Mtelegence Corporation has been awarded a Phase II SBIR contract from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to develop Readorium, a web-based software solution to help middle school students comprehend non-fiction text in the area of science. There have been major breakthroughs in educational research in terms of teaching nonfiction comprehension, but too often, middle school teachers are forced to cover large amounts of new material in 40 to 45-minute class periods, and lack the time and resources to teach literacy strategies effectively. Mtelegence strongly believes that Readorium, when fully developed, will help huge numbers of struggling readers understand complex text and become skillful and enthusiastic reading detectives.

Harriet Isecke, Mtelegence co-CEO and the Principal Investigator of the Readorium project points out that, “Middle school is a pivotal time as students are exposed to increasingly challenging content material. Teachers expect students to make the transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn.’ This transition is often unsupported, and students flounder. Students who struggle with literacy skills cannot perform well in school and run the risk of becoming disaffected. Reading failure is the main reason that almost seven thousand students, on average, drop out of US high schools every day.”

Readorium uses an engaging game-based economy to teach struggling readers in grades 6-8 how to use scientifically-proven strategies to construct deep meaning from text based on the National Science Standards. Enrolled students can use the program from school or home and may access help features such as word definitions, etymologies, and scaffolded multi-modal hints. Animated e-tutors guide students through interactive strategy lessons, gradually helping them become more self-reliant as they read. All text is written on 12 different readability levels, and the text that is presented to students becomes incrementally more complex as they gain the necessary skills. Readorium keeps track of student responses, time on task, and their use of hints. The Teacher Management System gives educators complete access to individual and group progress reports and to lessons and activities designed to help them tailor classroom instruction to students’ needs.

“Readorium computerizes these best practices and presents them in an engaging, adaptive format where students not only learn how to comprehend text, but they also learn science in sync with their school curricula and with the National Science Standards,” commented Attila Medl, Mtelegence’s co-CEO and the co-Investigator of the project.

Source:http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/386064

A private foundation is giving the state $25 million to better track student achievement and fulfill a cash commitment toward Idaho’s education broadband system.

The investment from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation was announced Wednesday and includes $21 million for the Idaho Department of Education to pay for software designed to improve the performance of students and teachers.

The software is designed and distributed by SchoolNet Inc., a private New York company.

The SchoolNet tool will improve the way schools monitor real-time student progress and teacher effectiveness, said Albertson Foundation Executive Director Jamie MacMillan.

“The foundation has always believed that it was important to move toward a more informed, accountable and transparent education system where data is used to make timely decisions that benefit student learning,” McMillian said in a statement.

The SchoolNet tool will be an extension of Idaho’s new longitudinal data system, which was designed to collect and monitor individual student test scores, attendance and other data from the time they enroll in kindergarten. Idaho was the last state to install a longitudinal data system.

With the new software, teachers will be able to cater lesson plans to individual students and develop tests based on a single lesson to see if students retained the material, said state Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath.

The new software program dovetails with the education reform plan that public schools chief Tom Luna championed during the 2011 Idaho Legislature, McGrath said. The reforms were signed into law earlier this year and shift money in the public schools budget for salaries to fund technology upgrades in the classroom and a new teacher merit pay plan.

Idaho will phase in laptops for high school teachers and students, under the plan.

“This is related to the reforms because we really want teachers to have more technology in the classroom that will assist them in raising student achievement and this type of technology is critical,” McGrath said.

The grant money will also cover the remainder of the foundation’s $6 million pledge toward the $60 million cost for installing broadband infrastructure statewide for the Idaho Education Network, a project to link public schools, universities and businesses across the state.

Source:http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/3ea18d6cc5b04a81b09ddf91e4319d90/ID–Education-Grant/

As the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) movement gains momentum worldwide, there is also a pragmatic realization among companies that it is important to align such initiatives with the core business and invest substantially in such projects. A good example of how CSR may be made complementary and synergistic to your business came from MetaQuotes Software Corp. recently.

Known as the global leader among providers of online trading platforms that facilitate foreign exchange brokerage (given its popular products MetaTrader 4 and 5), MetaQuotes launched the TeamWox Groupware as a tool for companies to automate the business process, optimizing both production and management.

Using TeamWox, a company can organize its entire operations, make them more transparent and hasten decision making based on full and authentic information. The system comprises popular business components such as a Docflow, Customer and Vendors Relationship Management (CRM), Personnel Management, Collaboration and Accounting modules and is a very effective management tool in the hands of small and medium businesses (SMB).

Now, based on an analysis of why educational companies were lukewarm in their response to the product, which has been so enthusiastically embraced by the management in other diverse sectors, MetaQuotes has launched a worldwide social initiative under which it has pledged to provide TeamWox to any educational institution, absolutely free of cost.

“Educational institutions are almost the same as commercial companies in organizational terms. They have big staff strength, a lot of “paper work”, periodic group events to be organized – all of which could be managed effectively with TeamWox, leading to reductions in both cost and time,” says Renat Fatkhullin, CEO of MetaQuotes Software Corp., “but we found that many of these enterprises could not afford a product such as this as they mostly do not operate as strictly commercial organizations. That is when we decided to give them the product free.”

Thus, the free version of this commercially successful and very functional software was made available to any organization that has a valid license for educational activity, issued by the relevant governmental regulatory body. The offer is open for an unlimited number of users and has no time restrictions.

This, however, is not MetaQuotes’ first brush with education per se. The company maintains and develops several websites aimed to provide free education in the field of automated trading on the financial markets. They even pay for the user-generated content in these sites so that any community member with strong knowledge in the field may write for these sites and get paid for that. This model has helped MetaQuotes build a substantial library of unique information that the public can access for free.

The company has also sponsored some online books in this field. Once again, it publishes these books on the Internet for free and anybody can download them for use. Given its clearly rooted philosophy of furthering the cause of education, it is perhaps not surprising that the offer of TeamWox was extended to the sector in particular.

The current initiative was launched first towards the end of February in Russia, the homeland of the TeamWox developers, where it received a warm response. Fifty educational institutions in the country had already applied for this version, provided copies of their educational licenses, and received the free software before the company announced the offer globally.

Users have been benefited by many of its features, which they feel have systematized their operations to a large extent, making many internal processes, tasks and projects faster and more controllable.

Nickolay Nickolaevich Bakushin, deputy director of facilities management at the experimental Moscow-based high sports school “Khlebnikovo”, cites the example of the email management system which has helped them so much. “We can now immediately assign a received email to an executor – instead of waiting for a director’s endorsement, making several copies and bringing them to relevant responsible specialists. I love this one-click solution. The director receives all emails and appoints the responsible employees, which is then clearly traced in the history,” explains Bakushin. He also finds himself more in control of execution by people to whom he would have delegated certain tasks; the mobility that the system offers to a manager who may be physically present elsewhere is a huge plus as well.

For the school of management thought which believes that business-aligned social initiatives are more effective in creating true impact and less likely to be ephemeral, MetaQuotes clearly sets a sound example.

Source:http://hken.ibtimes.com/articles/123720/20110317/metaquotes-metatrader-operations-management-corporate-social-responsibility-csr-groupware-teamwox-ed.htm