Learning Solution – Online Education

Here we a go again. We are always looking to do something constructive and fruitful over the net. But we end up at some social networking site or playing an online game. So if we do end up at some game site why not at the best. www.onlinecasinobluebook.com is one of the best gaming portals where you will find links to some great online casinos. After all gambling is the best form of gaming.

Now the good news for users is that it also feature no deposit Casinos, this is great for beginners as they are generally a bit hesitant to invest cash the very moment. This site supports all the major credit cards though it has special casinos featuring American Express. This can be found out at the AMEX online gambling zone.

Onlinecasinobluebook.com also has a poker room, so if you are a poker freak, just let those horses go wild for some time. You could join a poker room depending upon its rating.

Finally if you need some instant tips or want to share your reviews or comments you can always do it I the forum. The forum has all the information you will ever need about gambling and winning. Overall to sum it up, this is a good place to visit and has a lot of interesting stuff which will keep you interested for hours!!

Medical PG Admissions-2010

Applications are invited for Medical Post Graduate courses (MD/MS/Diploma) and Residency in Medical Physics commencing in 2010

31 Oct 2009 Last date for receipt of completed application forms
07 Nov 2009 Last date for receipt of completed sponsorship forms
28 Nov 2009 Written test
03 Dec 2009 Announcement of list of candidates who qualify for interviews
04 Jan 2010 Registration for Interviews & Medical Checkup
05 Jan 2010 Special Tests and Interviews at Vellore.
06 Jan 2010 Announcement of final selection list.
07 Jan 2010 Acceptance by 8.00 am
26 Feb 2010 Registration
01 Mar 2010 Courses begin
** Dates are subject to change

Course details/eligibility criteria/Admission bulletin/Online application form available at website home.cmcvellore.ac/admissions/admin.htm

For more info see:

• CMC Vellore 2009 Application form
• CMC Vellore 2009 Eligibility
• CMC Vellore 2010 SELECTION PROCESS

Studies in the August issue of the American Journal of Education highlight the role that school location plays in where parents buy a home and where schools set up shop.

Abacus Educational Services: academic editing, classes Academic Editing, Classes, Homeschooling, Exam Prep, Online Classes.

Karnataka to have single CET from 2010.Taking either CET, COMED-K will entitle admission could be an option

The Karnataka government plans to have a single Common Entrance Test (CET) for admission to medical, dental and engineering courses – in both government and private institutions – from the forthcoming year.

Karnataka Minister for Higher Education Arvind Limbavali said that the State government was keen to have one common admission test for professional courses and it would try to ensure the same next year. The minister also noted that the state was keen to have a say in the admission process of deemed universities too.

Limbavali was responding to queries in the Legislative Council on the hardship and confusion arising from two different tests – CET by Karnataka Examiniation Authority and COMEDK by the managements of private colleges.

Limbavali said the government wanted to adopt the single-CET system from this academic year, but could not do it due to technical reasons.

Nanaiah earlier highlighted the ‘fraudulent practices’ being adopted by Comed-K. “They ensure admission to students of their choice while awarding ranks after entrance exams,’’ he alleged. “Otherwise, how is it possible for students who have got 50-60% in PU exams to get ranks in the Comed-K entrance exam?”

Source TOI & Express Buzz

Over 115,000 forms – more than double the seats in Delhi University colleges – have been sold for admission to various graduate courses. And students continue to flood the information centres of the varsity.

“In total 115,149 forms were sold at 16 centres spread across the capital till Tuesday evening,” deputy dean students’ welfare Seema Parihar told sources.

The sale and receipt of forms for admission into 47 courses and 63 colleges will be open till June 15 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

“While only 49,000 seats are offered by the university, the response of the students has been great. And still there are five more days to go,” said Parihar.

The streets of the varsity’s campuses in the north and the south of the city appeared flooded with aspirants and parents making their way to the various centres and colleges.

