MaSSSoftech

Students return this week to new age of learning tools

By Vanessa Miller (Contact)
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Monarch High School senior Wes Snyder, 17, right, gives a tour of the athletic facilities to incoming freshmen and their parents Wednesday. The new students, from left, include Elise Kinney, Bridget Radley and Megan Radley, all 14.

Monarch High School senior Wes Snyder, 17, right, gives a tour of the athletic facilities to incoming freshmen and their parents Wednesday. The new students, from left, include Elise Kinney, Bridget Radley and Megan Radley, all 14.
Information technology instructor Maureen Curno, right, helps Jackie Esler, a new sixth-grade science teacher, with access to the school district’s Web site during a technology training session at Arapahoe Ridge High School last week.

Photo by Marty Caivano

Information technology instructor Maureen Curno, right, helps Jackie Esler, a new sixth-grade science teacher, with access to the school district’s Web site during a technology training session at Arapahoe Ridge High School last week.
From left, incoming Monarch High School freshmen Bridget Radley, Lizzie Johnson and Elise Kinney, all 14, walk through the Louisville school during a tour for new students Wednesday. When Boulder Valley students start school this week, they’ll return to classrooms with upgraded technology, like interactive white boards and high-speed Internet.

From left, incoming Monarch High School freshmen Bridget Radley, Lizzie Johnson and Elise Kinney, all 14, walk through the Louisville school during a tour for new students Wednesday. When Boulder Valley students start school this week, they’ll return to classrooms with upgraded technology, like interactive white boards and high-speed Internet.
Back to school

Start dates for students in the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts:

Tuesday: Boulder Valley transition day for sixth- and ninth-graders

Wednesday: First day of school for the rest of Boulder Valley’s middle and high school students; first day of school for all St. Vrain Valley students

Thursday: First day of school for Boulder Valley elementary students and half of the Boulder Valley kindergarten students

Friday: First day of school for the remaining half of Boulder Valley’s kindergarten students

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BOULDER, Colo. — Boulder Valley students’ lives these days are teeming with the latest and greatest technology, and now — after years of district upgrades — so are their classrooms.

When students and teachers across the Boulder Valley School District return to school this week, they’ll have more digital tools at their disposal than ever before. Any teacher in any school, for example, will be able to pull up any educational video or slideshow on their computer through an on-demand-type communal database aimed at streamlining teaching materials and eliminating paper and plastic products.

“We used to use VCRs and DVDS and send them from building to building,” said Dave Williamson, Boulder Valley’s chief information officer. “No more. All that now is housed centrally in a big video library.”

That same system will deliver cable TV to most classrooms in the district, he said, and dramatically improve student and teacher Internet access.

“That used to be slow and hampered,” Williamson said. “Now things are going to be much, much better.”

One of the more glamorous technology advancements that some schools have boasted for a while and other schools will debut this fall are intelligent white boards that are a far cry from the black boards and chalk of yore. They work like giant iPhones, allowing teachers or students to touch the board, drag icons and access the Internet in an instant to look up news articles, world maps or anything else relevant to the subject at hand.

“I love smart boards,” said Alex Young, 13, an eighth-grader at Boulder’s Southern Hills Middle School.

“You can do anything on them,” her friend and classmate Caitie Reck, 13, agreed. “They’re a lot nicer than a projector, and they’re fun.”

Even tests are changing shape. Many of today’s Boulder Valley teachers nowadays are quizzing their pupils using clickers rather than pencils and paper. Students are assigned clickers and then asked multiple choice questions that they can answer with their devices.

“The new technology lets teachers check in more with how many kids are getting it,” said Southern Hills parent Pat Gilbert.

‘This is just getting started’

Most of the district’s latest technological classroom advances that will make a noticeable difference this fall are a product of Boulder Valley’s new “wide area network.” Crews installed the 70-mile fiber optic network — paid for through the $296.8 million bond initiative passed in 2006 — over the past year with the goal of digitally connecting all of the district’s 55 schools.

“It’s not something you see physically, but students and teachers will notice a significant difference in their ability to do things — like access the Internet,” said Williams, the district’s information officer.

The network has increased the Internet-connection speed from 1.5 megabytes a second to 10 gigabytes a second, and it’s allowed the district to convert all of its phones to “voice over internet protocol” — meaning calls are made via the Internet rather than traditional phone lines.

Boulder Valley used to have several separate phone and Internet connections, each with its own service fee. Reducing the number of connections not only improves reliability but saves the district thousands of dollars each year, Williamson said.

“And this is just getting started,” he said of the new technology’s benefits.

