The 70th ASCD Annual Conference and Exhibit Show kicked off in Houston! Check out the video to get your conference experience off and running.
The conference has over 350 concurrent sessions where attendees can learn from educators, administrators and thought leaders from around the world.
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By Ron Bethke, eCampus News Assistant Editor, @eCN_RonB
More than a new brand name, ACE-approved Study.com is trying to combat rising tuition costs by giving students an alternative to earn college credit online.
Could an online education resource eliminate the need for community colleges? Such an undertaking might seem drastic, but it’s exactly what the newly re-launched Study.com aims to accomplish.
More than just a trendy name, Study.com offers 19 exclusive courses accepted for credit by the American Council of Education (ACE), and another 30 are currently under review. Students can also submit their scores to more than 2,900 accredited colleges for transfer credit.
Read the rest of the story from eCampus News
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With Governor Robert Bentley signing into effect a bill supporting charter schools in Alabama, superintendents in the River Region still do not know what the bill means for their school systems.
The bill, which allows for the creation of up to 10-start-up charters a year for five years, was signed into effect Thursday afternoon by Bentley. With the new law, charter schools could be in place across Alabama by fall 2016. However, some educators in the area do not know what the law means for them.
Andre Harrison, superintendent of the Elmore County Public School System, said his main concerns with the bill were with funding the charters and how much money they would be taking from the school systems.
“That’s my number one concern because from my experience as an educator, you really don’t know what the bill will do until it has been implemented,” Harrison said. “That’s what I’m waiting to see and I’m waiting to see what it does to the education trust fund.”
Harrison said members of the school board have expressed similar concerns, but that all he could do for the time being was to see what impact the bill would have for Elmore County.
Read the rest of the story at the Montgomery Advertiser
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Straining under a record number of civil rights complaints, the U.S. Department of Education wants to hire 200 more investigators to expand its civil rights division by 30 percent.
Attorneys and investigators in the civil rights office have seen their workloads double since 2007, and the number of unresolved cases mushroom, as complaints have poured in from around the country about students from kindergarten through college facing discrimination on the basis of race, sex and disabilities.
“Some of this is about the community believing that we’re here and we’re in business and we’re prepared to do the work,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s secretary for civil rights. Some of the increase, she said, was due to guidance her agency has issued, reminding the public as well as schools and universities of various protections under federal law and how to report illegalities.
For the rest of the story at the Washington Post
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ByDave McCombs – Bloomberg
Rakuten Inc., operator of Japan’s biggest Internet shopping mall, will pay $410 million in cash for e-book distributor OverDrive Inc. to expand its digital content business.
OverDrive will strengthen Rakuten’s e-book business by adding a distribution platform, more than 2.5 million titles, relationships with 5,000 publishers and 30,000 libraries, Rakuten said in a statement.
Rakuten has spent about $3.2 billion over the past three years to buy companies as it expands into online services and selling e-books, video and other content. The company said earlier this month it would invest $530 million into Lyft Inc. and paid $981 million in cash for Ebates Inc. in October, after acquiring Viber Media Ltd. last March for $905 million.
Rakuten’s billionaire Chairman Hiroshi Mikitani has introduced tablets in Japan to help sell e-books, tracking rival Amazon.com Inc.’s strategy of delivering digital content through its Kindle platform. Mikitani is Japan’s third-richest man with a net worth of about $9.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
OverDrive supplies the industry’s largest catalog of e-books, audiobooks, music and streaming video to 33,000 libraries, schools and retailers worldwide, according to a statement from the Cleveland, Ohio-based company. It will operate under current Chief Executive Officer Steve Potash as a subsidiary of Rakuten’s U.S. unit, according to the statement.
As of Dec. 31, Rakuten had about 1.2 trillion yen ($9.9 billion) in net cash, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Rakuten rose 0.9 percent to a record 2,129.5 yen as of the close in Tokyo, while Japan’s benchmark Topix index fell 0.4 percent. The shares have declined 27 percent this year, compared with 12 percent for the Topix.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dave McCombs in Tokyo at dmccombs@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net Suresh Seshadri
If put in front of a focus group today, the title of the nation’s top K-12 education law would be met with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for day-old cafeteria pizza.
Congress may still be arguing about what provisions of the current law should be extended and which should be axed. But educators and politicians appear to agree on at least one thing: The outdated No Child Left Behind Act needs a fresh brand.
What, though, should replace “NCLB,” which has been around since 2001, as a catchy tag for the next version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act? And how much does it matter?
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