School officials at a New York School were surprised this week when a 6-year-old girl pulled out a .25-caliber handgun along with her lunch and school books.

The girls mom a retired NYPD detective told her fellow officers that she didn’t mean to pack away the gun and had placed the Taurus pistol in the bag for “safekeeping” and then forgot about it.

One parent who was disturbed by the situation told the New York Daily News:

“No one was hurt—but maybe she don’t know it’s a real gun and bang, bang, bang.”

The girl’s mom Marian Brioso has not been charged with a crime however police officials did report the incident to the Administration for Children’s Services. Police confiscated two other handguns from the family’s home.

In the meantime Marian’s husband an NYPD captain has chosen to remain quite about the event.

My only question is why would the mom believe packing a gun in her daughter’s school bag would be a good place for “safekeeping.” What type of punishment do you think the girls parents should be subject to?

Mom Accidentally Sends Daughter To School With Gun is a post from: The Inquisitr

Since launching Skype in the Classroom as a beta program this past December the company has signed up more than 16,000 teachers and now they have announced plans to shoot for 1 million educators.

Speaking at the Social Good Summit Skype CEO Tony Bates revealed:

“Skype has been going on for many, many years, and teachers have been finding each other and they’ve been finding ways to use the power of Skype in the educational process for a long time.”

Bates then went on to add:

“We really felt that it was time to take this to the next level…moving from grassroots Skype in the classroom to an initiative driven by Skype.”

The platform currently allows teachers to create profiles that describe the classes they teach, while providing their teaching interests at which point that directory is then searchable by teachers from all over the world.

Mashable points out the the most useful features is the “project” tab that:

“Helps teachers find partner classrooms for projects and ideas. One teacher, for instance, used the platform to coordinate a “weather around the world” unit. A middle school in Massachusetts regularly chats with an Afghan youth peace volunteer group. Another was able to host a virtual visit from Barbara Bush.”

More than 900 projects have already been posted through the Skype education website.

Do you believe that allowing Skype to connect classrooms around the world provides for a more robust teaching environment for students who have learned to engage with technology since birth? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Skype CEO: We’re Bringing Our Platform To 1 Million Classrooms is a post from: The Inquisitr

Here’s one I bet you wouldn’t have seen coming but it appears that Valve, best known as the creator of such video games as Half-Life and Portal, is joining the Digital Promise education initiative from the President and Congress.

To be honest I’m just as confused as to how a video game company is going to get its hands dirty when it comes to education but thankfully we have this bit of an explanation from the Digital Promise press release on the Whitehouse.gov site:

Leading Video Game Company Establishes Education Prize: Valve, creator of best-selling video game franchises and leading technologies, is stepping into the educational arena due to interest from teachers, students, researchers, and fans after the release of Portal 2, a brain-challenging puzzle game.  Valve will run a competition next year where middle- and high-school students and teachers can create levels of Portal 2 to be used in the home and classroom while competing for prizes worth $250,000.  As a start, Valve will be giving out free copies of Portal, the first in the series, which is rated for teens.  For more information, go to:www.learnwithportals.com.

Wow, Portal in the classroom. Sure could give a whole new meaning to cutting class.

Valve turning on the tap when it comes to education is a post from: The Inquisitr

He lives in a pineapple under the sea and apparent he also hurts your child’s brain according to a research research study.

In the study researchers showed children a nine-minute SpongeBob SquarePants video, while another control group watched educational programming from the PBC education program Caillou while a third group spent that same time drawing. The group of four year old children were then tested to see how well they could stay on task without being distracted. According to researchers the SpongeBob group was significantly worse at staying on task and avoiding distractions than both of the other groups.

A pediatrician speaking on the Today show said of the study:

“Most parents worry too much about how much TV their children watch and not enough about what they watch,” while adding, “It’s not about turning the TV off. It’s about changing the channel.”

Nickelodeon took very little time to fire back at the study, noting that the show is aimed at children 6-to-11-years-old and not the 4-year-old group used for the study. In fact, Nick reps says 4-year-old children “are clearly not the intended demographic.”

I understand the point of the study, but was there really any doubt that SpongeBob SquarePants isn’t an educational program? Most of the time SpongeBob and Patrick run around for no apparent reason, performing tasks that children learn nothing from. It obvious the show is meant to be entertaining and not necessarily educational.

What do you think about the SpongeBob SquarePants study? Do you let your children watch the cartoon?