As part of this year’s upgrades, the district has installed ceiling-mounted projection systems and speakers in most classrooms allowing teachers to transmit whatever is on their computer screens to projection boards that all students can see, Williamson said.

“I think, in some ways, Boulder Valley is catching up to the curve,” he said.

Training Boulder Valley’s thousands of staff members will take time, he said, but eventually the new technology will make a “fundamental difference” in the way students learn.

“It will take a healthy dose of staff development,” Williamson said. “But it’s certainly going to affect the way they teach in the long run. No doubt in my mind.”

Green technology

Not all of the district’s new technology is being used on teaching aids. Money from the district’s bond initiative also has funded high-tech energy savers that have helped many Boulder Valley buildings go green.

Most classrooms now have individual thermostats to keep sunny rooms from wasting heat and shaded ones from wasting air conditioning. Many rooms also now have motion sensors that automatically turn lights on and off when people enter or leave.

Some classrooms even have lighting ballasts that automatically dim the electrical lights as the sun brightens a room, district bond spokeswoman Susan Cousins said.

“That’s intended to be something that building occupants don’t even notice,” she said.

A few schools — like Manhattan Middle School in Boulder — are using solar panels, and other buildings have been uniquely designed to capture daylight with “light shelves,” larger windows and skylights, Cousins said.

In the bathroom, many toilets have been converted to low-flow tanks or dual-flush operations. Dual-flush technology, she said, allows a person to push the flusher one direction for a lot of water and another direction for a little.

When it comes to keeping students safe, bond money and a federal grant has enabled Boulder Valley to upgrade its security technology by installing automatically locking doors in some buildings and downloading building floor plans into an online database.

'This makes it all easier’

Students are reaping the benefits of new technology outside the classroom, as well. High-schoolers regularly use the Internet for research and study help, of course, but many teachers also send home assignments via e-mail and provide online resources to study aids.

“My Spanish text book was online so I didn’t have to carry it around,” said Fairview High sophomore Maia Raeder, 15.

Southern Hills parent Renate Brummer, of Boulder, said she’s been amazed at some of the new tools at her daughter’s disposal.

“The smart boards are fantastic,” she said. “They allow teachers to explore everything very visually and in a quick manner. You don’t have to deal with the colored chalk and the dry-erase boards.”

Brummer said her seventh-grader has shared about how she can flip around digital images of protractors during geometry lessons instead of having to hold up rulers while trying to calculate measurements.

“This makes it easier, by all means,” Brummer said.

And while district officials and national education experts are predicting technology will continue to become more and more central to classroom instruction, Brummer said she’s still pressing the importance of traditional reading, writing and calculating skills to her child.

“You can’t take a laptop into King Soopers to write a shopping list,” she said.

And, Brummer said, even with all the new tools in the world, students still depend on good instruction to gain long-term knowledge.

“Technology alone doesn’t make a good school,” she said. “It’s secondary to the teachers and the principal and the parent involvement.”

Few people realize how many Iowans have technology jobs.

If lawyers who work on intellectual property rights and others whose jobs depend on technology workers are included, the total can reach 150,000, which is one of every 10 jobs in Iowa.

There are technology clusters around Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, but nearly half of Iowa's technology jobs are spread across a rural landscape that covers roughly 150,000 square miles.

That dispersion means that most Iowa techies can't just drop into a favorite restaurant or coffee bar to talk shop and solve problems with coworkers, the way counterparts do in Silicon Valley or Seattle.
That lack of collaborative opportunities was a shortcoming, said Leann Jacobson, president of the Technology Association of Iowa.

So, the group stepped in and did the next best thing.

It has used social-networking technology to create a Web site, IowaTechLinkz, that is sort of a Facebook on steroids for Iowa techies.

The site allows a technology worker in Allamakee County, or any other location in Iowa, to share information instantly and pick the brains of peers in Des Moines or Sioux City, or anywhere else in the state.
"It's a cool thing," said John Rath, a database manager for Team Technologies in Cedar Falls, who can now go online and chat with professional peers at Principal Financial Group in Des Moines or Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids.

The technology that makes it possible is cutting-edge stuff, Jacobson said. In tech jargon, it's somewhere between Social Networking 3.0, which includes applications like Facebook, and 4.0, which is the next generation of social networking technology that doesn't even exist yet.
VerticalLinkz, a startup in Waukee, is the company that created the IowaTechLinkz Web site.

Bill Adamowski founded VerticalLinkz in 2008 as a way use social networking software to build virtual communities around specific interests, topics or geographies.

