National Education News

Can you calculate the number of different trifecta bets that were possible at the recent Belmont Stakes?    

Why are normal preventive measures falling short as fires rage in Colorado?    

Technology giants Facebook and Microsoft disclosed that they received thousands of requests for user data from government agencies in the United States in the last half of 2012.

Google is preparing to conquer a new dimension: the stratosphere. The Internet giant is releasing 30 high-tech balloons in a trial of technology designed to bring the Internet to places where people are not yet connected.

This Washington Post story by my colleague Emma Brown tells the revealing story of the academic trouble that some of the highest achieving graduates from D.C. Public Schools face when they start college.

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See what you know about the news of the day.    

This word has appeared in 14 New York Times articles in the past year.    

Deep budget cuts have Philadelphia school officials worrying about how to make do without aides, secretaries, counselors, monitors, coaches or money for new books or paper.    

Placing students in clusters according to ability, a tactic once rejected over concerns that it fostered inequality, has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country.    

By Shawn Francis Peters, Chronicle of Higher Ed

My use of Twitter in the Wire course might be my greatest break with pedagogical convention. Whatever its faults, Twitter allows my students to respond quickly and freely to this provocative drama about the complex interactions between police and drug dealers in Baltimore. Their spontaneous tweets form the foundation of a conversation in class once we’re done viewing a particular episode. I also use our hashtag for posting material that might be relevant for exams. For our midterm this semester, students worked in groups to produce components of a study guide. They took pictures of the results and then posted them with the hashtag, where everyone had access to them.

http://chronicle.com/article/Diverse-Students-Go-Digital/139645/

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Here's a sweet Fathers Day piece by Santa Clara University student Nicole Pal about how her father, Allan Pal, influenced her education.She grew up in San Jose, California, and will graduate in 2014 with a degree in web design and computer engineering. This summer she is building a solar-powered home "Radiant House" for the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon competition.

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by Kimon Keramidas, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Prezi is marketed as a presentation tool, a killer app for the frustrated hordes of PowerPoint users who are looking for more dynamic and visually compelling modes of presentation. It accomplishes that task quite well with a digital canvas design structure, a user-friendly interface for adding text, images, and multimedia (it even cannibalizes existing PowerPoints well), and the capacity to create a step-by-step path through materials for presentation purposes. But if you start to think more creatively about what Prezi’s toolset offers, you begin to realize how powerful a tool it can be for designing a wide array of visual compositions. If one looks past the presentation use case, the combination of the flexibility of a nearly infinite digital canvas and easy-to-use design features makes for a powerful and highly accessible tool for developing thought maps, prototyping designs for digital interfaces and physical spaces, creating bespoke visualizations, and as a platform for comparative visual analysis and annotation.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/hacking-prezi-as-a-platform-for-visual-composition-and-design-experimentation/49909

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By Lauren Ingeno, Inside Higher Ed

Though there are differences from one platform to the next, crowdfunding sites function similarly: A person posts a description of his or her idea asking for small contributions from the community at large, and those who feel passionately about the project can donate. The fund-raiser is usually given a specific amount of time to reach his or her goal, or the backers are not charged. Typically the crowdfunding site receives a percentage of the amount the fund-raiser earns, and backers can receive “rewards” from the fund-raiser for pledging certain amounts of cash. Kickstarter, which launched in 2009, is the world’s largest funding platform for artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers. While many projects fail, some have found massive success on the site — like a video game that gained $4,188,927 from 74,905 backers. Replicating Kickstarter’s model, websites that are used specifically to crowdfund scientific or technology-based projects have launched in recent years. Some of these sites include iAMScientist, Microryza, Petridish and FundaGeek.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/10/academic-researchers-using-crowdfunding-platforms

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Chen Guangcheng, the legal advocate, said he was being forced to leave the university over concerns that his activism was harming its relationship with China.    

Johnathon Carrington grew up on the sixth floor of a low-income D.C. apartment complex, a building most recently in the news for a drive-by shooting that injured 13.

His parents told him early on that education could be his escape, and Carrington took them at their word. He graduated Friday as the valedictorian of his neighborhood school, Dunbar High, and against all odds is headed to Georgetown University.

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