It
Makes Teachers Touchy
Matthew Philips
NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Sep 22, 2008
Teachers
are conditioned to tolerate a lot of abuse—it's a professional
hazard—but what faculty members at Sir G. E. Cartier Elementary
School in London, Ontario, went through last spring seems beyond the
call of duty: a few of them agreed to be duct-taped to a gym wall
while students hit them in the face with pies.
Why on
earth would they do that? To raise $3,000—enough cash for an
interactive whiteboard, the most coveted piece of educational
technology on the market right now.
These
Internet-age chalkboards are essentially giant computer touchscreens,
and they're all the rage among teachers. But with little room for
them in school budgets, many educators are doing whatever it takes
to raise the money themselves. "We're a desperate breed, aren't we?"
says Sharon Zinn, one of three teachers who volunteered for Cartier
Elementary's whipped-cream-flavored firing squad.
At
schools fortunate enough to have them, interactive whiteboards are a
blessing for educators struggling to engage a generation of students
weaned on the Web. In the U.K.—where 70 percent of all primary and
secondary classrooms have interactive whiteboards, compared with
just 16 percent in the United States—students in those classrooms
made the equivalent of five months' additional progress in math. So
far, the data on the efficacy of touchscreens in U.S. classrooms is
inconclusive, but promising. Multiple recent studies suggest that
the devices boost attendance rates and classroom participation.
Read more
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1032 11th Street
Modesto, CA 95354
Voice: (209) 578 9739
800 845 4628
Fax: (209) 578 5463
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You
are invited to join us for this important seminar. . .
Disaster Recovery in 2008
This FREE
seminar is in response to overwhelming customer input from our
business survey of 2008 and is a must for all business & IT
professionals!
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Disaster
recovery plans of 3 years ago won't work today! Data
loss occurs in many forms. We invite you to come learn
how to protect your business information from an
unexpected catastrophe in today's environment.
9:00-10:30am on Friday, Oct. 24, 2008 at Modesto Junior
College, Forum Building #7-Room
To reserve your seat for
this FREE seminar call (209)578-3572
Space is limited. Door prizes! |
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When Network Safety
Starts at Employees' Homes
Protecting Your Network from Home Wireless Hackers
Introduction
Remember the good old days of wireless Internet,
when we boldly broadcast our SSIDs and happily
shared our bandwidth with our neighbors? Sadly,
that modern-day Mayberry is gone, as hackers and
criminals alike discovered the open back door
into our systems and began to relieve us of our
personal and business data, email communication,
and bandwidth or CPU cycles for their own evil
exploits. They even banded together to advertise
the open door with “war-chalking” and other
types of public notification.
Today, as the lines between home and business
computing continue to blur, even enterprise IT
administrators need to be concerned with their
employees’ security practices on their home
wireless networks. The last thing you want is
for a hacker to compromise an employee’s
computer via an under-secured home wireless
connection, and then quickly and efficiently
travel down that handy remote user VPN tunnel
straight into your business’s network. Not
surprisingly, enterprise IT managers are now
deploying training on wireless security,
specifying wireless router hardware and/or
configuration settings, and in some cases,
providing firewall/VPN endpoint appliances
(managed from the data center) for key
employees’ in-home use.
Read more |
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Excellent Customer Service
 In
the business world, good customer service often isn't good enough
anymore.
Customers and clients are becoming increasingly disenchanted with
the merely adequate. For them, extraordinary service is the rule,
not the exception. Anything less, and they're happy to vote with
their feet and their wallets.
That makes extraordinary service necessary, not just desirable. And
that, in turn, mandates a strategy to help ensure that your business
matches that standout service standard on a daily basis.
Here are seven
ideas and tips to help your business establish and maintain an
ongoing climate of service excellence.
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Laws
You May Choose to Ignore
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| Moore's law describes an
important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number
of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated
circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every
two years. The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon
E. Moore in a 1965 paper. The trend has continued for more than half
a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least
and perhaps much longer. |
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You probably thought
you knew every single law of nature, science, and humanity, but we
at ITSolutions have uncovered
some additional laws that you may not
have heard previously.
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Melissa’s Quotes:
Imagine
a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who
cannot,
and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live.
-
Peter Cochrane
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Disaster Recovery