Only 230 forms for students applying through the physically handicapped category have been filled. There are 1,500 seats reserved for the handicapped category.

“Year after year the number of forms filled for the physically abled category is decreasing. More than half the seats go waste every year,” added Parihar.

Special help desks have been set for the specially abled aspirants in the arts faculty area of the university. Counsellors have also been deployed at each desk to help out candidates in filling the forms. IANS

Source: workid1@gmail.com (Anuj Kothari)

After watching their students’ test scores drop for nearly 20 years, school officials in Mapleton, Colo., took steps to shut down the city’s traditional, comprehensive high school and replace it over a period of years with a network of six to seven smaller schools as part of a broad, and bold, effort to improve learning.

The story of the school system’s transition over the next five years is the stuff of a new book, titled Against the Odds, by five researchers and school reformers. The team, led by noted Stanford University researcher Larry Cuban, draws on interviews, analyses, and observations conducted between 2006 and 2009 as the initiative kicked into high gear.

Yes, I know small schools are yesterday’s news in national debates on school reform, but this book extracts some interesting lessons and observations from Mapleton’s experiment, which was heavily backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For one, the school system found the conversion was expensive, largely due to increased building and transportation costs. That may not have been unexpected, but the surprise (for me, anyway) was that the added 5 percent in costs meant that educators had to make up the money somewhere else. The cut, for Mapleton, came in instructional services. The district reduced some staff development and asked teachers to volunteer their time for other professional development workshops.

Another surprise: While participation in high school athletics dropped off after the conversion, it grew for after-school clubs, including those that were academically oriented.

In the end, while the district did succeed in creating more personalized learning environments for students, it still had not seen the hoped-for, dramatic learning gains by 2008. But dropout rates appeared to be decreasing by the end of that time span, and district officials were hopeful that, with a little more time, test scores would follow suit. At the same time, though, the district was facing increasing pressure to ratchet up accountability measures and boost lagging test scores.

It’s hard to know how many, if any, of these changes were due to the high school’s downsizing. (In a second phase of the reform, the district also began shrinking its elementary schools.) As part of the transformation, the district embraced a more constructivist-oriented approaching to teaching. And each of the new schools also adopted a different instructional model, such as Big Picture High School or Expeditionary Learning, so much was happening at the same time.

But, for any school system that’s still interested in downsizing, Mapleton offers a candid and cautionary case study.

The Houston Chronicle’s education blog is reporting that city schools Superintendent Terry Grier is talking about finding a “world-renowned researcher” to help make the school system the hub of a new research center dedicated to measuring what works in the Houston schools.

“Think about it,” Grier told the bloggers over at School Zone. “We’re sitting right here in Houston. M.D. Anderson is the biggest cancer institute in the world. We have all kinds of energy and petroleum companies that are constantly doing research around trying to find alternative fuels. We are the hub of a research center here in Houston that I think would rival that of any place in the world. I’d like to see us have a research center tied to our school system that helps us measure what works — whether it’s computer software programs or a literacy reading program in a particular school or whether it’s which algebra books get the best results from kids.”

Faithful readers of this blog may remember that I wrote back in November about the Texas Consortium on School Research, of which Houston is a part. Similar sorts of scholar-school district collaborations are popping up across the country as well. The model for these efforts: the Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago, which has been churning out a steady stream of studies on Chicago’s schools for nearly 20 years. Read more about it here.

The last “Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education” is now available online. Readers of this blog will recall that Gerald Bracey was working on this report the night before his death last month at the age of 69.

In this, his 18th edition of the report, he offers a critical analysis of the research behind three popular education reform pushes: the call for high-quality schools, mayoral takeovers of school districts, and the drive for higher academic standards. The report is being published jointly by the Education in the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.

The national board that advises the U.S. Department of Education on its research operations voted to weigh in yesterday on the proposed rules for the new Investing in Innovation or “i3″ program—and just in the nick of time.