In addition to IowaTechLinkz, VerticalLinkz is also developing networking sites for mortgage bankers, called MorLinkz, and Des Moines-area professionals, called MetroLinkz. It's also experimenting with a religion-oriented site, FaithLinkz, and a site for the horse industry, EquineLinkz.
The new IowaTechLinkz site, which was launched last week and is free to users, will serve several functions, Jacobson said.

Like Facebook, it will be a way for technology workers to meet and get to know each other, because each user creates a profile that includes background information and interests.

Users can also write blogs about technology topics or experiences, share information by directing others to specific Web sites, or post photos.
The site also allows users to create their own communities and pose questions to each other in a semi-private surrounding.

"It's helpful to know others in Iowa who are working in similar technologies," said Gary Scholten, chief information officer at Principal Financial Group. "You can ask them questions about how are you dealing with this problem with this particular server system, or that type of desktop software. Or what do you know about this vendor.
"We already have user groups that are national, but sometimes it helps to be able to connect with somebody who is more local."

Other professional networking groups are not geographically based, like IowaTechLinkz is, Scholten said.

IowaTechLinkz had about 300 members at its formal launch last week, but Jacobson said membership is expected to grow quickly.

Principal has about 2,000 technology employees, Scholten said. He expects a majority of those workers to be using the online site soon.
IowaTechLinkz is a good test market for VerticalLinkz social-networking programs, Adamowski said, because the opportunity for creating smaller networks within the overall framework is substantial. The site already hosts 18 individual communities with opportunities to create dozens more. Existing communities include angel investors, data centers, intellectual property law and Web strategies.

"It's also a good opportunity for Iowa to get some recognition as a technology leader," Scholten said. "A lot of people don't know how much information technology there is in Iowa."

Two of three top positions go to girls

* Of 47,668 male and female candidates, 23,949 (50.39 percent) were successful; 410 of successful candidates secure A-1 Grade, 1,790 A Grade, 5,972 B Grade, 9,611 C Grade, 5,911 D Grade and 316 E Grade

By Aamir Yasin

RAWALPINDI: Girls clinched two of the top three positions in the Rawalpindi Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education’s (RBISE) Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) examinations whose results were formally declared during a special function at the Divisional Public School on Saturday.

According to the RBISE, 47,668 girls and boys (24,116 as regular candidates and 23,552 as private candidates) sat the examinations, and 23,949 of them (50.39 percent) remained successful. A pass percentage of 53.1 percent was reported in girls and that of 46.42 percent in boys. The results of 140 candidates have been withheld for using unfair means in the examinations.

The results showed that of the successful candidates, 410 secured A-1 grade, 1,790 A Grade, 5,972 B Grade, 9,611 C Grade, 5,911 D Grade and 316 E Grade.

Provincial Minister for Religious Affairs and Auqaf Ehsanuddin Qureshi distributed medals among the top position holders of the examinations.

According to the results, in Pre-Medical Group for boys, Hina Khan, of Government College for Women, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi bagged first position by scoring 1,003 marks out of 1,100. She was followed by Shahr Bano, of Punjab College of Information Technology for Girls, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi, who secured 999 marks. Ahmad Abdullah Mehmood, of Cadet College, Hassan Abdal got third position by scoring 997 marks.

In Pre-Engineering Group for boys, Ahmad Abdullah Mahmood, of Cadet College, Hassan Abdal stood first with 997 marks; Moin Ahmed, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi second with 980 marks, and Farhan Ahmed, of Cadet College, Hassan Abdal with 979 marks.

In Pre-Engineering Group for girls, Aattiqa Anwar, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi clinched the first position by securing 984 marks. Maeira Imtiaz and Iqra Shakeel, of the same college, stood second and third with 970 and 962 marks respectively.

In Pre-Medical Group for boys, Aziz Ahmad Chattha, of Cadet College, Hassan Abdal was the topper with 996 marks, followed by Saqlain Saleem, of the same college, who bagged 995 marks. The third position went to Asad Faruqi, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town, who secured 994 marks.

In Pre-Medical Group for girls, Hina Khan, of Government College for Women, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi bagged first position by obtaining 1,003, while Shahr Bano, of Punjab College of Information Technology for Girls, Satellite Town got second position by securing 999 marks. Tehrim Amjad, of Punjab College of Information Technology for Girls, Satellite Town and Ambreen Tariq shared the third position by scoring 995 marks each.

In General Science Group for boys, Wasim Zarin Khan, of Indus College of Commerce for Boys, Satellite Town bagged first position by securing 958 marks; Hassan Shehzad, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town second with 947 marks, and Dawar Zaman, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town third with 945 marks.

