Education IT News For VARs — January 15, 2015
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
In news this week is an example of the benefits of visitor management software for a school’s security and examples of innovations in digital textbooks.
Security Benefits Of Visitor Management Software To School Demonstrated In Case Study
Rowan-Salisbury School System, in North Carolina, has adopted Raptor Technologies’ new visitor management software to enhance its security measures across its 35 elementary, middle, and high schools, according to District Administration. The software will be used to screen visitors to the institutions for sex offenders, providing tracking reports of who is in school buildings, and provide customized alerts.
Education IT Talking Points
According to this article by WISHTV , a new partnership between MyON and the Indiana Department of Education will make more than 5,000 new digital books accessible to migrant students and their families. This is part of a larger state initiative to further migrant education. Users of the MyON website will have access to these books 24/7. During a trial run of the project, migrant students accessed 26,000 books and spent 4,000 hours reading books on the MyON website, the Indiana Department of Education reported.
Discovery Education has announced the release of its new Math TechBook, the latest in its line of digital textbooks, which emphasizes real-world connections to subject matter while simultaneously promoting conceptual learning. The program gives students access to built-in tools like a graphing calculator and matrix solver.
The Atlantic reported that UPenn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry Course — ModPo — is an online poetry class that has demonstrated that MOOCs don’t have to be impersonal and can draw students into smaller, engaged, communities of teaching and learning. In its first year, ModPo has 42,000 students from 150 countries, and 38,000 in its most recent term, according to the Atlantic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a small startup called Texts.com has introduced a price-comparison tool to help students find cheaper options, angering a major textbook company. The tool, called “Occupy the Bookstore,” is available as a software add-on for Google’s Chrome web browser that pops up on college bookstore sites to help students find the best deals. Follet Higher Education Group has threatened legal action if Texts.com didn’t stop the tool from working within its college bookstore sites. In the wake of the threat, use of the add-on has soared from 200 to 15,000 times.
For more news and insights, visit BSMinfo’s Education IT Resource Center.