The Atlantic Wire reports that an all-digital school means no more books, no more heavy backpacks full of textbooks, and no more lockers to store those books. It also means saying goodbye to a lot high school accoutrements like highlighters, pens, and notebooks. And it’s already becoming a reality at an all-boys Catholic school in New York. “No one else in the country has this,” Lisa Alfasi, an account manager at Pearson, a tech/educational company told USA Today. Pearson partnered with Archbishop Stepinac High School in West Plains, N.Y. and helped turn the school into one of the country’s few all-digital schools. Stepinac’s K-12 students are now connected, either through tablet or laptop, to the school’s library and have access to 40 textbooks needed for any class, “not to mention all sorts of note-taking, highlighting and interactive features.”
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Everything we know about the hero teachers from the California shooting
As details emerged from Thursday’s shooting at Taft High School in Taft, California, the teacher present in the classroom and a classroom supervisor emerged as heroes for successfully talking the gunman into putting his shotgun down and surrendering before police arrived, the Atlantic Wire reports. Multiple reports identify Ryan Heber as the science teacher whose first period class was interrupted when one of his students entered the class late with a shotgun and fired on another student. The shooter had planned to fire on another student, but Heber and classroom supervisor Kim Lee Fields, who responded once she heard gun shots, didn’t overreact. Heber just participated a shooting emergency prepared class that morning. Heber and Fields were able to talk to the shooter while Heber evacuated the rest of his class to safety. Eventually, they convinced him to put the shotgun down without hurting anyone else. They disarmed the shooter even before police officials could get there…
…Read MoreLenovo’s new coffee table computer is one gigantic iPad
The first introductory events of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicked off quietly this weekend, giving the world a glimpse at the coolest, shiniest new gadgets out there, the Atlantic Wire reports. The show doesn’t actually start until Tuesday, but the sneak previews are a great chance for companies to get out in front of the inevitably oversaturated tech news cycle that the week brings. One cool-looking gadget that caught our eye comes from Lenovo, the makers of the very boring-looking ThinkPads. It’s called the IdeaCenter Horizon Table PC and is eye-catching mostly because it looks like something out of an Onion article about zany gadgets at CES, except it’s absolutely real and you can totally buy one. What is it? Well, for lack of a better analogy, it’s like one enormous iPad that you can carry around your house, play boardgames on and use as a table. Just be careful not to spill your drinks…
…Read MorePrivate schools are getting into the lucrative data mining business
The challenges facing the well-to-do New York City parent never end! If it’s not combating the trials of having a child born in the summer, it’s dealing with the insane costs of the private schools you are lucky enough to be selected to send your child to, the Atlantic Wire reports. And after that, it’s confronting the reality of those private schools mining your personal data for more money. It turns out, private schools are not immune to the charms of the internet, and are following in the footsteps of many an online marketer, “mining online data for details about parents’ homes, luxury cars, private planes, stock holdings and donations to other charities,” writes Jenny Anderson. “So-called development offices, once the domain of part-time administrators and school volunteers, have been elevated along with the titles of those running them, who are now known as chief advancement officers, directors of philanthropy and heads of strategic initiatives. Heads of school report spending much of their time in search of money, according to surveys.” The richest are courted the most intensely, not only because they have the most money (and tend to donate more), but because there is more available intel about them, “like the foundation boards they sit on and their political donations and property reports.”
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