In General Science Group for girls, Rabia Bashir, of Government College for Women, Chakwal bagged first position by scoring 954 marks; Shameen Yousaf, of Government College for Women, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi second by securing 949 marks, and Mehvish Naz, of Community Model Girls Higher Secondary School, Khaur, Attock third by obtaining 921 marks.

In Humanities Group for boys, Sudheer Ahmad, a private candidate from Rawalpindi, stood first with 852 marks. He was followed by Arshad Mehmood, of Madrassa Darul Mohiul Islam, Walyatabad, Kallar Syedan, and Zaheer Abbas, of Mumtaz Foundation Education Complex Higher Secondary School for Boys, Mangwal, Chakwal, who shared second position by securing 851 marks each. Muhammad Amir, a private candidate from Jhelum, was third position holder with 847 marks.

In Humanities Group for girls, Nimra Khalid, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town bagged first position by scoring 918 marks; Aamra Izzat, a private candidate from Dina, Jhelum, second by securing 914 marks, and Ramsha Sohail, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town, third by bagging 912 marks.

In Commerce Group for boys, Umer Farooq, of MA Jinnah College of Commerce and Computer Sciences, Jhelum topped the examination by securing 960 marks. Hassan Tahir, of Punjab College of Information Technology, Satellite Town, stood second by securing 943 marks, while Muhammad Usman, of Indus College of Commerce, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi, remained third position holder with 931 marks.

The top federal panel that sets policies for electronic health records so that a national system can be adopted made recommendations on Friday that would allow multiple organizations to certify electronic record products instead of the one certifying body that exists today.

Doctors and hospitals are slated to receive up to $17 billion in stimulus funds to help pay for health information technology systems. But the payments are dependent on doctors using systems that meet "meaningful use" criteria, standards the Health Information Technology Policy Committee is developing.

The stimulus package, included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, required the committee to recommend a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information infrastructure -- including standards for the exchange of patient medical information and certifications criteria -- to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Health and Human Services Department.

Currently, only the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) certifies electronic health records systems. Critics have charged that CCHIT has been influenced by health care information technology vendors, which helped form the group in 2004.

Paul Egerman, co-chairman of the policy committee's certification and adoption work group and the founder of IDX Systems Corp., a health IT system vendor acquired by General Electric Co. for $1.2 billion in 2006, recommended forming multiple certification bodies. Marc Probst, the other co-chairman and chief information officer of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, also supported the recommendation.

Egerman and Probst also suggested the committee expand certification to include a range of software sources, including open source software and open systems based on the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, which the Veterans Affairs Department operates.

The recommendation to establish multiple certification organizations will break the hold health IT vendors have on the certification process and open up new approaches such as Web-based health IT systems, said Brian Klepper, a health care analyst. He co-authored an Aug. 11 letter to David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology, criticizing the role CCHIT plays in the certification process.

Earlier in August, Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer at Google, said at a meeting of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that a national health IT system should be based on Web records that patients control.

Egerman and Probst urged the Health Information Technology Policy Committee to put more emphasis on interoperability among health IT systems so patient data could be easily exchanged.

Christine Bechtel, a committee member from the National Partnership for Women & Families, suggested interoperability could be fostered by the exchange of scanned patient records in the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF. "This would facilitate the movement of data ... by getting a piece of paper to go with the patient" in an electronic format, she said.

Roger Baker, chief information officer at VA, told the technology policy committee that PDFs work fairly well for the exchange of patient information. He added that VA and the Defense Department have extensive experience with exchanging patient information among large health care organizations and urged the committee to rely on that experience.

The policy committee advises HHS, which signs off on recommendations after collecting public comments.

There’s a new berry on the block, and this one’s supposed to be “designed for India.” No, that thankfully doesn’t mean it has a torch which can double up as the headlamp of a truck. It’s cheaper, is available on prepaid connections for the first time and is a bit more rugged. It was officially supposed to be in stores from last Friday, which means you should, by now be able to pick it up from Airtel outlets in most metros.

If you already use a Blackberry Curve 8900 (Javelin) or a Bold 9000, then there’s not much point “downgrading” to the new Curve 8520 “Gemini”. If you’re looking to switch from a Curve 8300 series phone or are interested in buying your first Blackberry, then the 8520 is a very interesting proposition. (Btw, if you use a Storm (the touchberry) or Flip (the clamshell berry), then you need to get your head examined!) Here’s the lightning quick review:

Federal court documents are currently made available to the public through a crufty system called PACER. For eight cents per page, users can download filings and other relevant documents associated with individual cases. PACER is intended to open case law and court activity to broad public scrutiny, but the system's obfuscated design and its paywall significantly undermine its efficacy.

