Football Day at Sound Beginnings

It's become a tradition at Sound Beginnings: come with your family, wear your Aggie gear, bring a football for student athletes to sign. It looks adorable--and it is--but there's some meaty stuff going on here.

For one thing, children who are deaf or hard of hearing are interacting with people they don't know, taking verbal cues from players as they toss the football around. "The kids are understanding these instructions from the football players," said Kristina Blaiser, director of Sound Beginnings. "That just shows what they have accomplished."

On Friday, Utah State University's football players came to spend part of a day with the families of the Sound Beginnings program. It was their third annual Football Day together.

Sound Beginnings provides early education to children with hearing loss whose families want them to learn to listen and talk. It is located within the Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education department here in the college. The program offers the training needed to use a hearing aid or cochlear implant to its fullest potential. The technology provides early access to sound; the training helps the child learn how to use it.


The service providers make sure the work seems more like play. "With preschoolers, you have to make it fun or they won't do it," Blaiser said.


It was an anticipated event--the children counted down the days until the football players arrived. When the time came, the parents of younger children were able to watch the older ones interact. It shows them what they can look forward to, Blaiser said.

The football event allowed everyone in the program to stop, celebrate and enjoy their community.

You can read more about the event in Cache Valley Daily news.

Thanks, student athletes, for spending a cool fall day with us!

We knew the superintendent when...

Photo courtesy of the Center for Persons with Disabilities

Earlier this week, the Utah State Board of Education named Martel Menlove as Utah's Superintendent of Public Instruction.

He has a lot of ties to Utah State University and the EEJ College of Education and Human Services. He graduated from here in Elementary Education, then received his Ph.D in Special Education.

While he finished his doctorate, he also worked as a program director for the Utah Assistive Technology Program at the Center for Persons with Disabilities, one of the units within the college. You can read more about that on their blog.

Since then he has served as superintendent in the Box Elder and Rich school districts. He has been deputy superintendent at the Utah State Office of Education since 2009.

"I am humbled and excited for the opportunity to serve," he said in a press release from the Utah State Board of Education. "My promise is that we will focus on the students and I will do all that I can to move public education forward."

You can read more in the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune .

B&N, Microsoft Partner to Form Nook Media

The strategic partnership between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft is now complete and the new venture will be called Nook Media.

Nook Media will be a B&N subsidiary made up of its digital and college  businesses, backed by a $300 million investment from Microsoft. The partnership will help B&N continue its growth into digital content and allows the company to expand internationally, CEO William Lynch told The Wall Street Journal. Lynch added he expects Nook Media revenues to be $3 billion annually, but no decisions have been made for possible spinoffs.

“There can be no assurance that the review will result in a strategic separation or the creation of a stand-alone public company,” Lynch said. “Barnes & Noble does not intend to comment further regarding the review unless and until a decision is made.”

Nook Media does have one issue to address: The name is already owned by a Swedish developer of online gambling casinos, according to Digital Reader.

Accessibility Still Lacking to NFB

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has accused Educause and Internet2 of ignoring the needs of print-disabled students in e-book pilots in progress on more than 20 campuses across the country this fall. The criticism caught the pilot developers by surprise since they thought they were collaborating with the NFB on the project.

The criticism was leveled, in part, because a review of the original pilot done by Disability Services at the University of Minnesota recommended the school drop out of the program because of its use of PDF formats that wouldn’t work with adaptive technology such as text-to-voice software.

“The initial problem was the way the content is packaged and delivered, but it really [goes] beyond that, to the affordances that are built into the package as well,” said Brad Cohen, associate chief information officer for academic technology at the University of Minnesota.

The NFB criticism is an attempt to pressure organizers to add accessibility requirements into any platform used to deliver e-books, according to NFB President Marc Maurer, who added he would be satisfied to know what accessibility plans will be going forward.

“There has to be a deadline by which time they expect the system to be accessible to blind professors and students,” he said. “It can’t be 25 years from now. A couple of years would suit me. I’d be glad to have it sooner than that.”

Educause and Internet2 claimed in an e-mail to Campus Technology, “Given the rapid change in how technology is deployed—students often bring it rather than campuses providing it—it is critical to experiment with new ways to provide course materials. Inevitably, some of those experiments fall short. However, rejecting experimentation does not solve the problem.”

The tiff could be an opportunity for publishers to become more involved. Mickey Levitan, CEO of Courseload, which provides an e-reading platform for the pilot, said he believes accessibility is a “shared interest” between tech firms and publishers.

“These are very complex issues that will have to be resolved with collaboration of all the key parties,” he said. “I don’t think that this is going to fall unduly on any one of those groups, but its clear that its going to have to be a collaborative multipronged effort if we’re going to make progress possible.”

Online Schools Getting Mixed Reviews

As the popularity of online public schools grows, so does concern about the quality of education students are receiving.  Supporters see the programs as innovative and affordable, while public officials in a number of states are reporting poor grades and worse graduation rates.

New applications for online schools in Maine, New Jersey, and North Carolina are being denied, according to a Yahoo! News report, while the auditor general of Pennsylvania claims online schools in his state are being overpaid by at least $105 million per year. In addition, state education officials in Florida have accused virtual schools of hiring uncertified teachers and an Ohio study reports that nearly every online school in that state ranks below average for student academic growth.

Cyber-school officials note their students are often behind traditional students and need time to catch up. A recent study by the University of Arkansas showed steady improvement for students who remained in online schools for several years.

However, a Stanford report found online students in Pennsylvania made “significantly smaller gains in reading and math” than traditional public school students. At the same time, the first virtual school in Tennessee had the lowest possible score for student growth.

“I’m not closing the door on it, but we have to do it right,” said Assemblywoman Connie Wager, who has held public hearings on virtual schools in New Jersey.

Moving Ahead with Competency-Based Learning

Competency-based learning has educators thinking about how classrooms are organized. For example, Arizona has an initiative, called Move on When Ready, that allows high-achieving students to graduate after their sophomore year if they demonstrate they can perform at a college-ready level.

Jeff Livingston, senior vice president of college and career readiness at McGraw-Hill, added to the conversation in an interview with GigaOM, where he suggested that educators will be rethinking organizing K-12 classes by age.

“What does it mean to be a ninth grader or 10th grader beyond a certain age?” Livingston said. “It doesn’t make sense that all the 15-year-olds are in this grade and all the 16-year-olds are in that grade. It should be where your interests, your skills, and your mastery of certain concepts take you.”

Mixed-aged classrooms have been around since one-room schoolhouse days, while the Khan Academy and Western Governors University are putting learning based on competency into practice. Massive open online courses are also part of the picture, providing high school students the opportunity to move ahead of their classroom coursework through college-level courses.

The technology is there to make it happen, or soon will be. The question is whether teachers, school administrators, and parents are ready for the change. 

What is Plagiarism?

At first, academic integrity seems like a no-brainer: don't pass off somebody else's work as your own. But the nuances of plagiarism can be complicated.

Getting it right is serious business--universities including Utah State have policies and penalties in place for those who plagiarize. But as information is shared freely on the web (re-blog, anyone?), it can be easy to lose academic integrity.

So how much do you know about it? Rutgers University put a quiz together to measure your plagiarism savvy--and it was harder than we expected. Take it and see how you do: it's called The Cite is Right.