The window for commenting on draft guidelines for the $650 million grant program was scheduled to close at midnight last night, but the six members of the National Board for Education Sciences, at their meeting earlier in the day, approved a resolution that calls for strengthening and expanding the criteria the feds hope to use to decide how to distribute and evaluate grants through the program.

Part of the $100 billion in economic-stimulus funds for education, the i3 program is designed to spur the “next generation” of improvements in education and promote the spread of proven innovations. The biggest awards, or “scale up” grants, would be worth up to $50 million each for programs that are supported by “strong” evidence of research. A second category of “validation” grants of up to $30 million each would go to programs with a “moderate” research track record. The draft rules also call for awarding “development” grants of up to $5 million each for programs with “reasonable research-based findings or theories.” (For further details, see my colleague Michele McNeil’s story inEdWeek.)

The problem with the draft rules, the board maintains, is that their definition of “strong evidence” and their evaluation requirements for validation grants give equal weight to random-assignment experiments and quasi-experimental studies. Only the former, which involve randomly assigning subjects to either experimental or status quo groups, are considered the “gold standard” for determining whether an intervention works. Said board vice chairman Jon Baron:

“Our thought is that awarding scale-up grants solely on the basis of quasi-experimental studies would likely lead to implementation of some programs that are not effective.”

What the department ought to do instead, the board says, is express a clear preference for randomized experiments. The board is not the only group to stake out that position: The Knowledge Alliance, a Washington-based group that represents research groups, also submitted a comment calling for giving more weight to randomized research in the definition for strong evidence. That group does not, however, favor setting out the same sort of methodological hierarchy as the criteria for evaluating validation grants, according to Jim Kohlmoos, the association’s president.

The board’s resolution also says the program should require evaluations to include estimates of program costs, and not just benefits, and that the new fund guidelines ought to encourage ways to design evaluations so that research costs and the burdens on schools and districts are kept as low as possible.

But, as Kohlmoos points out, there’s also a risk in setting the methodological criteria too high for this program: Will there be enough education programs with a research track record strong enough to qualify for the new grants? Time will tell.

The blogging has been light this week because I’ve been taking some days off work. Next week, I expect to be back up to speed in posting news nearly every day. Readers, please don’t go away.

Ten ed-tech organizations have been chosen as Innovative Incubators by the Software & Information Industry Association, giving them the chance to match up with commercial vendors and potential investors, the Washington-based group announced this week.

The incubators offer online learning platforms, real-time tech-based assessment tools, social-networking applications, multimedia content, and data-management programs. They include for-profit and nonprofit companies, research groups, and academic institutions. The finalists will participate in the Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City at the end of the month. The annual meeting brings industry executives and entrepreneurs together to discuss business development and new products for the K-12 and higher ed markets.

A lot of policymakers and educators have been drawing hope from recent studies of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program. If you haven’t heard of it, the Perry Preschool project was an early-intervention program for children from disadvantaged families that was run out of Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti, Mich., in the 1960s. A forerunner of the federal Head Start program, the project has long been considered a success.

Recent re-analyses of program data show that, from a public-investment perspective, it provided a pretty good bang for the buck, too. Those studies estimate the rates of return to be about 16 percent to 17 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to find a checking account or a certificate of deposit that pays that well. The rate is high in part because, compared with nonparticipants, fewer of the program grads required special education services or ended up in prison later on in life.

In a new working paper, however, Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and colleagues suggest those earlier estimates might have been a little too generous. In their paper, which was posted online this month at the Web site for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists argue that the previous analyses were flawed because of problems in the randomization process for the original experiment, missing data and costs, and a failure to calculate standard errors.

When they account statistically for all those issues, they come up with a rate of return that falls somewhere between 7 and 10 percent. That’s still statistically better than zero, they maintain. But it’s not nearly as exciting as 16 or 17 percent. Look for this study to figure heavily in debates over President Obama’s plans to expand the federal Head Start program.

