|
March 15, 2001
Trend Watch by T&L Editors
Here we bring you a quick look at new industry standards in technology skills, a possible learning box o' the future, and a sampling of highlights from the Florida Educational Technology Conference.
Personal Trainer
Classroom Connect and Palm have teamed up to make smaller bigger. The two are offering Pocket CU, an application that allows educators to tap into professional development courses anytime, anywhere via the handheld computer. The Palm device delivers supplemental content for Classroom Connect's six-week Connected University course. The first offering, "Teaching to the Standards," is designed to prepare educators-via online assignments, projects, and discussion groups with colleagues-to create and modify lessons that use technology.
On-Site Support
"We couldn't find enough people to hire so we trained our own," said Gateway exec Dick Callahan, whom we saw at FETC. He was telling us about the company's new education-trained fleet of salespeople who'll be available to lend educators professional support when they purchase hardware at the company's Country Stores. Be on the lookout for 44 more of these stores to spring up nationwide.
What Grads Need Now
With roughly 850,000 tech positions going unfilled this year, according to the Information Technology Association of America, educators may be wondering what skills they should focus on to help graduating students meet marketplace demands. Corporate giant Cisco, which trains kids through its Networking Academies, has a few ideas. In addition to its regular Academy offerings, the company is expanding to include Web publishing, A+ (entry-level PC technician training), cabling, and UNIX. The first module, UNIX training, will be added this September, thanks to a partnership with Sun Microsystems.
Double or Nothing
While Microsoft cops to no inten-tions of channeling its soon-to-be-released Xbox gaming device into the education market, we say keep your eye on this one. The Xbox, which doubles the memory, sound, and graphics processing of this year's hard-to-find PlayStation 2, could lend some real zap to tomorrow's virtual classroom experience if game consoles should happen to go the way of handheld devices.
An FYI on IEPs
Special education students and teachers are getting a much-needed helping hand from Chancery Software and eSped.com. At FETC we learned that eSped, a provider of Web-enabled applications, services, and information for the special education community, is working to integrate its individual education plan product, WebIEP, into Chancery's Open District, Mac School, and Win School student information systems. This move promises to streamline and speed up the traditionally long and arduous process of creating and maintaining an IEP-which about one in every eight U.S. students has, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Read other articles from the March issue
Send a letter to the Editor in response to this article.
|
