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January 15, 2002
Trend Watch
By Susan McLester, Amy Poftak, Kristen Kennedy and Michelle Thatcher
Whatýs Your Opinion?
Should corporations be allowed to settle consumer claims by donating money and/or products to schools? See the results of your responses on The Back Page in the March issue. |
Big Concerns
Microsoft and nine states have settled more than 100 consumer lawsuits with an agreement requiring the company to distribute $1 billion in refurbished computers, software, services, and training to schools in poor communities over the next five years. The proposal, at press time pending approval from a federal judge, has met with opposition from educators who argue that it would give Microsoft too much influence over schools' technology purchasing decisions. Administrators are also concerned that only 9 percent of the settlement's total value has been earmarked for training teachers to use the technology that is given to them.
US District Court, Maryland
Digital Diplomacy
The Bush administration recently launched the Friendship through Education Consortium to encourage communication and understanding between U.S. schools and those in Islamic countries. Dedicated to fostering peace and human rights through online and offline exchanges of art, letters, and collaborative projects, the consortium will help identify friendship schools and assist with safe Internet communications and translations.
Because UR U
The latest in personal security systems, Digital Persona's U.are.U lets Windows XP users secure their files and desktops with the touch of a finger. Biometric technologies scan unique fingerprints and assign them a code of their very own, eliminating the need for passwords. School network administrators and IT professionals may soon welcome this hardware-software package, which includes a plug-and-play finger sensor, security software, and finger scan-enabled applications.
Take It from the Top
Heard at the National School Boards Association's Technology + Learning conference in Atlanta last November: "The major purpose of high-stakes testing should be to inform instruction. We've got a lot of work to do to manage data and to get timely information back to the teacher."
-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige
HighWired Gets a Second Act
Do you ever wonder what happened to those education startups that made a big splash during the Internet's heyday, but then quietly disappeared? We discovered the servers of online school newspaper pioneer HighWired, tucked away in the research and development offices of the Concord Consortium. The Consortium's plan: to continue to offer HighWired's basic services and eventually expand it into a platform for innovative but non-commercially viable, open-ended, open-source tools. Irony? Back in the day, HighWired raked in over $30 million in venture capital.
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