Tag: SCHOOL

Six middle-schoolers in Carson City, Nevada have been arrested for using Facebook to threaten violence against their teachers. One of the six students, all of whom are 12- and 13-year-old girls, created a Facebook event entitled "Attack a Teacher Day," and allegedly invited around 100 others to do that very thing last Friday. The other five girls, among the invitees, allegedly posted threatening ...

Last month, a nursing student was expelled from a community college in Kansas after posting to Facebook a photo of herself standing next to a human placenta. The student, 22-year old Doyle Byrnes, reportedly took the photo during a lab session, led by Johnson County Community College nursing instructor Amber Delphia. Four other students posed alongside the placenta, but it was Byrnes's photo that ...

We always thought intimate, human-to-human interaction was a crucial element to learning any foreign language. But officials in the South Korean city of Daegu apparently think that human-to-robot interaction can be just as effective. On Monday, the city unleashed an army of 29 robot English teachers, designed by the Korea Institute of Science of Technology. The 'bots conducted classes across ...

It was bound to happen eventually. Oregon, one of the first states to offer online testing and digital writing exams, has decided that students will be allowed to click the spell check button while taking their state-wide writing tests. State Superintendent Susan Castillo told Oregon Live, "We are not letting a student's keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge their writing ...

Today's teenage bullies may conduct the majority of their schoolyard terrorism on Facebook, but parents are quickly catching on, and doing their best to mitigate cyberbullying. The New York Times Magazine recently investigated what some parents are doing to counteract online bullying, and, not surprisingly, found a pretty wide variety of approaches. Some run to the police, while others choose to ...

Yesterday, both houses of the New Jersey state legislature passed an 'Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights,' just a few months after 18-year-old Rutgers student and cyberbully target Tyler Clementi committed suicide. The bill, which is now awaiting the signature of Governor Chris Christie, would require most public school employees to take training courses on how to pick up on cyberbullying, while ...

China might not openly celebrate certain forms of technological freedom, but the nation certainly knows how to throw a free-wheeling, frivolous tech fiesta. This week, China's Zhejiang Province hosted a monumental robot contest, which pitted 115 different teams and their diverse crews of 'bots against one another. The teams represented 50 different schools, and the budding engineers reportedly ...

We've previously discussed the potential of technology and social media to alter the classroom experience. Many schools and professors are looking to boost student engagement by using Facebook and Twitter, but can that tech actually lead to better grades? A study just published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning suggests that it might. The researchers monitored the engagement and grades ...

The FCC's E-Rate program provides many schools around the country with money to support their computer networks. It also provides opportunities for private tech companies, who can bid for school contracts under what's supposed to be an open and fair process. Hewlett Packard, however, recently came under fire for allegedly bribing certain school officials with lavish gifts in an attempt to rig the ...

Getting in trouble because of Facebook is so passe and predictable. Astonishingly, though, three Huntsville, Alabama high school students have contributed a startling new chapter to Facebook crime and punishment. Grissom High School administrators apparently have far too much time on their hands, though, because these Alabama students were reprimanded over an incredibly mundane and harmless ...

To ensure that kids don't get off at the wrong stops, some school districts have started using fingerprint and card scanners to track students who ride school buses. The Desert Sands Unified School District, located just north of San Diego, began testing a Biometric Observation Security System (BOSS) on its buses earlier this month, according to USA Today. Students simply touch their fingers to a ...

A school board member in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas has announced that he will step down from his position, after having faced widespread criticism for a torrent of anti-gay rants he posted on his Facebook page. Clint McCance, who served as the vice president of the Midland School District, recently spewed a slew of homophobic sentiments all over his Facebook page, in response to GLAAD's October ...

As Facebook has grown in popularity, we've gotten some slightly surprising friend requests. There are the long-lost kindergarten classmates, the relative strangers and the former coworkers. But our favorites have always been the teachers. If we're lucky, we all had one or two teachers between grade school and high school that really spoke to us, whether bestowing upon us a love for their favored ...

We've already heard about how students are clinging to printed textbooks despite many of the advantages provided by e-books. Sales of electronic textbooks are expected to increase in the coming years, but growth may be relatively slow, with optimistic estimates projecting a 15-percent adoption rate by the end of 2012. But a new report from the Chronicle of Higher Education claims that some ...

The eyes of nearly every child in the United States instantaneously sparkle at the mere mention of two words: "snow day." Even those of us who grew up in the warmer parts of the country would sometimes be granted the glorious reprieve from school by icy roads, or -- if Heaven would have it -- respectable piles of the white stuff. All those young, wistful, smiling eyes may soon be permanently ...