Microsoft Corp.recently launched a new social-networking Web site for educators called the Partners in Learning network. It appears that the new community is the latest reincarnation of Microsoft’s Innovative Teachers Network. So far, 1.6 million educators from 59 different countries are participating in the online community, according to the company.

This new resource allows educators to connect to others with similar professional interests, subject-matter expertise, or location, and provides access to resources and learning tools for the classroom. It also allows teachers to find and share lesson plans with each other.

This development dovetails nicely with the survey we wrote about last week which found that when educators were asked which social networks they would be most likely to join in the next year, they strongly preferred communities that were education-related. However, only a small percentage of those educators were actually familiar with education-focused social-networking sites and an even smaller percentage participated in them.

That finding is a bit surprising considering the high numbers of participants in Microsoft’s community, as well as others like the Discovery Educator Network and Elluminate’s LearnCentral, which claim hundreds of thousands of participants.

What do you think? Are education-focused social-networking communities a good resource for educators? Have you joined one, and if so, is it worthwhile?

The back-and-forth on charter school research never seems to end.

The latest analysis takes to task the much-publicized study of New York City’s charter schools that was conducted by Stanford University economist Caroline M. Hoxby and colleagues. (You can read more about the original study in this EdWeek article. Read the full text of the Hoxby study here.)

In the new critique, Sean F. Reardon, a colleague of Hoxby’s at Stanford, points up what he sees as flaws in the New York City study. For one, he says, in measuring the effects of charter schooling on students in grades 4-12, the study relies on statistical models that include test scores from the previous year, which are measured after the admissions lotteries take place. Because of that timing, he says, the scores could be affected by whether students attend a charter school, which “destroys the benefits of the randomization” that is a strength of Hoxby’s study.

Reardon, a research methodologist, also faults the Hoxby study for “inappropriately” extrapolating data on students’ achievement gains between kindergarten and 8th grade to calculate learning benefits over their entire school careers and raises some other, equally technical, issues as well.

Reardon’s bottom line: The report “likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students’ cumulative achievement, though it is not possible—given the information missing from the report—to precisely quantify the extent of overestimation.”

You can find the full paper at the Web site for the Think Tank Review Project, which posted it on Thursday. The project, which specializes in reviewing studies in the news on hot-button education issues, is a joint project of the University Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center and the Arizona State University Education Policy Research Unit.

And here’s a side note: If you think nobody pays attention to all these studies on charter schools, think again. The final guidance issued by the federal Education Department this week for its $4 billion Race to the Top program indirectly references some of that research in relaxing language, in the draft guidelines, that many had interpreted to be an endorsement of charter schools as the chief remedy for failing schools. The new language reads:

“Notwithstanding research showing that charter schools on average perform similarly to traditional public schools, a growing body of evidence suggests that high-quality charter schools can be powerful forces for increasing student achievement, closing achievement gaps, and spurring educational innovation.

That first clause sounds to me like a reference to a national study released over the summer by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, which is also based a Stanford. The wording also partly explains, in a nutshell, why so much of the research on charter schools seems to conflict. Some charter schools are very good and some, not.

Researchers and practiioners from Dallas, El Paso, Houston, and 16 other Texas school districts got together last month to formally kick off the formation of the Texas Consortium on School Research.

Modeled after the 19-year-old Consortium on Chicago School Research, the new group enlists university academics, local educators, and administrators to work together on research projects that address the common, real-world problems that school districts have. Over time, they hope to create a “community of practice” for sharing findings and strategies. The Texas consortium’s research partners are the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center, the Regional Education Laboratory-Southwest, which is one of the 10 regional education laboratories funded by the federal government, and the Chicago consortium.

The Texas group is the latest of several district-university research partnerships to get off the ground: Recall that similar efforts have been launched in Baltimore, Newark, N.J., and New York City. And the Chicago group hosted a conference over the summer to help nurture some of those burgeoning efforts across the country, which you can read more about here.