SpongeBob Square Pants Hurts Kids Brains [Study] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Chicago School Sued For Handcuffing Talking Children, Threatening Them is a post from: The Inquisitr

Following Gov. Scott Walker’s bill which took away a large portion of a teacher’s collective bargaining rights in the state of Wisconsin, while making them pay more for benefits, a record number of Wisoncin teacher’s have chosen to retire this year, nearly double the normal amount the state typically receives.

Reports show that teachers began filing for retirement weeks before the Republican bill was set to take effect, a time when various top level public officials also decided to accept their pensions and exit the public services field.

One teacher, Ginny Fleck of Green Bay said that after 30 years teaching she left because:

“It wouldn’t make sense for me to teach one more year and basically lose $8,000.”

If Ginny had continued to teach she would have taken an $8,000 hit to her salary under the new agreement.

Ginny is one of nearly 5,000 teachers who decided to call it quits, causing a huge experience drain on the state.

The University of Wisconsin System has also witnessed a doubling of retirements from 480 last year to 1,091 through the first half of 2011.

When all is said and done, 9,933 public workers left their posts through June 2011, while retirements for all of 2010 were just 4,876.

With so many retirements occurring at one time the Governor’s plan to cut educational expenses in the state appears to be working, the Beloit school district alone has saved in the vicinity of $920,000 from retirements, but at what cost? Class sizes will need to increase dramatically until new teachers are hired, if they’re hired at all and the drain from experienced educators can already be felt across the state.

While Wisconsin teachers have been jumping ship at record numbers, other state employees have also been tossing in the towel and calling it quits with State agency retirements nearly tripling from 747 in 2010 to 1,966 from January through June 2011.

What do you think about the number of teacher’s who chose retirement in the state?

Record Number Of Wisconsin Teachers Retire is a post from: The Inquisitr

The California Supreme Court on Monday ruled that illegal immigrants who take up residency in the state can receive “in-state” tuition when attending school in the area. The same type of law is already available in 11 other states.

The challenge to that law was brought forth by a conservative immigration-law group who argued that the policey was violating federal immigration law by provided “preferential treatment” to illegal immigrants.

The court found that the tuition benefit was based off graduation from high school and not their legal place of residency. According to the ruling, any qualified graduate who attending California high schools for at least three years can qualify for the reduced tuition structure.

California Ruling: Illegal Immigrants Can Receive In-State Tuition is a post from: The Inquisitr

It is a refrain we hear constantly as we grow up – get your college education because you’ll go nowhere without it and so we go into debt in order to live up to others expectations of us and proportedly to help us get better paying jobs.

The question is though as we head down that path – what should we be taking in college or university to best get us ready for those high paying jobs. Well to help us make those decisions Georgetown University has released a new report that breaks down the various college majors and how they relate to our future fortunes.

If you are out for the big money the report says to head down the engineering road and not to expect any real money if you follow your artistic proclivities.

Engineers are the king of the cash hill, raking in a median salary of $75K, while Psychology and Social Worker graduates beg for the trickle-down table scraps, amounting to $42K. The brightest light in the non-hard sciences is the Social Sciences, with economists earning $70K, using their savvy knowledge of money to rake in more than their compatriots in both finance and architecture.

Art majors are pretty much doomed to small studio apartments, maxing out at $46K for a career in film (the graph below represents the bottom 25 percentile to the top 75th percentile earnings for each major; dotted line indicates median).

via Fast Company

 

 

Just what are those college degrees you go into debt for worth? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Intel has announced that they are infusing American universities with $100 million in cash over the next five years. According to the chipset manufacturer the money will go to various Intel Science and Technology Centers, with the first being built at Stanford university.

The large cash donations will be primarily used to focus on next-generation visual computing with research being conducted in the fields of mobility, security and embedded technology.

According to Electronista:

At the Stanford lab, researchers will work with colleagues from seven other universities. These include the Universities of California at Davis, Berkeley and Irvine; the University of Washington; Cornell; Princeton; and Harvard.

For their research the Sandy Bridge Core Processor line will be used to help develop the way images are captured or created before the computer monitor delivers those images to the user.

Intel is also sending four of their own researchers to each center to allow for better interaction between University researchers and Intel scientists.

Intel To Give Universities $100 Million For Research is a post from: The Inquisitr

The one big thing that I don’t like about a lot of the so-called online learning is that for the most part it is nothing more than a money machine bilking the government out of millions of dollars which was reported on in a recent documentary on PBS. However Bill Gates is one of the people who thinks that done right technology could go a long way to reducing the ever increasing cost of going to college and university.