The content hosted on PACER can be freely redistributed by third parties because copyright is not applicable to court documents, but the access fees make it costly and difficult for data archivers to assemble their own comprehensive mirrors that would offload the hosting burden and make the content more easily accessible to the general public. Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is launching a new project to tackle this problem.

A team led by CITP director Ed Felten has devised a novel means of boosting the availability of PACER documents outside of the paywall. They have created a new Firefox extension called RECAP that seamlessly replicates PACER content and uploads it to a mirror hosted by the Internet Archive. When RECAP users browse the PACER site, the content that they pay to view will be uploaded to the mirror by the Firefox extension. Users will get free access to the documents that are already hosted by the mirror.

Over time, free PACER content will accumulate at the Internet Archive's mirror, making it unnecessary for additional users to pay PACER for access to those files. The unrestricted availability of the mirrored legal documents will empower legal researchers and members of the public who can't simply pass the access costs along to clients as most lawyers do.

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts contends that access fees are needed in order to fund the bandwidth requirements and ongoing maintenance of the system. Crowdsourcing distribution and offloading the data to public mirrors like the Internet Archive presents a practical way to alleviate the strain on PACER while making the data more broadly available.

The RECAP project could also illuminate potential solutions to the problems that are blocking a more complete PACER overhaul. Despite growing pressure from Congress to reform the PACER system and make data available at no cost, the courts are still reluctant to make major changes to the system because of uncertainty about the cost and the technical challenges of hosting and distributing the data. The RECAP project's effort to mirror a portion of PACER could help answer those questions and provide a real-world model that demonstrates the viability of open access.

Our own Tim Lee, who wrote about the problems with PACER in article earlier this year, is one of the developers behind the RECAP project. Lee participated in the creation of the Firefox extension and some related backend infrastructure in collaboration with Harlan Yu and Steve Schultze. The Firefox extension is open source software and is distributed under the terms of GNU's General Public License. The extension is available for download from the RECAP website, which launched today. The website also has an introductory video and additional details about the project's goals and philosophy.

Yu offers additional commentary about RECAP at the CITP's Freedom to Tinker blog. He envisions a future where court documents are freely available to everyone and are annotated with software-friendly metadata that makes the information easy to process, index, and programmatically analyze.

"With today's technologies, government transparency means much more than the chance to read one document at a time. Citizens today expect to be able to download comprehensive government datasets that are machine-processable, open, and free," he wrote. "Today, we are excited to announce the public beta release of RECAP, a tool that will help bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US federal court system. RECAP is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that makes it easier for users to share documents they have purchased from PACER, the court's pay-to-play access system."

As Lee explained in his previous article, the revenue generated by PACER's paywall far exceeds the amount of money needed to run the system. The operating costs could be further reduced through much-needed consolidation and other changes. The RECAP system is an important vehicle for encouraging open access and moving the system forward. It also reflects the growth of an emerging movement that seeks to boost government transparency through data availability.

A number of similar projects have popped up recently with the goal of making the inner workings of the government visible to regular citizens via the Internet. An example is OpenRegs.com, a website established in June by Mercatus Center researcher Jerry Brito and programmer Peter Snyder to help people navigate federal regulations. The government itself is also pushing a number of important data transparency projects, such as the new Data.gov website that was launched in may by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to aggregate government data sets in machine-readable formats.

BANGALORE, INDIA: India's third largest PC brand Acer today announced the launch of its special "Independence Day Offer".

On the occasion of the 62nd Independence Day, Acer, offers its customers cash backs on purchase of Aspire Notebooks and select models of netbooks across India, said a press release.

Customers can avail a discount of Rs. 1000 on all Aspire series of Notebooks (not vaild for Aspire One D250 netbook) and the Aspire One 751h Netbook.

Customers also get a discount of Rs. 1500 on all Timelines series of Notebooks.

S. Rajendran, CMO Acer India said, "The cash back offer, is Acer's salute to the spirit of freedom and in keeping with the company's long standing initiative of offering cutting edge technology at mainstream prices. In keeping with that philosophy, it gives us great joy to announce this offer to all our end customers to avail better price with superior technology."

This limited period offer, valid from the 13th to the 16th of August, 2009, is available on the above mentioned product lines across all Acer brand stores and LFRs, which may in select cases run alternative offers which would equal the present offers during the time period, said the release.