Do I spot a trend?

Here’s a tidbit that you may have missed: Vanderbilt University scholar James Guthrie has been tapped to direct education policy studies at former President George W. Bush’s new think tank.

Based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the George W. Bush Institute will be part of the Bush Presidential Center, which also includes Bush’s presidential library and museum. Besides education policy, the center will focus on global health, human freedom, and economic growth. Read all about it in the Houston Chronicle and in these press releases from Vanderbilt and SMU.

Guthrie currently directs the Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt, where he specializes in studying improving school leadership. At the Bush institute, he’ll be teaming up with Sandy Kress, who was Bush’s campaign adviser on education, to continue that line of inquiry.

Construction on the center isn’t expected to begin until fall, but Guthrie and Kress are already planning a national conference on education leadership, policy, and school reform at SMU for this March.

Diane Ravitch over at Bridging Differences observes that many charter schools “have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners.”

That complaint has been popping up in a number of different places lately.

Last month, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco made the same observation in the Huffington Post, basing it on data about charter schools in New York state. The month before that, an ELL advocacy group in Massachusetts made the same claim about charter schools there, which I reported on in Education Week.

But a national study of charter schools in 10 states found that, on average, enrollment of ELLs in charter schools was about the same as in traditional schools. I got that information from Margaret E. Raymond, the director of the Stanford center and the study’s lead author, when I interviewed her back in September.

She said, however, that some charter schools, such as those in Minnesota that offer dual-immersion programs in Hmong and English, have a high concentration of ELLs and others don’t.

So the information from the national study doesn’t contradict Diane Ravitch’s statement that “many” charter schools don’t enroll as many ELLs as traditional public schools do.

I’m hoping in the next couple of years that researchers will provide richer information about ELLs and charter schools. At this point, we don’t know much.

More than three decades of research has shown that, when it comes to academic achievement, children who focus on effort tend to be more successful than those who focus on innate ability. The problem, though, is that many kids decide early in life that more effort isn’t, well, worth the effort. They believe people are either born smart or dumb and that no amount of work is going to change that situation. In the face of such persistent beliefs, how do you motivate kids to try harder?

Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck and her colleague, Lisa Sorich Blackwell, have hit on one possible solution. They developed a software program, called “Brainology,” that uses brain science to persuade middle school students that intelligence is a malleable, rather than a fixed trait.

Studies have shown that it seems to help. Compared with peers in traditional classrooms, middle school students who used the program improved their motivation to work harder in school and, over time, their achievement as well. (You may have read about some of that related research in this space before. A good, readable summary of all the research that led to the development of this program can also be found in this 2007 article from Scientific American.)

What’s new is that, starting today, the program will be available on the commercial market. Designed to be “like an owner’s manual for your brain,” the software teaches middle schoolers that when people practice and learn new skills, the areas of the brain responsible for those skills become larger and denser with neural tissue, and that new areas of the brain become active when performing related tasks. They’re taught that the brain continues to grow nerve cells, or neurons, daily, and that this process speeds up when a lot of active learning is occurring.

Marketed by a for-profit company called Mindset Works of San Carlos, Calif., the program may be a bit pricey from some: It costs $99 for one child for families, and less for siblings, and $20 a head for educators who order 20 or more programs. Could a skilled, well-informed teacher get the same results for free? Possibly.

One of the largest school districts in the country, the 174,000-student Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, recently upgraded to a Cisco network that is entirely wireless. I had a chance to catch up with Neal Shelton, the district’s network engineering supervisor, to ask a few questions via e-mail about why going wireless was important to the district and what kinds of challenges had to be overcome. My questions are in bold, and his answers follow.

The wireless implementation in Fairfax County Public Schools–or FCPS–obviously took quite a bit of time and effort. Why was this undertaking such a priority for the district?

