education - page 3

Head to any technology conference and you’ll wonder where all the women are. We live in an age where women are routinely underrepresented at best, harassed and threatened at worst.

Technology classes in schools are just as bad, with less opportunity for girls to explore potential careers in high-tech fields.

To combat this, a group of women in Portland started App Camp for Girls in 2013, and they’ve now expanded to camps in Seattle and Vancouver.

“Apps are rapidly becoming an important part the world’s economy and culture,” writes the team on their website. “If women are left on the sidelines of this phenomenon, everyone suffers.”

They’ve also just raised their goal of $100,000 with two days left in their IndieGoGo campaign.

A New York elementary school has taken the bold move of upgrading 75 percent of its third and fourth curriculum to iPad, meaning that students spend three-quarters of each day using their Apple tablets.

Jackson Avenue School is currently in its fifth year of a district initiative providing all students in grades 3-9 with iPads for digital learning.

You know nothin’, Jon Snow. Especially how much more full of shifting alliances and intrigue The Wars of the Roses was than your epic television series is able to show. Game of Thrones superfans may already know that 15th-century England inspired much of the structure of George R. R. Martin’s overarching book series, but having it all laid out — lovely animations and visuals to support the historical information — is our first exposure to that fact.

The short animated video, written by Alex Gendler and animated by Brett Underhill, even illustrates how Game of Thrones matches directly to historical facts with some fun Pop-Up Video-style flourishes. You’ll love it.

There are plenty of schools with computers. But find a teacher with tech industry experience and you’ve found a “unicorn,” says a school director who wants to introduce kids to the language of coding.

Lyel Resner, director of K-12 curriculum at New York’s Flatiron School, is promoting a series of summer workshops across six U.S. cities to teach high school students programming fundamentals, app development, front-end web design and how to get a startup off the ground.

Apple and Google are very interested in taking over the U.S. education market from Microsoft, but when it comes to capturing marketshare, the Chromebook is teaching Apple an important lesson: Price matters.

For the first time ever, Google has passed Apple in the U.S. education market, according to IDC data obtained by The Financial Times, which shows Google’s Chromebook laptops are more popular now in the K-12 classrooms than the iPad.

My math-averse daughter wanted to cheat on her algebra homework. So we downloaded PhotoMath, a free app that lets you take a picture of your mathematical and algebraic equations, solving them for you and showing the steps to the solution.

PhotoMath has been at the top of the App Store charts for a couple of weeks, hitting number one on the Education, Kids Games and Top Apps lists. Small wonder, as it seems like a great way to get out of doing homework.

However, despite the concerns of some parents and teachers, apps like PhotoMath just won’t help when it comes to cheating — they’re far too limited. Still, it’s a promising technology that, once it matures, might actually turn into the type of wonder tool for education we’ve long been promised, turning our iOS devices into useful educational tools that will help kids actually learn math, rather than simply giving them a shortcut to homework answers.

Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pear has called for L.A. Schools chief John Deasy — the man who helped orchestrate the ill-fated $1.3 billion tech deal designed to give an iPad to every student — to report to “teacher jail” while the program is under investigation.

“Teacher jail” refers to district offices which house instructors who are facing allegations of misconduct.

In Deasy’s case, the alleged misconduct relates to apparent inappropriate dealings with Apple and education publisher Pearson that may have influenced the bidding process for the massive deal, which has now been abandoned. Deasy claims there was nothing inappropriate about his relationship with either company.

Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl has called for an investigation into Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy’s relationship with Apple, which led to the announcement that the school system had blown its entire $1 billion tech budget on giving an iPad to every student last year.

Although the iPad deal was later put on hold, the L.A. Board of Education is being pressured by Caputo-Pearl to investigate why Deasy and his then-chief deputy, Jaime Aquino, were apparently discussing the deal with Apple and education publisher Pearson up to two years before the official bidding process was finished and contracts were approved.

The Los Angeles Unified School District decided to blow its entire $1 billion tech budget on an iPad for every student last year, but after security hacks and supply issues got the program off to a rocky start, the district has decided to adjust course and let on a few challengers.

