economist : The Booming Business Of Home Tutoring

…..No one knows how many people work as home tutors: the business is unregulated and many work for cash in hand.  But more youngsters are getting education on the side than before.  A recent survey by the Sutton Trust, an education charity, found that 22% of parents with 11-16-year-olds in state schools had paid for tutoring at some point.  Four years ago, 18% had.  Tutoring also starts earlier now than it used to.  The standardised tests pupils take at age seven mean that parents whose children are falling behind find out earlier than previously—and today’s cash-rich, time-poor working mothers may well decide their only option is to pay for the homework help their own mothers would have seen as part of their job description.  Even parents who already pay for schooling no longer seem to think that tutoring is unnecessary: Charles Bonas, the managing director of a London-based tutoring agency, Bonas MacFarlane, says most of its clients are privately educated…..Underlying this demand is increasing competition to get into the most prestigious universities.  Even in the era of university top-up fees it is the taxpayer, not the student, who pays most of the cost of a degree.  To limit its liability the government caps student numbers.  But school-leaving cohorts have been getting bigger for some years now, and a larger share of school-leavers are going on to further study.  The battle for places is particularly acute this autumn because of the shortage of entry-level jobs.

Counter-intuitively, perhaps, rampant grade inflation is adding to the competitive pressure.  Students cannot rest on their laurels in the firm expectation of a sheaf of A-grades but take even more care to get them.  An eighth of all those taking A-levels now get at least three As.  So universities also look at GCSE results when deciding whom to admit—and approach admissions as an exercise in finding reasons to say no.  A youngster who slacks or slips up will quickly find that there is no way to redeem himself.  So many parents, including those paying for private schools, see home tutoring as a near-compulsory insurance policy.  One side-effect is a generation of young people who think that making sure they learn is someone else’s job entirely.  “Lazy rich kids who had been mucking around, and coming up to exam time realised they needed help”, is how one tutor describes his pupils.  “A lot of it is just checking to see they are doing what they’ve been assigned,” says another.  She describes the role of a tutor as “somewhere between hand-holding and prison-guarding”.  Another, equally undesirable, is that the league tables of exam results that are used to compare schools are worth a good deal less than meets the eye.  A good showing proves little more than that a school is patronised by parents who will do whatever it takes to get good results for their children, not that it does much in the way of quality teaching itself.

Reference : http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14419144

The Economist : Education Spending Under Pressure

 

As public finances worsen, few areas of government spending are likely to escape close scrutiny.  Education, which accounted for 13.3% of public spending in OECD countries in 2006, now faces some lean years.  Pay rises for teachers may be off the agenda; school class sizes are unlikely to keep falling; decrepit buildings may have to serve a few more years.  Countries where the taxpayer funds higher education may have to ask students to part-finance their tuition, or else see their campuses crumble and become more crowded, and their professors flee abroad in search of higher pay.  In some rich countries, such as France and Sweden, the share of public spending going to education was falling even before the economic crisis.

Reference : http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14419128

The Economist : Serious Games Seek To Challenge Chalk-And-Talk In Classrooms

SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as “chalk and talk”.  Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.  Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do.  Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York.  She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games.  Quest to Learn draws on many roots.  One is the research of James Gee of the University of Wisconsin.  In 2003 Dr Gee published a book called “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”, in which he argued that playing such games helps people develop a sense of identity, grasp meaning, learn to follow commands and even pick role models.  Another is the MacArthur Foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, which began in 2006 and which has acted as a test-bed for some of Ms Salen’s ideas about educational-games design.  A third is the success of the Bank Street School for Children, an independent primary school in New York that practises what its parent, the nearby Bank Street College of Education, preaches in the way of interdisciplinary teaching methods and the encouragement of pupil collaboration. 

Ms Salen is, in effect, seeking to mechanise Bank Street’s methods by transferring much of the pedagogic effort from the teachers themselves (who will now act in an advisory role) to a set of video games that she and her colleagues have devised.  Instead of chalk and talk, children learn by doing—and do so in a way that tears up the usual subject-based curriculum altogether.  Periods of maths, science, history and so on are no more.  Quest to Learn’s school day will, rather, be divided into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of “domains”.  Such domains include Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social studies), The Way Things Work (maths and science) and Sports for the Mind (game design and digital literacy).  Each domain concludes with a two-week examination called a “Boss Level”—a common phrase in video-game parlance…..Whether things will work the way Ms Salen hopes will, itself, take a few years to find out.  The school plans to admit pupils at the age of 12 and keep them until they are 18, so the first batch will not leave until 2016.  If it fails, traditionalists will no doubt scoff at the idea that teaching through playing games was ever seriously entertained.  If it succeeds, though, it will provide a model that could make chalk and talk redundant.  And it will have shown that in education, as in other fields of activity, it is not enough just to apply new technologies to existing processes—for maximum effect you have to apply them in new and imaginative ways.

Reference : http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14350149

Singapore Now Has Two American International Schools

Another international school has opened its doors in Singapore, hoping to fill an expected demand for foreign—style education system here and in the Asia Pacific.  According to Singapore—based education group Cognita, although earlier surveys had estimated the exodus of some 2,000 international students, improvements in Singapore’s economy have in fact led to an increase in expatriates moving into the country.  The company runs the new Stamford American International School, which opened its temporary campus at Lorong Chuan on Friday.  It said some 32,000 students are studying in international schools here and the number is expected to double by 2014…..Cognita has already committed S$250 million for the development of its new campus, which currently has over 80 students.  The firm said demand is good, citing up to 70 enquiries on enrolment each week.  Brian Rogave, chief executive officer of Asia Cognita, said: “Every single enquiry we’ve had turned into enrolment. It’s a positive trend, we hope it continues.”

The current campus can take in up to 600 students.  The permanent campus, to be located at Upper Serangoon, will offer some 2,500 places when it is ready by 2012.  Access to foreign schools is an important criterion for expatriates coming to work in Singapore, according to a study conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham).  The study also found that more than three—quarters of respondents preferred attending international schools with home—country curriculum.  In August last year, the Singapore government had, for the first time, listed public buildings and vacant plots to be made available for more foreign schools.  Initial plans were for up to four schools to be built, but this was later scaled down to just one due to the economic downturn.  Cognita runs 50 schools worldwide, including the Australian International School here which has reported a waiting list of 114 for next year’s enrolment.

Reference : http://sg.news.yahoo.com/cna/20090828/tap-409-new-international-school-opens-t-231650b.html