Several years ago, many in FCPS understood the importance of wireless technology in a school environment. Over a two year period (2002-2004), FCPS implemented wireless technology in all its schools and centers. The number of access points grew from approximately 600 to nearly 8,000. Today, there are nearly 8,700 access points located in 240 sites.

The effort to bring wireless to the schools brought new freedom to educational computing. Access to network resources without the constraints of physical wiring provides widespread availability to students and faculty in a range of locations previously thought impractical to wired networking methods.

What sort of learning opportunities does this create for students?

The concept of “network access anywhere, anytime” has great appeal in an instructional environment. A wireless network deployment plan was developed that details necessary groundwork and infrastructure requirements needed for delivery of this new service.

Wireless networks allow students, teachers, and administrators access to the Internet, the FCPS intranet, and other network resources wherever the need arises. Wireless mobile computer labs enable a more efficient use of space that was previously reserved for permanently placed computer labs. These mobile labs allow classrooms to share resources on an as-needed basis and aid in the efficient integration of technology into the curriculum. There are more than 500 wireless mobile labs in place in FCPS. In addition, all elementary school classroom teachers now have a wireless laptop to access wireless infrastructure throughout the county.

What were some of the challenges you faced as the network was put in place? How did you deal with those challenges?

Size does matter. A network as large as the one at FCPS poses challenges. One of the challenges is to keep all access points and wireless controllers functioning in an efficient manner. To overcome this challenge, we created a structured environment that is based upon industry approved standards. The FCPS wireless team ensures wireless efficiency by standardizing configurations and installations. Any wireless difficulties within this framework are quickly resolved with the effective use of monitoring and troubleshooting tools.

To read more about the benefits and challenges of moving to a wireless network, check out this story I wrote for the most recent issue of Digital Directions.

One of the largest school districts in the country, the 174,000-student Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, recently upgraded to a Cisco network that is entirely wireless. I had a chance to catch up with Neal Shelton, the district’s network engineering supervisor, to ask a few questions via e-mail about why going wireless was important to the district and what kinds of challenges had to be overcome. My questions are in bold, and his answers follow.

The wireless implementation in Fairfax County Public Schools–or FCPS–obviously took quite a bit of time and effort. Why was this undertaking such a priority for the district?

Several years ago, many in FCPS understood the importance of wireless technology in a school environment. Over a two year period (2002-2004), FCPS implemented wireless technology in all its schools and centers. The number of access points grew from approximately 600 to nearly 8,000. Today, there are nearly 8,700 access points located in 240 sites.

The effort to bring wireless to the schools brought new freedom to educational computing. Access to network resources without the constraints of physical wiring provides widespread availability to students and faculty in a range of locations previously thought impractical to wired networking methods.

What sort of learning opportunities does this create for students?

The concept of “network access anywhere, anytime” has great appeal in an instructional environment. A wireless network deployment plan was developed that details necessary groundwork and infrastructure requirements needed for delivery of this new service.

Wireless networks allow students, teachers, and administrators access to the Internet, the FCPS intranet, and other network resources wherever the need arises. Wireless mobile computer labs enable a more efficient use of space that was previously reserved for permanently placed computer labs. These mobile labs allow classrooms to share resources on an as-needed basis and aid in the efficient integration of technology into the curriculum. There are more than 500 wireless mobile labs in place in FCPS. In addition, all elementary school classroom teachers now have a wireless laptop to access wireless infrastructure throughout the county.

What were some of the challenges you faced as the network was put in place? How did you deal with those challenges?

Size does matter. A network as large as the one at FCPS poses challenges. One of the challenges is to keep all access points and wireless controllers functioning in an efficient manner. To overcome this challenge, we created a structured environment that is based upon industry approved standards. The FCPS wireless team ensures wireless efficiency by standardizing configurations and installations. Any wireless difficulties within this framework are quickly resolved with the effective use of monitoring and troubleshooting tools.

To read more about the benefits and challenges of moving to a wireless network, check out this story I wrote for the most recent issue of Digital Directions.