The Upper Merion School District estimates its robotic floor cleaner saves the district about $126,000 a year.

Pennsylvania’s Gov. Mifflin School District is considering adding to its custodial staff, and the worker comes with an impressive resume: It’s been known to save thousands of dollars a year in custodial costs while doing a top-notch job.

But if that’s not enough, its family already has built a reputation for hard work in the Gov. Mifflin district. Relatives include the cafeteria vending machines, the copier in the high school office, and the microwave in the teachers’ lounge.

Its older brother, R2D2, is a movie star—but that’s another story.

That’s right, Gov. Mifflin is thinking of adding a robot to the custodial staff.

Picture an industrial-size Roomba. It’s a dust mop and floor scrubber all in one. And, when it’s programmed with a building’s floor plan, it reportedly will clean the floors on its own.

It’s a tool that school districts like Mifflin might turn to as they trim the size of custodial staffs to save on employee costs.

“With budget cuts and staff being cut, [schools] can essentially do more with less,” said Wendy E. Hughson, marketing director for Intellibot Robotics, the Portland, Ore.-based company that makes the Gen-X Robotic Sweeper/Scrubber.

Gov. Mifflin isn’t set on getting one of the robots yet. Administrators told the school board in January that they would solicit bids for review.

“This is going to be a tough budget year, and we have to look everywhere,” said business manager Mark R. Naylon. “Sometimes you have to spend money to save money.”

The district has the chance to cut two part-time custodian positions through attrition, Naylon said. The robot would help the remaining workers keep up with the cleaning.

Password sharing among teens puts their cyber security at risk.

Educators should be aware of an emerging trend that puts students’ cyber security at risk: Password sharing among teen couples.

It’s something that experts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area say teen couples are doing to show their love and affection, KDAF-TV of Dallas reports. But they also say it can come with some serious long- and short-term consequences.

“They feel like it is another level of status in their relationship,” said Teen Contact Director Missy Wall, who added that it’s something many teens tell her they’re doing. She said it often causes problems.

“Relationships change, and in schools what happens with bullying and the stakes get higher with Facebook,” said Wall.

Teens admitted to sharing passwords on the KDAF-TV Facebook page. One girl wrote, “I share my password to everything with him.”

For more safety & security news, see:

10 ways schools are teaching internet safety

Teachers’ newest online worry: ‘Cyberbaiting’

SAFE Center at eSN Online

Wall said it actually could be a sign of an unhealthy dating relationship.

“If they say, ‘If you really trust me, you’ll let me have your password,’ well that is a control mechanism,” she said.

The folks behind EyeGaurdian, a tool designed to help parents track their kids’ online behavior, say password sharing can lead to even bigger problems long-term.

“That person could easily give out information that maybe they didn’t want to share, so then they’re prone to identity left, they’re prone to cyber bullying,” said ImageVision Social Media Director Stephanie Ochoa.

"We're getting calls now, and we're more than happy to share," said Superintendent Lance Bagstad. "We've made mistakes, and we've done things right."

The sign in the hallway tells Renville County West fifth-grade students what they’ll need in class: social studies book, pencil, folder, iPad.

In another classroom, Quick Response codes on the bulletin board can be used to download assignments directly onto an iPad.

They are visual reminders of how much things have changed this year for students and staff at RCW, which has provided Apple iPads for all students in grades 4-12. Nearby MACCRAY Schools has provided iPads for students in grades 7-12.

There have been bumps in the road—the devices need better cases, because they break too easily, and there have been occasional issues with kids downloading unauthorized software.

But the positives have outweighed the negatives, school officials said recently. While this is still a transition year, they say they can see ways the iPads will help the district contain costs in the future.

As they need new textbooks, for example, they expect to use digital versions where possible.

For more news about iPads in the classroom, see:

Apple unveils interactive textbooks, revamped iTunes U

Tips and success stories for effective mobile learning

Schools see rising scores with iPads

Many U.S. schools adding iPads, trimming textbooks

Textbook-free schools share experiences, insights

Their experience also has stirred interest around the state. RCW representatives were mobbed at a January school board convention, where people had to be turned away from their presentation.

“We’re getting calls now, and we’re more than happy to share,” said Superintendent Lance Bagstad. “We’ve made mistakes, and we’ve done things right.”

School Board member David Hamre said the board has been pleased with the progress seen this year.

“They are above and beyond what we ever dreamed of,” he said, “and it’s only the beginning.”

Students taught by one Model Classroom workshop participant said they never felt so enthralled by schoolwork.

South Carolina is at risk of a water shortage. With $500,000 in grants available for innovative conservation projects, it’s up to the students in Bryan Coburn’s introduction to engineering course at Northwestern High School in Rock Hill, S.C., to devise solutions.

Armed with smart phones and an array of ed-tech tools, the teens spent much of last semester on that hypothetical assignment. By the project’s end, they had created elaborate online portfolios showcasing their research, 3D designs, and multimedia packages.

