Teachers

Monday's ceremony marked the installation of the Born Learning Trail, a series of signs along a pathway through a playground at Springside Park in Pittsfield, aimed young children and their families to encourage outdoor activity and reading. The Born Learning Trail comes from efforts by Pittsfield Promise, a city-wide coalition that is working through a variety of projects with a goal of boosting reading proficiency levels among Pittsfield third-graders to 90 percent by 2020.

Books for the very youngest readers can be deceptively simple. Often, although not always, printed on thick cardboard pages (board books) and with an elementary text and straightforward illustrations, these books can strike many adults as rather boring to read and easy to create. Yet the truth is that books for babies and toddlers take a devilish amount of talent and an uncanny ability to synthesize information and illustrations while still making them entertaining and educational.

In a few more days Clarksville students will be dismissed for the summer. Weeks of relaxation, fun activities and vacation trips will kick into high gear after Memorial Day. For the director and teachers at Clarksville Youth Enrichment Programs (CYEP), the real fun starts on June 3 when their summer programs begin. Brooke Knight founded CYEP in January 2012, and wanted to create a learning center where students had the opportunity to learn academics within a fun environment.

Most parents will have access to free, all-day kindergarten beginning in the Fall of 2014 under a $15.7 billion education funding bill given final approval by the Legislature on Sunday. The Senate approved the bill on a 41-26 vote and sent it to Gov. Mark Dayton. The bill is both the biggest single part of the state's general fund budget and a top priority of the DFL Legislature. Their reason for taking the unpopular step of raising taxes is to provide the popular benefit of all-day kindergarten, as well as other education improvements.

Casey Wardynski knew his district had to make a change when he glanced at its crop of history textbooks and spotted one glaring omission. "They didn't even have 9/11 in them," said Mr. Wardynski, the superintendent of the Huntsville city schools, an Alabama district of about 24,000 students. Last summer, the district replaced its paper-based curriculum with digital content in a rapid-fire overhaul--with 3rd graders and above receiving Hewlett-Packard laptops, while pre-K pupils to 2nd graders received iPads.

--> Having grow up on afterschool specials and whatnot I’m of the generation that knows the TVz can teach u stufz. To wit, the recent spate of PSAs informing me that my kids should get 60 minutes of exercise a day (which reminds me of the one telling me to read to my kid for 30 minutes a day, which I ignored I hate reading to children).Now that recess is relegated to the era of after school specials (kids informed me its 10 minutes when it occurs) and PE is only once a week, I find myself, in the absence of team sports (that’s a whole other post coming up soon) pushing the kids to “exercise.”I’d like to say that this push has us all exercising en famille, with pickup games of soccer in the yard et al. Sadly not.Thankfully our academic ‘hood handed down a new bike to fMhson and he happily tools around, free-ranging. fMhgirl is a devoted skater/scooter (and wannabe skateboarder, but I’m holding off on that “you could break your wrist” However my most ingenuous method of sneaking exercise in has been to require kids to perform brief calisthenics to “earn back” stuff of theirs I’ve picked up or to earn extra “screen time.”How about you interwebz? Do you get 60 minutes of exercise a day? Do your kids?

The University of Minnesota at Duluth has fired Rod Raymond as wellness director over numerous charges that he denies, The Duluth News Tribune reported. During the last four years, two students filed sexual harassment complaints against Raymond and he was facing other, unspecified charges. A university statement said that he was dismissed for, among other things, “violation of the Regent’s Policy on Nepotism and Personal Relationships;" “inappropriate sexual conduct with a UMD student on university premises and during work hours,” and "untruthfulness during an Office of Equal Opportunity investigation." Raymond has denied all charges, and vowed to challenge his dismissal. Ad keywords: Diversity

Students, joined by civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred, on Wednesday filed complaints against Dartmouth and Swarthmore Colleges, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Southern California over their handling of complaints of sexual assaults, The Los Angeles Times reported. The complaints -- filed with the U.S. Department of Education -- charge that the institutions have failed to adequately investigate reports of sexual assault or to accurate report such incidents as required by federal law. The charges are similar to those made recently with the Education Department about Occidental College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. College officials, while acknowledging periodic missteps, have generally said that they make every effort to comply with the relevant laws. Ad keywords: Diversity

Rising tuition, declining government subsidies, stagnant endowments, and increased competition are challenging higher education like never before. College and university leaders are struggling to understand where these changes will lead and how they can make higher education more affordable, more accessible, and of greater quality for an increasingly diverse and aspiring student. Based on our interaction with university leaders and policy makers, we believe that the timeline for transformational change has shortened to five years. During this time, higher education will have moved from a provider-driven model to a consumer-driven one and, in so doing, upend a system that had endured for centuries. Half a decade from now, almost all universities will offer their students the option of undertaking their coursework in high-demand degree programs online. However, online offerings will no longer be the competitive advantage they are today. Most online enrollment will be open or provisional and more than 80 percent of professional degree programs, such as MBA, RN-to-BSN, and M.Ed., will be earned online. Additionally, by 2018, new types of widely accepted degrees will have emerged that are less time-consuming, less expensive, and more relevant to 21st century jobs. The vast majority of on-campus students will be enrolled in some online courses, a movement already afoot, with the Sloan Consortium’s 2012 Survey of Online Learning finding that approximately a third of all U.S. college students took at least one online course during the fall 2011 term. The increase of nearly 10 percent in online enrollments over the previous year is particularly meaningful given that overall enrollment declined in the United States for the first time in 15 years, and continued its decline across the developed world. Foreign universities with growing stature and competitive pricing will be aggressively recruiting U.S. students for their online programs. With thousands of universities in the United States and around the world online, students will have more choices in higher education than in any other consumer category. This unprecedented competition and the availability of many high-quality, low-priced options will have caused the tuition bubble to burst and the cost of attending college to tumble, putting even greater pressure on institutional budgets. While the relative cost of instruction will have declined due to increased scale, the incomes of many professors providing online instruction will have risen sharply. Some of these professors will have become the free agents of academe, with their courses widely accepted at both public and private universities around the world. While some international students will continue to come to the United States to study, we expect that almost all enrollment growth at U.S. universities will come from international students enrolled in online programs. Some public and private universities will have reached iconic status, ushering in a new breed of multinational educational organizations. These large multinational universities will provide curriculum and instruction in multiple languages and offer competitive pricing designed to suit local markets. Capitalizing on their reputations, they will have become leading global brands with student bodies well in excess of 100,000 choosing from many newly added degree programs designed to meet demand in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and India. As a result of greater use of technology in the delivery of higher education, construction of new buildings on the campuses of tax-supported institutions will have slowed significantly. At the same time, we expect that over the next five years university systems will be consolidating campuses at an increasing rate as trustees and legislators come to understand the economics of online learning and how vastly it can expand the reach of an institution. Companies like ours — Academic Partnerships — are helping

Reed eliminates its application fee in a bid to secure more applications, particularly from low-income students who could benefit from the college's need-based aid. Editorial Tags: AdmissionsCollege administrationCollege costs/prices