At the recent Technonomy conference held in San Francisco Bill Gates suggested that technology could reduce that cost of a post-secondary school education down to $2,000

“College, except for the parties, needs to be less place-based,” he said.

Moving more learning activities online can bring down the soaring cost of a college degree.

“Only technology can bring [college tuition] down, not just to $20,000, but to $2,000,” he said, citing price tags as high as $50,000 for a year of college.

Gates predicted that technology could soon make place-based learning five times less important for college and university students.

Source: Hillicon Valley

As nice as that sounds we are a very, very long way from that vision as you can see when you watch College Inc from PBS.

According to Bill Gates college should cost $2,000 is a post from: The Inquisitr

Former head of research unit responds to criticism by arguing for necessity of assessing excerpts by independent reviews

This article was written by Adam Vaughan, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 15th July 2010 00.59 UTC

The former head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which was at the centre of a media and scientific storm over leaked emails, said their response to the incident was delayed by “shock” at the leak and at the content of the communications, a Guardian debate heard last night.

Professor Trevor Davies, the UEA’s pro-vice chancellor of research, spoke out after climate scientists and sceptics clashed last week over the findings of a six-month inquiry into the emails dating back 13 years.

“We were shocked too by the excerpts from the original emails and that was one reason why we were accused of slowing our response. We had to verify they were real. We decided to assess them, not by a small number of emails, but by independent reviews,” Davies said.

The university was criticised by climate sceptics and commentators last year including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who accused it of reacting slowly to the publication of the emails in November and the ensuing media storm.

The pro vice-chancellor struck a conciliatory note at the heated debate, as panellists argued over whether the inquiry drew a line under the affair or was a “whitewash”, as one critic said.

Davies said: “There are lessons to be learned. We need to be much more aware of interactions between the mainstream media and the blogosphere and contribute to public debates.”

He said the university had a series of initiatives planned for later this year to such effect.

Responding to criticisms in the findings of last week’s Muir Russell report, which called the university and its Climatic Research Unit’s (CRU) responses to freedom of information requests “unhelpful and defensive”, he said: “We have to be more helpful to freedom of information and environmental regulation requests.” He defended two reviews commissioned by UEA as “wholly independent”, and reiterated the conclusions of the total of three reviews into the affair, all of which cleared scientists of wrongdoing and manipulating data, and said the science was sound.

But prominent climate sceptic bloggers Stephen McIntyre and Douglas Keenan criticised the CRU and UEA. “Both the Muir Russell review and Oxburgh review [an earlier review of the emails] are clearly whitewash. That is not the problem. The real problem is the lack of systematic accountability, whereby allegations of improper behaviour are dealt with,” said Keenan.

He also claimed that university researchers were switching from using their university to using Gmail addresses, to avoid being covered by freedom of information requests. Bob Watson, chief scientist at Defra, said he had not personally heard of any scientists switching to such email addresses.

Under questioning from McIntyre, Davies confirmed Sir Muir Russell, the chair of the six-month inquiry published last week, had not met Phil Jones, the current head of the CRU, in person after his inquiry’s panel was appointed in February. Evidence from Jones was instead taken by other officials.

Watson, a former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the system for advising governments on how to act on climate change should accomodate sceptical opinions. “I think the IPCC is probably the best system you could invent… but sceptical views must be in the document.”

He also said the IPCC had failed to admit mistakes quickly over an error in its last major report about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. But he added the UN panel was “very strong” and would be strengthened by a review into its work due to be published in September by the InterAcademy Council. Watson was damning about media coverage of the emails affair. “The printed press said UEA was guilty without examination. One had the feeling people were guilty without an in-depth analysis.” Davies said Jones, who admitted earlier this year he had considered suicide because of the pressure on him, had been “hounded by the press”. The panel included science journalist Fred Pearce, Davies, Defra chief scientific adviser Bob Watson and climate sceptic bloggers Doug Keenan and Stephen McIntyre. It was chaired by Monbiot.

Last week the third and final UK report into the emails affair, the Muir Russell review, cleared the CRU of manipulating data. Announcing the findings, Muir Russell said: “Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said. The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt.”

