WJU designs program to cater to student needs Wheeling Jesuit University is launching a new online master’s degree program in education leadership (MEL) that can be completed in as little as one year. The program was designed to offer “real career advancement for both working educators and for those just entering the teaching profession.” “Our [...]
In a stunning, but not unexpected move, Mayor Angel Taveras of Providence, Rhode Island has sent layoff notices to 1,926 teachers – all the teachers in the city. While not every one of them will be dismissed, under state law all teachers need to be notified before March 1, long before the start of the new school year. This warning system “gives [the school district] the freedom to let go many of them later without having to single any of them out now.”
In Florida, parents could be seeing a new grade on their K-3rd grade child’s report card: parental involvement. This new, and controversial, bill proposal made by Florida state Rep. Kelli Stargel would ask teachers to rate a student’s parents with one of three choices – “satisfactory”, “needs improvement”, or “unsatisfactory”.
Education programs in Ohio’s university system will be undergoing some new measures to gauge how well they are training their teachers of tomorrow. This will make Ohio the “first state in the nation to grade colleges on how well they train teachers to help students succeed.” There are 15 measures to be implemented, announced Chancellor Eric D. Fingerhut, which will test teachers in both public and private universities. Ohio was one of only 12 states to receive federal funding from President Obama’s “Race to the Top” plan, which boasted a $4.3 billion budget. About $400 million was given to Ohio, which was then split accordingly amongst all schools.
A self-directed education is something that you normally see in a doctoral or master’s program. However, in elementary and middle schools there are “schools within schools” that are focusing on each student’s individual strengths. This focus of education seems to be working for a lot of kids, as it gets them focused and learning quicker and broadens their knowledge of subjects through a learning mode they like and understand. Other schools are trying to catch up all over Hall County, Georgia.
It’s in the headlines all the time, it’s the topic of talks on lunch breaks amongst teachers and administrators and unfortunately, most students are a little concerned about it as well. The topic? Education budget cuts at the state and the federal level. It seems as if in a time of economic crisis, the liberal arts, music and elective programs get the first cut. With President Obama and the rest of the US concentrated on getting more students to compete at the international level for math and science, it seems as if the humanities are getting put on the back burner. It’s a worrying sign to those that want a degree in English, or philosophy, for example. Yet as the times change, technology is changing with them, and more people are turning to an online English degree in the face of these cuts.
The world of education is a vast one, with differing specialties and age groups. In all grade levels of education, however, specialized teachers are needed to help students that require extra attention due to a learning or behavioral disability. Some more common ones include speech or language impairments to the more severe cases such as traumatic brain injuries. A teacher that has taken online education classes, or even traditional classes, that offers a degree in special education opens the doors to many more opportunities in the job market. With more focus on teachers than ever before and the need for more as our population continues to grow, those that have added degrees give themselves a competitive edge over those that do not. Not only that, special education can be a very rewarding career, since the education of a student with disabilities relies solely with the teacher trained to help them.
Most people you know around you speak one to two languages fluently. It’s not uncommon to be required to take a language course in high school or college that can range from Spanish and French, to Japanese and Russian. However, what may surprise you is the vast amount of languages that are spoken all over the world and the thousands of languages that have yet to be discovered and analyzed. Those that carry out this incredible task of studying and cataloguing new and old languages alike are linguists. They also have the task of finding new and innovative ways to approach linguistics and the impact it has on the world. The range of jobs that linguists is pretty substantial and exciting, but for those that already have a degree and want to get a doctorate in different linguistics applications, an online PhD education is a great way to study while still working full time.
Teachers from school districts all over the state of Kansas attended a workshop last month to receive an education of their own in education technology. At the workshop, they learned about the Discovery Education Network, a “global community of educators passionate about teaching with digital media.” New forms of education technology have made their way into classrooms across the country, and are benefiting students and teachers alike.
Special education is an often overlooked and underappreciated element of the larger education sector. Often, people correlate an education degree with grade school, high school or college teaching and administration. But there are a number of other equally important areas of teaching and education, like special education, that give service-minded individuals an opportunity to make a positive and lasting difference in students’ lives.