When I worked as a reporter in the Midwest, there was routine news about methamphetamine lab busts — usually in isolated rural areas lacking neighbors who might smell or suspect something.

Uhh… Awesome.

AMAZING:

The student added that his wife is expecting a baby, and he goes to bed every night “terrified of the thought of trying to provide for my child AND paying off my J.D., and resentful at the thought that I was convinced to go to a law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career.”

“Is his goal to drive tuition higher? If it is, we’re going to fight with him. He’s saying he wants us to submit a plan that would raise tuition more than 9 percent,” Foster said.

Because petty, fake-naive rhetoric is what helps the freaking students themselves! I am SO SICK of political crap taking precedence over students and education.

UGH. And I know the solution isn’t to lower the bar. It’s more likely to raise the ground.

In a report to the committee on how technology is being used, David Theriault, who is in charge of technology at Lewiston High School, said three years ago about 5 percent of teachers routinely used technology as part of their lessons.

“Now it’s 50 percent,” he said. “Technology has become an embedded tool at Lewiston High School. You see it every day.” (Via world-shaker)

Wow, that is really fabulous! It’s great to see a school district have the funds, will, and ability to bolster their educational infrastructure via technology rather than brute force.

Responding to what they call unfair scrutiny from state and federal regulators, representatives from online colleges discussed a self-imposed quality-assurance framework at today’s Presidents’ Forum in Washington, convened by Excelsior College.

But state officials said they are still concerned that self-imposed standards are not good enough and that online programs are not consistent in providing students with high-quality education.

Echoing federal government concerns about the quality of online institutions (reflected in the “gainful employment” rule debated by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year), a panel of education officials from four states and the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education—which represents 15 states—said it was their responsibility to ensure that all students of online colleges received a good education, and they are skeptical that the institutions consistently deliver. (Via world-shaker)

I totally feel online colleges. It’s bad enough that there’s still a social stigma to online education, but the colleges themselves get unfair scrutiny. Uhhh, have you taken a walk around any public or private college campus on a Saturday night? Tell me that environment is a priori better than any other.

This link offers descriptions & videos about various social media tools for teachers. Thanks Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this Mashable link. (Via thingsforteachers)

This is a neat article. It goes to show, you needn’t attend an online university, necessarily, to gain some of the benefits of online/distance education.

In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments — experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files…

Wouldnt’a happened if Kaczynski had attended, say, the University of Phoenix.

(Source: givemesomethingtoread)