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Any teacher that has ever worked with reading, ie all of us, have at some point talked to students about prereading.  This is the basic instinct for teacehrs to help students have an idea of what they are reading, and in particular, help those with little to no background knowledge.  Prereading is a skill that many teachers have been teaching in their classrooms for centuries, literally.  But, has the new common core standards are being rolled out many educators are finding that prereading is no longer seen as important.  It is being “curtailed and revamped”.

The initial online reaction to this has been an uproar from the education community, some claiming that the writers of the standards are trying to “ban” prereading in classes while others supporting the standards say that it is just changing the focus.  Supporters show that in the writing of the standards is the phrase that ““text should be central” in instruction, “and surrounding materials should included only when necessary, so as not to district from the text itself.””  The Education Week article ‘Common Standards Ignite Debate Over Prereading’ discusses both sides of the issue and what it means to teachers.

“Teachers are always searching for fun, engaging, interactive methods to help students understand math concepts that are often tough to grasp, and that’s why we’ve developed these interactive whiteboard tools,” said DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson. “In addition to providing a visual representation of abstract concepts, the tools allow teachers to invite student participation at the whiteboard and spur classroom discussion where students share, explain, or defend their math strategies. It’s that pairing of interaction and thorough discussion that helps shape students into nimble mathematical thinkers and lays a solid foundation for future academic achievement.

Sports were her passion, and to an extent, it still is.

“I love statistics, and I always loved playing sports, and I loved coaching,” said Steele, who participated in basketball, volleyball, track and cross country in her school days at Rimersburg, Pa., High.

“Outside of my job, that’s what I love,” she explained. “If I could do anything, I would love to work in sports, whether it’s on the radio side, the TV side, or working for an organization, something with sports.”

But plans can change. And Steele found herself following a completely different career path, to implementing educational computer technology. She became so good at it that the Arizona Technology in Education Association recognized her efforts by naming her its 2012 Technology Director of the Year.

ImmediaEdu is a trusted partner to the K-12 Community infusing Innovative Classroom Technologies with Integrated Professional Services helping synchronize the efforts of Parents, Students, Teachers, and Administrators and drive student achievement.

Apple’s Massive Numbers And Some Context

Simply looking over the numbers, it might be hard to wrap your head around what Apple just announced for their Q1 2012 results. A company this big is not supposed to be able to nearly double revenue year-to-year. Nor are they supposed to more than double profit. But Apple did both. The numbers are so big that they almost seem like they should be typos — especially coming after a quarter that was a “miss” (though we can now clearly see what a joke that “miss” was). So perhaps it’s best to point out some bigger numbers and to frame some of them in ways to make them easier to understand. That’s what all of Twitter seemed to be doing anyway during the earnings call this afternoon.

Apple’s profit of $13.1 billion was equal to their revenue in Q4 2010, as Jordan Golson notes. To be clear, that was just a year and a quarter ago. That’s how quickly Apple is growing.

Apple added $38 billion in cash to its reserves just in the past year alone, as Horace Dediu points out. They now have $97.6 billion in cash and equivalents. $64 billion of that is offshore, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated during the call — meaning, it would cost money (taxes) to bring it back into the U.S.

Apple’s cash hoard alone is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth, as Dennis Berman notes.

Apple earned more money last quarter than the entire company was worth (in terms of market cap) just eight years ago, as Mathew Ingram relays from Eddy Elfenbein.

Apple likely sold three times as many iPads as Amazon sold Kindle Fires. At twice the price. And at a profit, as Jon Fortt notes. When asked about the impact of the lower-cost tablets, Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically mentioned the Kindle Fire and noted that when looking over Apple’s numbers, they didn’t seem to see any impact (positive or negative) from the Kindle Fire being on the market.

Apple’s revenues, while massive, are nothing compared to a company like Walmart, which reported $109.5 billion in revenue last quarter. BUT that $109.5 billion only turned into $3.3 billion of actual income for the quarter. In other words, Walmart has more than double the revenues of Apple, but Apple has more than four times the profits of Walmart. That’s remarkable.

Apple’s profits place them on this exclusive list of the most profitable quarters among corporations. You’ll note that Apple is the only company on the list that’s not an oil and gas company. And they’re a “mere” $3.2 billion from the top spot.

Back in July, we noted that while Apple was destroying their tech peers in profits, HP still held the revenue crown. Not anymore. HP’s last reported quarter (in November) saw the company announce $32.1 billion in revenue. They’ll report Q1 2012 earnings in about a month, but if history is any guide, Apple will be far, far ahead of both numbers. Likely well over $10 billion ahead.