Jones, the former head of CRU and scientist at the centre of many of the emails, was appointed last week to the newly-created post of director of research at CRU.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

UEA’s delayed response to climate emails caused by shock, says professor is a post from: The Inquisitr

Muir Russell report says scientists did not fudge data, but they should have been more open about their work

This article was written by David Adam, environment correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 8th July 2010 01.13 UTC

The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm over leaked emails were yesterday cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics, but a review found they had failed to be open enough about their work.

Sir Muir Russell, the senior civil servant who led a six-month inquiry into the affair, said the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were not in doubt. His investigation concluded they did not subvert the peer review process to censor criticism and that key data was freely available and could be used by any “competent” researcher.

But the panel said the scientists’ responses to “reasonable requests for information” had been “unhelpful and defensive”. The inquiry found “emails might have been deleted in order to make them unavailable should a subsequent request be made for them” and that there had been “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness”. Scientists also failed to appreciate the risk their lack of transparency posed to the university and “indeed to the credibility of UK climate science”.

The controversy began when 13 years of emails from CRU scientists were released online last year. Climate change sceptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating and suppressing data to back up a theory of manmade climate change. Critics also alleged the scientists abused their positions to cover up flaws and distort the peer review process that determines which studies are published in journals, and so enter the scientific record. Some alleged the emails cast doubt on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Announcing the findings, Russell said: “Ultimately this has to be about what they did, not what they said. The honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt … We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.”

The review is the third and final inquiry into the email affair, and effectively clears Professor Phil Jones, head of the CRU, and his colleagues of the most serious charges. Questions remain over the way they responded to requests for information from people outside the conventional scientific arena, some of whom were critics of Jones. “We do find that there has been a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA,” said the report, commissioned by UEA at a cost of £200,000.

It also criticised the CRU scientists for failing to include proper labels on a 1999 graph prepared for the World Meteorological Organisation, which was the subject of an infamous email about Jones using a “trick” to “hide the decline”. The panel said the result was misleading, though they accepted this was not deliberate as the necessary caveats had been included in the report text.

Acknowledging that the digital age brought a greater demand for openness and access to data, it concluded “like it or not, this indicates a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century.” Edward Acton, vice-chancellor of UEA, said the university accepted the report’s conclusion that it should have been more open. “The need to develop a culture of greater openness and transparency in CRU is something we faced up to internally some months ago and we are already working to put right.”

He hoped the review would “finally lay to rest conspiracy theories, untruths and misunderstandings” that had been circulating, and that the “wilder assertions” about the climate science community would now stop.

Jones issued a statement which said: “I am, of course, extremely relieved that this review has now been completed. We have maintained all along that our science is honest and sound and this has been vindicated now by three different independent external bodies. There are lessons to be learned and I need time to reflect on them.” Jones is to be director of research at CRU. Acton said this was “not a demotion but a shift in emphasis of role”.

Ed Miliband, the former climate change secretary, said: “Muir Russell has given the world a clear message: we should not believe those who tell us that one string of emails undermines years of climate science. We should also learn lessons because maximum openness and transparency is the best weapon against those who want us to stick our heads in the sand as if climate change isn’t happening. Now the world needs to step up the momentum again and get the deal that eluded us at Copenhagen.”

Writing on Comment is Free, Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, who testified to the inquiry, said: “The Russell review has rejected all claims of serious scientific misconduct. But he does identify failures, evasions, misleading actions, unjustifiable delays, and pervasive unhelpfulness – all of which amounts to severely sub-optimal academic practice. Climate science will never be the same again.”

Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said: “It is clear that greater transparency is required in climate research because of the intense public interest in it, and its profound implications for society. However, it is also now very apparent that many so-called sceptics owe a huge apology to the public for having presented the email messages as evidence that climate change is a hoax carried out by a conspiracy of dishonest scientists.”

Acton said: “CRU will be more closely integrated in the bigger school of environmental sciences and a key difference is to place some of the administrative burden that Phil had before this incident on the head of the school.”

Bob Watson, chief scientific advisor to the department of environment, food and rural affairs, said that while it was clear scientists needed to be more transparent, he hoped the report would “draw a line under this episode so that the scientific

community can begin to regain the trust of the public and continue to

do its vital work on climate change, which remains one of the biggest

challenges we face as a planet.”

Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford, said: “What everyone has lost sight of is the spectacular failure of mainstream journalism to keep the whole affair in perspective. Again and again, stories are sexed up with arch hints that these “revelations” might somehow impact on the evidence for human impact on climate. Yet the only error in actual data used for climate change detection to have emerged from this whole affair amounted to a few hundredths of a degree in the estimated global temperature of a couple of years in the 1870s.”