Officials at the U.S.’s second-largest school district have decided to allow a group of high schools to choose between six devices instead of the iPad, effectively putting distribution of Apple’s tablet on hold district-wide.

Good news if you’re a student! Apple has introduced reduced education pricing for both the iPad Air and Retina iPad mini — with prices for the two tablets starting from $469 and $379.

This represents a $30 discount for the iPad Air and a $20 for the iPad mini, and also marks the first time that Apple has included the iPad in its special discount program. Last year the company cut the educational price of the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro to $999, while Apple additionally offers discounts on its entire Mac line in its education store.

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President Barack Obama may not be able to use an iPhone for security reasons, but that doesn’t mean he can’t praise the work Apple is doing.

In his State of the Union address to the American people Tuesday, Obama credited a number of technology companies — Apple included — for helping with his ConnectED program, which aims to improve Internet access at schools across the U.S.

Autism is an epidemic that can’t be overstated. The disorder is really a spectrum of behaviors and needs, and it affects about one in every 50 children in the US alone.

The Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) has developed an app that puts its research-based interventions into an educational iPad app with mini games for reinforcement. The app, titled Autism Learning Games: Camp Discovery, provides children ages two to eight with direct instruction on topics that kids with Autism have trouble sorting out.

“The idea here is that there are so many things a kid needs to learn, to ‘catch up’ with their peers,” CARD’s chief strategy officer, Dennis Dixon told Cult of Mac during a phone call. “Autism has a number of skill deficits. ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) targets those skills one at a time.”

Camp Discovery, then, is like having a behavior intervention teacher on the iPad, presenting lesson after lesson with 100 percent accuracy. But will kids play with it?

The Los Angeles Board of Education has voted to continue its efforts to provide every student and teacher in the L.A. Unified school district with a computer by approving a new $115-million proposal to distribute iPads to 38 more campuses. The proposal also calls for the purchase of laptops for every student at seven high schools, and picks up a couple thousand extra iPads for new state tests in spring.

Overall the board thinks it will buy somewhere around 67,500 new tablets just for the spring testing, even though an oversight committee recommend only purchasing 38,500. The board decided getting everyone the same model at the same time is of the utmost importance for revolutionizing education, even though the $1-billion effort is expected to exhaust all their tech funds made available by voter-approved school-construction bonds.

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Apple has contacted developers to inform them that Mac applications will soon be eligible for its Volume Purchase Program, which gives businesses and educational institutions the ability to purchase software in bulk at a discounted rates.

Gearing up for the school year, Apple has just launched a newly redesigned “Apple and Education” page on its website, featuring a simplified design and fresh categories showing how iPhones, iPads and Macs can make a difference in the classroom.

Seven schools in the Netherlands are teaching kids using only iPads. These “Steve Jobs Schools” are part of the O4NT program (Education for a new Era).

The Los Angeles School Board of Education has announced a new program that will see 640,000 school kids given free iPads. 31,000 of those will be given out this year, while the other 609,000 will be issued by the end of 2014. The program comes after a $31 million deal with Apple.

iTunes U hasn’t been redesigned to mesh well with iOS 7 just yet, but Apple is still putting out a few feature updates for its educational app.

Apple released a new version of iTunes U in the App Store today that adds pull to refresh, improved language support, bug fixes and more. The new update is available in the App Store for free.

Here are the release notes:

Apple just scored a big win with the education industry last night as the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced it has signed a $30 million contract with Apple to supply its students with iPads in the classroom.

The terms of the contract show that Apple will provided the iPads to LAUSD at a cost of $678 per iPad. That price is a bit above retail, but the iPads will come pre-loaded with a bunch of educational software, and Apple’s giving them a three-year warranty as well.

Apple SVP Phil Schiller had the following to say about the deal in the official press release:

WWDC is the best place in the world to go and learn how to become a better iOS or OS X programmer. Only problem is it’s really freaking expensive, and it’s hard as hell to buy tickets before the thing sells out.

To help students out with the $1599 price tag for one ticket to WWDC, Apple announced that it will award 150 WWDC 2013 Student Scholarships. All you have to do to get the scholarship is be a full-time registered student, and make a killer iOS app.