Students said they never felt so enthralled by schoolwork. Some were inspired to become engineers.

“It was amazing,” freshman Parker Hooten said. “We didn’t just sit there and learn. We actually did stuff. It made the class much more fun and involving. You want to be there.”

That’s the kind of school experience that Coburn, the state’s Teacher of the Year in 2009, and the founders of a national program want to replicate.

For more Best Practice news, see the “Best Practices” section of eSN Online.

Coburn is among a cadre of celebrated teachers rethinking how to prepare students to excel in an age of rapid innovation and global uncertainty. The project is called “The Model Classroom.”

Run by the Pearson Foundation’s New Learning Institute, the two-year-old program invites Teacher of the Year winners from around the nation to Washington, D.C., during summers for workshops on making better use of ed tech to inspire a new generation of students.

A new report examines how different countries approach ed-tech management and access.

A new report comparing educational technology use of K-12 students in 21 countries found that, despite global economic uncertainty, many countries are still investing in technology to improve educational systems and boost student achievement.

Twenty governments said that giving students better access to the internet is a top priority, and roughly half said students need more access to computers.

The January 2012 report, International Experiences with Technology in Education (IETE), comes from SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning and was conducted at the request of the U.S. Department of Education.

It seeks to identify what types of educational technology data are being collected, how technologies are being used to improve international students’ access to high-quality instruction, how technologies are being used to increase teacher effectiveness, and how other governments are tracking student progress and using those data to inform policy decisions.

The governments shared many of the same national goals when it comes to improving educational technology for students, including “updating infrastructure; ensuring equity of access to digital technologies; improving information and communications technologies (ICT) proficiency among students, teachers, and administrators; increasing the availability of digital learning resources; and increasing the integration of ICT into instruction to support students’ creativity and problem-solving and collaborative skills.”

“This report is unprecedented in the range of countries that were included and the compilation of success indicators that are being used across large-scale international studies,” said Gucci Estrella Trinidad, educational researcher at SRI and manager of the research project.

“Countries are exploring different mechanisms and avenues for making technology more accessible to students and teachers to support learning. By making cross-country comparisons, a wider audience can benefit from experiences and solutions of other countries.”

Research took place in two phases during 2009 and 2010. In the first phase, researchers examined literature and the internet for multinational data collections, and they sought to identify methods, instruments, and available data on government efforts to integrate ICT into teaching and learning. The report’s second phase involved updating available data and surveying and interviewing representatives of the 21 governments included in the research.

Countries and governmental bodies included in the report are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, and Sweden.

Important findings

Key findings include:

The investigative technique has raised questions among some legal experts and unnerved students who said they assumed texting to be private.

An Illinois high school is cracking down on campus drug sales by confiscating the cell phones of student suspects and using their text messages to identify others—an investigative technique that has raised questions among some legal experts and unnerved students who said they assumed texting to be private.

Stevenson High School spokesman Jim Conrey said the ongoing investigation, in which Lincolnshire, Ill., police are also participating, has resulted in multiple suspensions, though he would not provide the number. He said examining student text messages was a legal and appropriate way to gather information about the alleged sales.

“That’s perfectly within our rights within the school,” he said. “If schools have credible evidence that cell phones are being used in some kind of trafficking … we have every right to take the phones.”

As the lives of teens become increasingly intertwined with the technology they carry, investigators are finding revelations about alleged criminal behavior on cell phones, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In a twist, some parents complained that because the school wasn’t saying much about what was happening, their primary source of information became those same social media sites.

And though Conrey said the privacy and legal issues were clear, some experts said courts and legislators are falling behind the galloping technologies.

Kimberly Small, assistant general counsel for the Illinois Association of School Boards, said the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that school officials need only “reasonable suspicion” to search students’ belongings, a standard of proof less strict than the “probable cause” that applies to police officers.

But she noted that a more recent federal law established that owners of electronic devices have a legitimate interest in the confidentiality of their messages. The law has yet to determine exactly how school administrators’ search power intersects with that privacy concern, she said.

“It’s such a gray area for everyone—students, parents, school officials, even law enforcement,” she said.

About 10,000 students from low-performing schools are participating in the first year of the program.

An online pilot program to help eighth- through 10th-graders who are struggling with Algebra I is being launched at 16 high schools and 23 middle schools throughout Oklahoma.

About 10,000 students from low-performing schools are participating in the first year of the program, which is free to their school districts, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“We wanted to reach students who are most struggling in Algebra I as they prepare to take end-of-instruction tests—one of the requirements for Achieving Classroom Excellence,” said state Superintendent Janet Barresi.

Teacher training is conducted by webinar and will continue through Feb. 8. Training is also free to participating districts.

“This is one of the state department’s efforts to assist low-achieving schools by providing additional resources to teachers and students,” Barresi said.

She said she hopes to expand the program across the state and reach students in younger grades after this pilot year.