Additional reporting by Christine Ottery

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Climategate scientists cleared of manipulating data on global warming is a post from: The Inquisitr

We live in a society that likes to think that its most important resources are the physical ones like gold, diamonds, oil, or just about anything that can be translated to a dollar amount. However when it comes to the intangible resources we slough them off as if they aren’t important – something that we can worry about later.

The most important intangible resource we have as a society is the education of our children and right now it is in a state of crisis in the US, and to a degree in Canada as well. Like everything else in our society it is seeing massive waves of change and not all of them are for the better. As these waves of change come crashing down around us our children are increasingly finding themselves adrift in a world that has continually downgraded its responsibility to the future by denying children the best of class education that they need, and deserve.

As Alvin Toffler, noted American futurist, wrote in Revolutionary Wealth:

Perhaps the greatest case of wave conflict in America will be paid by nearly fifty million children currently compulsorily enrolled in schools  that are attempting to prepare them – and not very successfully at that – for jobs that won’t exist. Call that stealing the future.

Education is about far more than jobs. But the schools, with minute exceptions, also fail to prepare students for their roles as consumers and prosumers. Nor does this system, by and large, help kids cope with the rising complexity and new life options they face in sex, marriage, ethics and other dimensions of the emerging society. Least of all does it succeed in introducing more than a tiny fraction of them to the enormous pleasure of learning itself.

This is what happens when education becomes more about the bureaucrats running the system and the politicians looking to constantly make brownie points. This is why we have states like Texas looking to influence the rest of the countries schools through the textbooks used in classes. It is able to do this because it is the second largest purchasers of textbooks, next to California, and the Texas school board want to adjust what it calls a liberal bias.

Brian Monroe writes in a Huffington Post article:

After two years of heated political debate, the Texas State Board of Education spent the past week incorporating their own conservative values into final guidelines for history and social studies classes taught in the state’s public schools for the next 10 years. They voted late Friday to adopt a host of sweeping changes. In the process, their decisions may force the entire nation to also adopt their radical right-wing re-write of history.

Among the proposed changes were plans to “teach” children to challenge the “solvency” of “long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare” and other euphemistic views of history that, for example, would refer to the slave trade as simply the “Atlantic triangular trade.” Oh, the conservative members of the board also hoped that no one noticed that they omitted from textbooks the name of the 44th President of The United States: Barack Obama.

If there is one thing that education must be is unbiased in anything being taught. By propagating personal political or religious biases we are short changing our children and their ability to make informed decisions based on what they have learned in the past. We in effect are feeding them a poisoned apple and crippling them before they have even left the starting gate on life.

Not only are we crippling our children with biases and prejudices we are also crippling them within the very walls of the places that are suppose to be enriching them. From California to New York schools are seeing massive cuts to their budgets. Teachers are being laid off (but all the school board members keep theirs), classes are being cut, and those that remain deal with larger classes.

Some will say that we’re going through a really hard economic times and we need to save money where ever we can, even if that means making cuts to education. Others might also suggest that the education system already costs too much and that there needs to be cutbacks. Yet politicians vote themselves pay raises, CEOs are getting insane bonuses even though their companies are failing, sports stars are signing massive multi-million dollar contracts.

The students? Well they get a standard of education that is seeing them slowly slipping down the global ratings of education excellence. They get a learning environment where getting a teacher that truly cares about teaching is more of a lottery draw. They get to try and survive and learn in a environment that sees more violence on a daily basis that you would see in downtown areas.

While it might be nice to daydream that all these cuts to the very lifeblood of our economic future will be good for the system in the long run is short-sighted. How can a society that consistently sends students who are so ill prepared in even some of the most basic skills out into a working world and expect that they are going to return the country to any type of prominence?

When all you are doing is churning out students that will be lucky to get jobs at WalMart or some other minimum wage jobs how can you expect them to be able to compete against students from other countries for those all important jobs in science, technology or even big business. How can you possibly expect to be able to produce the next crop of CEOs or entrepreneurs when some of those students can’t even read or perform basic math.

As Bill Gates said in 2005

America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded …. By obsolete, I mean our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today … This isn’t an accident or flaw in the system; it is the system.

There is hope though but it is so mired in politics that one has to wonder if there is really any light at the end of the tunnel. Against a lot of odds groups like Teach for America, Knowledge Is Power Program and New Leaders for New Schools, and other education reform groups spread across America, are trying to bring about change. Change that could see our children be able to excel, to have the best education possible.

