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Manila to buy 27,000 more computer tablets for students enrolled in public schools

The local government of Manila will buy 27,200 more tablet computers to ensure that all the city’s public school students will have gadgets to use for the upcoming blended learning system.

Manila Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso (Manila City Public Information Office / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO)

In his Facebook video message Friday night, Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso said they ordered more computers as the city only initially ordered about 110,000 tablets.  There are 275,000 students enrolled in Manila public schools this year.

“Because the number of our enrollees ballooned, we held a meeting again with our school board and decided to buy 27,200 more tablets. So, in total, the city will have acquired 137,200 tablets,” Domagoso said in Filipino.

He clarified that each household— not each student—will get a tablet to make sure that everyone is covered.

“Ang solusyon na ginawa ay bawat household o sa Tagalog, bawat

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Computer
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Students among first to return offer lessons for reopening schools

NASHVILLE — Abigail Alexander shuffled through a stack of papers trying to find instructions for logging in to her school-issued laptop. 

The 10-year-old chatted with her best friend, a fellow fifth grader, about who is in their classes this year at Head Middle Magnet Prep in Nashville and what period they have a specific teacher.

Their conversation Tuesday sounded like a typical one between excited, anxious students on the first day at a new school — except this year’s first day of school was like no other.

Abigail was seated in the dining room of her North Nashville home while her two younger foster siblings played around the table. Her friend was on FaceTime, the phone propped up against the side of Abigail’s laptop.

The girls were among more than 86,000 Nashville students who started the school year virtually while their schools remained closed due the ongoing spread of the

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How to improve distance learning for our youngest students

Younger students struggle with distance learning for an obvious reason — they have shorter attention spans. <span class="copyright">(Halfpoint — stock.adobe.com)</span>
Younger students struggle with distance learning for an obvious reason — they have shorter attention spans. (Halfpoint — stock.adobe.com)

Many teachers, students and their families can agree on one thing after experiencing the unexpected hurricane that was distance learning this spring: It must improve — especially in the earliest grades, transitional kindergarten through second grade.

Our youngest students, from ages 4 to 9, need more supervision throughout the day and help with the technology that enables learning. They are developmentally different from their older peers in ways that significantly impact how they best learn. Distance-learning practices must reflect that reality.

As educational researchers, we learned from conversations with teachers, school leaders, parents and early-education experts what strategies were effective for initiating and sustaining student engagement in the spring. Anyone responsible for supporting young students in distance learning could benefit from employing these approaches.

Obviously, distance instruction is not the same

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Technology
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Spring Valley Resident Works To keep Tech In Students’ Hands

SPRING VALLEY, NY—Schools and students in Hudson Valley rely on technology now more than ever, but technology is not always reliable or widely available. This summer, Jerry Registre, a Google intern from Spring Valley, is undertaking a critical project to help schools keep technology in the hands of their students.

As a summer intern for Google, Registre, a rising senior at Harvard College majoring in biology and computer science, is looking for ways to make it easier for schools to repair Chromebooks – a necessity for today’s learning experience, whether in the classroom or virtual. He is also encouraging students to engage with hands-on STEM and hardware learning opportunities.

“I have a sense that students on the whole are more technical now, in the realms of having more opinions about technology, knowing how different systems work, and getting better at fixing problems,” Registre told Patch. “And I think that Google,

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New Britain students may take classes in-person, online or on a hybrid schedule

Parents of New Britain students will have the option this fall to keep their children home for all-online education, send them to school for traditional classes or try a mix of both.

In explaining the school district’s plan for teaching 10,000 students during the pandemic, Superintendent Nancy Sarra emphasized that parents will have choices.

One option that might help working parents and guardians is a hybrid system: They may design a schedule for their children to attend in person on certain days, and take classes virtually on the others.

If families choose in-person classes, they should prepare their children for a daily schedule very different than usual.

