Tag: Mac

I just love seeing these types of positives steps in the American Education System (and not just b/c it’s Apple Macbooks) :

Despite the economic turmoil, Maine is expanding its program to provide laptop computers to students.

[From The Associated Press: Maine expanding school laptop program with Apple]

Hopefully they will be able to negotiate a reasonable price for the laptops — and then the associated software/infrastructure improvements to make them usable in a classroom environment. Oh and possibly train any teacher that doesn’t have any computer experience (are there any left? If so, why?) to use the new tools. It’s going to be an expensive undertaking, but it’s good to see at least one government body that has made preparing their students for the new world a priority.

I know that this video has been around, but it doesn’t hurt to promote it a bit more… A colleague of mine sent me this link to a video called “Did You Know?” . Updated version (v.4) that includes some citations and updated data. It’s worth the 10 minutes to view them if you are at all concerned with the future of our students in the US. To be honest, it’s a good video to watch no matter what walk of life you’re in (white collar slug, corporate exec, blue collar worker, etc.) – as you can derive a lot of facts that pertain to you and your competition.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that these videos are to promote pro-American nationalism. The videos were not to design for that purpose – but rather to deliver some actual hard facts and ask some serious questions about where the US education system stands. It actually makes me a little sad to see the internet flame wars (which no one ever wins) that are posted in the comments of the YouTube pages of those two videos — a lot of people missed the point of the videos, and were stupid (yeah, I’ll go with ‘stupid’ as a term here) enough to put their thoughts down in writing.

-JT