We need change t o education. We need to understand that the education of our kids will provide us with the most important resource that any society needs in order to survive and flourish. With every cut to education we make we hasten our headlong rush into oblivion. You can’t build a successful and creative society when everyone is a WalMart greeter or they believe that there is no future for them.

Instead of cutting education budgets we should be increasing them. We should be doing everything we possibly can to encourage our children to strive to be the best and the smartest in the world. We should be giving them every tool possible to be able to compete in an increasingly competitive world that is leaving them behind. We should be encouraging, and rewarding, those teachers who rise above the mediocrity and do everything they can to show our children that there is indeed a future and that they can help shape it.

If we don’t then the we will only have ourselves to blame as we all fade away from the world stage.

Education: The one resource we can’t afford to screw up – but are. is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you bought a Baby Einstein DVD between June 5th 2004 and Sept. 4th 2009 you can not receive a full $15.99 refund from Disney for your purchase. The Einstein DVD’s claimed they could make your 3 month to 3 year old children “Geniuses” by watching their videos, claims that research now refutes.

If consumers prefer they can also exchange their DVDs for Baby Einstein books, music or even 25 percent off coupons.

Disney decided to offer the refund now that research has come to light that shows the DVD’s may even be detrimental to developing good learning habits at an early age.

According to TheNewsPK:

An August 2007 the Journal of Pediatrics released a study by researchers at the University of Washington on the effects of television and DVD/video viewing on language development in children under two years of age.

The study’s authors, Drs. Frederick Zimmerman, Dimitri Christakis, and Andrew Meltzoff, concluded that exposure to “baby DVDs/videos” — such as Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby is strongly associated with lower scores on a standard language development test.

The big winner in this recall? The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood, an organization that focuses on parental run and real education over electronic media.

Disney Offers Refunds For Baby Einstein Product Over Concerns Of Efficacy is a post from: The Inquisitr

The future of intelligent children’s television programming just became significantly darker, and it truly saddens me – “Reading Rainbow”, a staple of both PBS and bright children nationwide, has been canceled after a wonderful run of 26 years.

I grew up, as a child of the late 80’s, with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, “Reading Rainbow”, and “Sesame Street”, all of which significantly influenced my life for the better, but only one remains.  My childhood was full of thought, imagination, and mental stimulation – there was no “Dora the Explorer” or “Blue’s Clues” (neither of which even begin to compare), and “Barney and Friends” came a bit too late to be relevant.

It was through these three television programs, along with my parents, that my early-childhood intellectual interests were initially developed, quickly becoming a lifelong obsession with reading.  I was often read to as a child, and always had an active (some might say overactive) imagination, but it was the efforts of Fred Rogers and LeVar Burton that helped to internalize reading and imagination as valued character traits.

“Mister Rogers’” was a program, shown on PBS for 31 years, devoted to teaching sharing with others, the importance of imagination, and assisted in defining the real world to entire generations of children through the use of fantasy lands, monologues, and colorful puppets.  Through his half-hour interactions with his young audience, the beloved Fred Rogers managed to address difficult topics without appearing false, while also showing the clear demarcations between fantasy and reality.  He encouraged the use of imagination in everyday life, and very clearly showed how it could be both enriching and entertaining – a powerful message for children who often feel a strong need to “be normal” and “fit in”.

Another PBS flagship program, “Reading Rainbow”, was similar in audience, but different in intent:  where “Mister Rogers’” encouraged children to think and imagine, LeVar Burton was the voice for the pleasure of reading.  Books were read on the program by celebrities, reviews were given by other children, library trips were encouraged, and relevant workplaces were featured – all with a heavy emphasis on not only reading, but reading for personal pleasure.  Burton’s voice and presence was of a comforting, familiar nature, not altogether different from Fred Rogers’, and many children over its 26 year history came to see him as a relatable figure in their lives that told them reading was both fun and “cool”.

The death of Fred Rogers in 2003 was a sad experience that dredged up memories of early childhood I didn’t even know I had, and I discovered I was still fond of the man and his commitment to well-rounded children.  The recent cancellation of “Reading Rainbow”, due to a lack of funding, is no different:  I knew intellectually that the show existed no longer, but it was not until I heard LeVar on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” that I discovered how truly devastated I felt by the loss of such a cornerstone of my childhood.

