Week of: September 29, 2008
- Picture Perfect
By Jeffrey Branzburg
Document cameras aren't new, but teachers still rave about them. A science teacher uses her doc cam to show a delicate fossil, a social studies teacher shows a map in a book, a math teacher a dodecahedron, an art teacher a small sculpture. Today's document cameras continue to evolve light years past the dinosaur days of the overhead projector. Check out the latest features of these document cameras to see how your tech-loving teachers can find even more presentation perks. - Product: MPC Txtbook
Price: $500
Description: The MPC TXTbook is another new entrant in the netbook ultra-mobile PC product category, which is aimed at students grade K-6. It is a compact, fully functional laptop.
How to use in schools: Weighing in at under 3 pounds, this machine would work as both an in-class and take-home computer for even the youngest grades. It would also fulfill any school district's one-to-one initiatives. - Interactive Math Classroom Adds Up to SuccessIn a field in which women have traditionally been underrepresented, teacher Kate Beal of St. Joe's Academy, an all girls' secondary school in Baton Rouge, wanted to amp up excitement about math. By adding a computer monitoring system and tablet PCs, not only did her students get excited about the technology, but test scores improved.
- Are Schools Really Going Green?
CDW-G's E2IT Report found a gap between thought and action concerning energy efficiency. Even when organizations buy equipment with energy management features, they often fail to use those tools, thereby losing much of the related savings opportunity. - Creative Commons At a Glance
By Judy Salpeter
Creative Commons licensing allows students and educators to determine what rights they are willing to share when they post original images, graphics, audio, text or multimedia works online. It also makes it easier to locate work by others that can legally be incorporated into remixes or other derivative products. Here are some basics for schools that are just getting going with Creative Commons.
- 1/3 of IT executives say energy efficiency is a very important consideration when selecting new equipment, often falling below operational considerations such as performance, reliability or service and support.
- While 31% of IT executives who buy desktop equipment select ENERGY STAR 4.0 qualifying devices, 62 do not make full use of the power management tools that earn the equipment the ENERGY STAR label.
- While 32% of IT executives choose energy-efficient, load-shedding uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), more than half of this group do not use the software incorporated in those UPS systems to monitor power demand and energy use.
- 49% of IT executives said they simply do not know all of the things they can do to improve energy efficiency. For a copy of the complete CDW-G Energy Efficient IT Report, please visit http://www.cdwg.com/e2it.