“All of our desk in the classrooms will be 3 feet apart, all students except for preschool must wear a mask and a face shield,” Sarra said in a recent online town hall for city parents.

Staff will maintain distance from students, kindergarten

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Online skills make students a whizz at working from home

girl with laptop - Stuart Nicol
girl with laptop – Stuart Nicol

The Coronavirus pandemic has left the economy struggling: a reality that is particularly threatening to students who face severe setbacks in the job market for the next few years.

However, students might have found a way around this, as they leverage the internet to earn money under a range of job roles. The ease of technology for students is second-nature, thus allowing them to fulfil a variety of positions remotely online. 

Repercussions of the pandemic have caused a higher demand for certain jobs- many of which students can fulfil. The need for extra child care at home has become supplementary to the economy, while time-off from formal education has given rise to tutoring outside of schools. 

Becky Marsden, a 20 year old student at the University of Stirling has been earning money online as a tutor for studentnannies.com. Based in Scotland, Becky has been

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University of Maryland students struggle to cancel housing leases

When South Campus Commons at the University of Maryland, College Park, canceled its apartment leases in March, Julia Kane called it “the right thing to do” during the pandemic.

By June, the university also gave students the option to cancel their fall housing agreements without penalty. But then South Campus Commons and The Courtyards, the public-private apartments owned by the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, told students they were legally bound to their leases.

Capstone On-Campus Management, the entity hired to manage the apartments, told 3,000 students with leases their only options were to re-lease to another student, to pay and live on-campus, or to pay and live at home, Kane said. Kane, a senior studying marketing and operations management and business analytics, managed to cancel her lease cost-free, but it only happened after days of pressure from her father, who is an attorney.

“When I signed this lease back in

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Programming
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Colleges could reopen if they test students every 2 days; Fauci ‘cautiously optimistic’ for vaccine this year

In its biggest coronavirus vaccine deal yet, the U.S. said Friday it will pay French pharmaceutical company Sanofi and Great Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline up to $2.1 billion to test and produce 100 million doses of an experimental coronavirus vaccine.

The deal is part of Operation Warp Speed, a White House-led initiative aimed at getting a vaccine to stop SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

On Capitol Hill, Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Friday before a special House panel. He told the committee that he’s “cautiously optimistic” that by late fall or early winter a vaccine now being tested would be deemed safe and effective.

Also in Washington, the extra $600 in federal unemployment aid that helped many Americans stay afloat amid the coronavirus pandemic is expiring as plans for additional stimulus stalled in a deadlocked Senate.

Here are some significant developments:

  • A new survey shows fewer Americans want to resume daily activities

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U.S. Students Need Help Getting Online

(Bloomberg Opinion) — With a new school year approaching, the U.S. faces an educational crisis. Though the Trump administration wants a full reopening of K-12 schools, not all states and school districts are going along. Millions of students will still attend classes remotely, at least part of the time, and many may stay home until coronavirus vaccines are widely available.

Such a prolonged absence from the classroom will harm students of all ages and abilities. For those who lack reliable access to computers and high-speed internet at home — as many as one-third of all public-school students — the shift to online learning threatens to create deficits they’ll never recover from.

It’s critical that Congress provide funding in the next coronavirus relief bill to assist families that can’t afford internet access. But that will take time that students can’t afford. The government needs to do more to get them online

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Internet
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New foreign students can’t enter US if courses online

A week after revoking sweeping new restrictions on international students, federal immigration officials on Friday announced that new foreign students will be barred from entering the United States if they plan to take their classes entirely online this fall.

In a memo to college officials, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said new students who were not already enrolled as of March 9 will “likely not be able to obtain” visas if they intend to take courses entirely online. The announcement primarily affects new students hoping to enroll at universities that will provide classes entirely online as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

International students who are already in the U.S. or are returning from abroad and already have visas will still be allowed to take classes entirely online, according to the update, even if they begin instruction in-person but their schools move online in the face of a worsening outbreak.

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Technology