While “Sesame Street” is more focused on learning, even in today’s watered-down version, “Reading Rainbow” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” were yesterday’s key to building a child’s interest in reading, fostering imagination, and encouraging children to be comfortable with themselves – a niche that has yet to be filled by other programs, and likely won’t be for some time.  The discovery of reading for pleasure is something that should not be left to chance, nor should the fostering of imagination.

Books, as many readers quickly discover, have qualities that cannot be found in other mediums:  for every mood, for every interest, for every purpose, books are there.  Books have the ability to stir up emotions, build escapist fantasies, or inform, and they are always available – like a best friend that’s only around when you need or want them.  Combined with the power of immersive imagination, the power of reading, at any level, can be a truly moving, personal, and influential experience.

It is truly sad that in an age dominated by both violent and mindnumbing entertainment, the fostering of children’s mental stimulation is no longer a central focus of attention.  “Power Rangers”, “Pokemon”, and “Wizards of Waverly Place” absolutely do not inspire their viewers to greater heights, nor will such programs ever elicit higher-order behavior.  The void left by the death of two of the most influential television programs in all of history, and the castration of their puppeteering brethren, will be felt for years to come – neither children nor parents may realize what is missing from their lives, but those of us who grew up with Mister Rogers asking “won’t you be my neighbor?” and LeVar Burton’s promise of “I’ll see you next time” will know.

The saddest, most emotionally catastrophic realization of all is that my children will never know “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” or “Reading Rainbow” – instead, they may grow up with colorful, singing, robot-fighting, Spanish-speaking dinosaur-based television shows that have no intellectual value.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

An Ode to Childhood Lost is a post from: The Inquisitr

There is no denying the fact that Google is a big believer in cloud computing and web based software. In fact much of their future growth is built on the principal of getting as many people as possible using their software whether it be Google search, Gmail or their Google Docs suite of office type programs. This of course is putting them in direct competition with Microsoft which means it has had to find different ways to get their software in the hands of consumers.

One of the principal ways that they have done this is to use the same tactic that Apple and Microsoft have been using for years – hit the colleges and universities. The first prong of their attach started over two years ago with them making the education providers an offer they couldn’t really refuse in a climate of growing IT costs. Google would provide them unlimited hosted email and other applications all of which would be branded by the institution for the price of – free.

With things like their browser, a possible operating system, and the in development Google Wave being added to this package Google has a chance to become an ingrained part of the student’s lives as they move from school to the business world. Right now Google is already providing services to some 4 million students and is providing serious competition to Microsoft for access to 17 million students on the more than 4,000 campuses in the US.

The campus push is part of Google’s broader bid to breed a generation of workers comfortable with the concept of "cloud" computing, and particularly Google’s version of it, where Google provides free web-based services in exchange for advertising dollars. "We want to build relationships with these users for life," said Jeff Keltner, Google’s business development manager for the program.

Source: Business Insider – Google’s 17 Million Built-in Chrome OS Users (GOOG)

The ability to offer colleges and universities a way to save millions of dollars a year in IT costs is making Google an almost irresistible force for these institutions while at the same time creating a constantly refreshing generation of Google users.

Google’s secret to taking over the world is a post from: The Inquisitr

Today it was announced that the state of Maine, known predominantly for Stephen King, lobster rolls and silly accents, has ordered 64,000 MacBooks for students in grades 7-12. An additional 7,000 laptops are planned for the coming weeks.

The initiative- aka the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI)- may just be the world’s biggest educational technology program of its kind. Even cooler is that Apple plans to hook Maine up with educational software, technical support, repair and replacement, so the pimply rugrats don’t even have to drag their cranberry-bogging selves to the Genius bar.

In a statement, Education Commissioner Sue Gendron said boringly:

“We have seen incredible success with our middle schools showing increased student engagement and achievement with MLTI in place and we want to bring this same opportunity to our high schools. This is not just about technology, it’s about using the technology to support education.”

Not so hot is the fact that only half of the state’s districts plan to participate in the initiative. Places you’ve read about in It and Needful Things such as Portland, Bangor and Augusta are seeking permission hook a brother up using stimulus funds to get the MacBooks for their oddly-speaking youngsters. It would be pretty awesome if that happened, because the lucky kids in Maine get to take their shiny new MacBooks home for homework, online teaching sessions and other edumacational stuff.

No one said what I really wanted to know- are they going to stick porn filters on them or something lame like that?