Learn more about Apangea Math

After reviewing seven online programs, the state Education Department selected Apangea Learning Inc. of Pittsburgh, Pa., to provide the supplemental online math instruction and tutoring services.

“We were very impressed with the demonstration of this product and can see the high potential for Algebra I students who are struggling,” said Jeff Downs, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) director for the state Education Department.

He said other states, including Texas, Idaho, and Indiana, have seen success from the program.

Schools and stakeholders across the nation advocated for more access to educational technology during Digital Learning Day.

Thirty-nine states, 15,000 teachers, and 1.7 million students participated in the first-ever Digital Learning Day on Feb. 1, which aimed to demonstrate how technology is improving teaching and learning across the nation.

Headed by the Alliance for Excellent Education, Digital Learning Day kicked off with web sessions focusing on leadership and innovation, instruction, and professional learning and teacher effectiveness before attendees viewed a national town hall webcast featuring Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, and video conferences with teachers and students from exemplary schools across the nation.

“We have to do everything we can to foster education and to help us move from print to digital as fast as we can,” Duncan said, noting that while technology has transformed businesses and governments around the world, it has only slightly changed the way most U.S. schools operate.

“We have to move from being a laggard to being a leader,” he said, challenging schools to move from print to digital textbooks within five years.

In March, Duncan and Genachowski will convene a meeting with policy makers and stakeholders to develop real action plans that will help the U.S. move forward and remain competitive with foreign education systems, Genachowski said.

Watch to see an example of one district’s Digital Learning Day

“The world has changed dramatically in the just the last year. … The next thing we want to do is to keep this moving forward,” he said.

A live chat continued through the presentations, and participants discussed “bring your own device” initiatives, how to ensure equity in educational technology access, the use of cell phones in classrooms, and more.

Kristin Kipp, the 2011 National Online Teacher of the Year, said digital learning and online education provide opportunities to students who might not graduate from high school otherwise.

The Obama administration has challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students' hands within five years.

Are hardbound textbooks going the way of slide rules and typewriters in schools?

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski on Feb. 1 challenged schools and companies to get digital textbooks in students’ hands within five years. The Obama administration’s push comes two weeks after Apple Inc. announced it would start to sell electronic versions of a few standard high-school books for use on its iPad tablet.

Digital books are viewed as a way to provide interactive learning, potentially save money, and get updated material faster to students.

Digital learning environments have been embraced in Florida, Idaho, Utah, and California, as well as Joplin, Mo., where laptops replaced textbooks destroyed in a tornado. But many schools lack the broadband capacity or the computers or tablets to adopt the technology, and finding the money to go completely digital is difficult for many schools in tough economic times.

Tied to the Feb. 1 announcement at a digital town hall was the government’s release of a 67-page “playbook” to schools that promotes the use of digital textbooks and offers guidance. The administration hopes that dollars spent on traditional textbooks can instead go toward making digital learning more feasible.

For more news about digital textbooks, see:

iBooks 2 license agreement gets icy reception in higher education

Textbook-free schools share experiences, insights

Many U.S. schools adding iPads, trimming textbooks

Going digital improves the learning process, and it’s being rolled out at a faster pace in other countries such as South Korea, Genachowski said in an interview. Genachowski said he’s hopeful it can be cost-effective in the long run, especially as the price of digital tablets drops.

Watch an example of Apple’s new digital textbooks

“When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don’t know, they are stuck,” Genachowski said. “Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don’t know, the device can let them explore, it can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn’t figure out how to solve.”

Students can use the textbooks for video explanations to help with homework, they can interact with molecules, and they can manipulate a digital globe to see stories and data about countries, said Karen Cator, director of the Education Department’s Office of Educational Technology.

“We’re not talking about the print-based textbook now being digital. We’re talking about a much more robust and interactive and engaging environment to support learning,” Cator said.

About $8 billion is spent annually in the U.S. on textbooks for children in kindergarten through 12th grade, said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. Diskey said textbook companies have been working on the technology for the past five years to eight years to transform the industry, but in many cases, schools simply aren’t ready.

A blogger who tracks Apple products called the iBooks 2 license agreement 'Apple at its worst.'

Advocates for open-license textbooks in higher education, while largely unhappy with Apple’s new iBooks 2 platform, say the technology behemoth has done a favor for their movement: Apple’s pricey, limiting approach to digital textbooks is in stark contrast to the textbook model that aims for low-cost or free college texts.

iBooks 2, announced to great fanfare during a flashy Jan. 19 press conference in New York City, offers iBooks Author software that enables instructors and others to create and publish their own interactive digital textbooks in the Apple iBooks Bookstore.

Some campus technology leaders hailed the new iBooks platform as a revolution in digital publishing.

Others took a close look at the iBooks 2 licensing agreement’s fine print and called it “crazy evil,” “mind-bogglingly greedy,” and “deliberate sabotage” of the open, industry-leading standard known as EPUB.

Read the full story on eCampus News