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Technology: Discovery Education , which provides curriculum-based digital content to more than half of U.S. schools, launched a new version of its platform specifically for the iPad. Using an HTML5player,this new version offers more than 33,000 videos  from Discovery Education streaming, Discovery Education Science, and Discovery Education Health. Discovery will add images, audio clips, PDFs, encyclopedia articles, reading passages, videos, and clips in upcoming months.

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Teaching Jobs: The government announced that state and local governments laid off nearly 58,000 educational workers in September, despite the $26 billion emergency aid package passed by the house and congress in August. Of course, this is not a huge surprise, as we had already reported that many states, instead of keeping teachers, were going to use the money to roll back furlough days, save the funds to prevent further layoffs next school year, or to hire support staff like custodians and bus drivers.

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College Tax Credits: Last year, as part of the stimulus package, The American Opportunity Tax Credit, was instituted. It allows families to receive a credit of as much as $2,500 per student. The tax credit is set to expire this year, but Obama is trying to make it permanent. If he succeeds, a student could receive a tax credit of up to $10,000 over four years, according to a Treasury report. The White House argues that this credit makes scooling more affordable, which is an important part of Obama’s initiative to increase college graduation rates by an additional 5 million people by 2020.

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Educational Reform: Michelle Rhee, the controversial Chancellor of the Washington DC school district, recently resigned. Rhee gained tremendous national attention by trying to initiate drastic educational reform in her district, including firing hundreds of low performing teachers. She gained further fame for her role in the film “Waiting for Superman.” The resignation follows the election of a new DC mayor, Vincent Gray. Says Rhee “…we (Gray and I) have agreed—together—that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside.”

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Christi Grab is Parentella’s Editorial Director and author of The Unexpected Circumnavigation: Unusual Boat, Unusual People Part 1 – San Diego to Australia. She is currently working on book two of the series.

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1. Obama Announces Change the Equation Educational Initiative
2. Obama Addresses Education Reform in Speech Today
3. Community College Initiatives by President Obama
4. 10 Tedx Talks that Teachers Should Watch
5. Round 2 Race to the Top Finalists: 18 States & D.C.

Tags: Education Policy, Education Reform, ipad, iPad platforms, Michelle Rhee, news stories, tax credits for college, teacher layoffs, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Christi Grab, Colleges, Current News, Education Policy, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.