[Image: CNet]

Laptops and lobster, or why Maine is cooler than where you live is a post from: The Inquisitr

I caught this one via Allen Stern’s post at CenterNetworks, but did you know that 35% of teens admit to cheating using their cell phones and that 23% don’t consider it cheating. This comes to us courtesy of a new report just posted to Common Sense Media (pdf).

Yes folks our kids are using those fancy cell phones they have emotionally blackmailed us into getting them for cheating at school. Whether it be as simple as storing notes to be used during tests to using the Internet as part of their cheating it is all happening under the watchful eye of teachers. Did we really think that our little darlings would do otherwise?

Here’s a few more findings from the study to cheer you up

• Nearly two-thirds of students with cell phones use them during school, regardless of school policies against it.
• Teens with cell phones send 440 text messages a week and 110 a week while in the classroom.
• 76% of parents say that cell phone cheating happens at their teens’ schools, but only 3% believe their own teen has ever used a cell phone to cheat.
• 45% of teens say that texting friends about answers during tests is a serious cheating offense, while 20% say it’s not cheating at all.

So much for actually learning anything eh.

Gee tell us something we didn’t know is a post from: The Inquisitr

One might think in this day and age of instant gratification, texting non-stop, and sound bite attention spans that appreciation for literature, classic and modern, has fallen by the wayside. Well thanks to Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing I thankfully found one young person who was will to chance punishment in order to share some of the best books written, but were banned by the school, with fellow students. I’m not even going to try and paraphrase the story which starts as a question at Yahoo Answers

Is it OK to run an illegal library from my locker at school?

Let me explain.
I go to a private school that is rather strict. Recently, the principal and school teacher council released a (very long) list of books we’re not allowed to read. I was absolutely appalled, because a large number of the books were classics and others that are my favorites. One of my personal favorites, The Catcher in the Rye, was on the list, so I decided to bring it to school to see if I would really get in trouble. Well… I did but not too much. Then (surprise!) a boy in my English class asked if he could borrow the book, because he heard it was very good AND it was banned! This happened a lot and my locker got to overflowing with the banned books, so I decided to put the unoccupied locker next to me to a good use. I now have 62 books in that locker, about half of what was on the list. I took care only to bring the books with literary quality. Some of these books are:

>The Perks of Being a Wallflower
>His Dark Materials trilogy
>Sabriel
>The Canterbury Tales
>Candide
>The Divine Comedy
>Paradise Lost
>The Godfather
>Mort
>Interview with the Vampire
>The Hunger Games
>The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
>Animal Farm
>The Witches
>Shade’s Children
>The Evolution of Man
> the Holy Qu’ran
… and lots more.

Anyway, I now operate a little mini-library that no one has access to but myself. Practically a real library, because I keep an inventory log and give people due dates and everything. I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it’s the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I’m doing a good thing, right? Oh, and since you’re probably wondering "Why can’t you just go to a local library and check out the books?" most of the kids are too chicken or their parents won’t let them but the books. I think that people should have open minds. Most of the books were banned because they contained information that opposed Catholisism. I limit my ‘library’ to only the sophmores, juniors and seniors just in case so you can’t say I’m exposing young people to materiel they’re not mature enough for. But is what I’m doing wrong because parents and teachers don’t know about it and might not like it, or is it a good thing because I am starting appreciation of the classics and truly good novels (Not just fad novels like Twilight) in my generation?

- Kat Atreides

All I can say is – faith restored.

Real hope for the next generation is a post from: The Inquisitr

Part of my youth was spent growing up during a time when the education system was suffering the first of its modern upheavals. I was even given the opportunity to go to one of those free schools – the kind where teachers were your friends and schedules were something the other schools had. Thankfully my parents came to their senses and I ended up going through the standard public school system.

However even that didn’t save me from the inanity that has become our education system. Increasingly it is being built around what is politically correct and what isn’t. Good teachers are being hamstrung by the warm and fuzzy crowd that has invaded their ranks. Kids are being floated through a system that apparently from the picture above can’t even spell. It has gotten to the point where even the idea of calling themselves schools is passé.

Why else would we have a school in England that has banned the use of the word school in its name. Apparently the reasoning is that the word school has negative connotations and these bastions of education should be known as a place of learning. No ringing of the bell at the end of class for these students (are they even called that anymore?) and students are encouraged to wear soft shoes indoors all to make the place more welcoming.

Mind you the price tag for this new center of learning was a cool £6 million so I imagine they didn’t want the floor of their fancy learning center to get all scratched.

No wonder edjamucation is such a joke is a post from: The Inquisitr