It was only October of 2010 when Apple passed Microsoft in terms of revenue. At the time, Apple posted $20.34 billion — they’re well beyond double that now. Microsoft’s most recent quarter saw record revenue of $20.9 billion. Again, Apple came in at $46.33 billion.

Meanwhile, it was only April of last year that Apple surpassed Microsoft’s in profit. This past quarter, Microsoft’s net income was $6.62 billion. Apple’s was $13.06 billion.

The iTunes Store alone generated 50 percent more revenue than all of Yahoo did last quarter, as Jordan Golson notes.

Likewise, the amount Apple paid to third-party developers via the App Store last quarter ($700 million) is more than double Yahoo’s overall profits. (Overall, Apple has paid over $4 billion to third-party developers now via the App Store.)

It would take TechCrunch parent AOL cloning itself 124 times to be as big as Apple, notes Mike Brown Jr. No idea what the metric is there, but sounds about right. (See: update at bottom)

Apple’s profits for the last quarter exceed Google’s entire revenue for the last quarter, as Farhad Manjoo points out. And it’s not even close ($13 billion to $10.6 billion). Think about that for a second.

And actually, Apple’s profit for the entire year now beats Google’s revenue for the entire year, as Marcel Molina points out. That gap is likely to get bigger given the most recent quarter.

After a short halt in after-hours trading following the earnings release, Apple’s stock popped nearly 10 percent from where it closed at the end of the day. Since then, it has settled back into the $450-a-share range which would be far and away a new record high for the stock if and when it opens around there tomorrow. That surge also pushes Apple well beyond the $400 billion market cap — and once again past Exxon as the most valuable public company in the world.

At over $400 billion, Apple is now worth more than Greece, CNN Tech says.

Towards the end of the earnings call, Tim Cook dropped a huge nugget of information: led by 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market. Someday in the not-too-distant future, the tablet market will be bigger than all of the PC market, he predicts. (Apple has sold 55 million iPads since the original launch in April 2010, Cook revealed.)

Apple’s gross margin for the quarter was 44.7 percent — a number which Oppenheimer stated he’s never seen in his 15 years at Apple. Of note, he also doesn’t expect Apple to ever post a margin that high again.

Apple sold half as many Apple TVs last quarter (1.4 million) as they did for the entire previous fiscal year. But Cook still considers the product a “hobby” — though it’s one he “couldn’t live without”.

Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year, notes Eric Spiegelman via Anthony De Rosa.

With 37 million iPhones sold last quarter, Apple is now the largest smartphone marker, besting Samsung’s (guesstimated) 35 million, as The Next Web remembers.

Apple is now selling twice as many iPads to K-12 schools as Macs. Perhaps that will help with this issue.

But perhaps all you really need is a picture. Just look at the chart Macworld made below. It’s absolutely staggering.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom/

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Posted by: Huffington Post

Shared by: Faridodin “Fredi” Lajvardi, Teacher, Mentor and Inspiration to Many, Carl Hayden Community High School

Now, new guidelines for vendors and educators aim to solve this comparison conundrum.

The report, titled “Conducting and Reporting Product Evaluation Research: Guidelines and Considerations for Educational Technology Publishers and Developers,” is authored by Denis Newman, CEO of Empirical Education Inc., and produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA).

It’s based on Empirical Education’s many years of conducting this kind of research, both for publishers and for the U.S. Department of Education (ED). A working group of industry experts also was established for evaluation, and it met monthly for more than a year to sort through the issues and draft a set of considerations.

The guidelines, available free of charge for members on SIIA’s website, are timely for educators and ed-tech providers because of the growing demand from schools for “evidence of effectiveness of products, especially as the resources for spending on program materials decreases and administrators have to make harder decisions about what will best solve the problems facing their districts,” said Newman in an interview with eSchool News.

He added that ED, through programs such as Investing in Innovation (i3), is showing a growing interest in gathering evidence of effectiveness, and this is also reflected in the draft reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which talks consistently of evidence-based programs.

“By evidence-based, they mean having evidence of the sort the guidelines help publishers and school district administrators obtain,” said Newman. “The guidelines are written in a style that can be understood by executives, whether they work for publishers or for school districts. District executives will find them useful not only to get clear on what they can and should expect from publishers, but because it can help them see how their own data can be used to evaluate programs they’ve already put in place and are considering expanding.”

The guidelines are also timely considering the amount of money the ed-tech market is expected to generate: $7.5 billion for non-hardware educational technology from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, according to SIIA.

Post By: Meris Stansbury