"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "Building a Grad Nation": New Report Finds More than Half of States Increased High School Graduation Rate, Number of "Dropout…

Alumni relations professionals need a method of measuring alumni engagement, including giving, that goes beyond counting event attendees and the number of Twitter followers. Social media are changing the way things have been done within the alumni relations profession, but that does not mean that people throw out everything they have done in the…

A person's sense of dignity is a complex phenomenon and is intertwined with their sense of feeling human and being respected as a human being. In 2010, the School of Health and Social Care developed a collaborative lifeworld led transprofessional curriculum for health and social work disciplines harnessing technology to connect learners to a wider…

With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective,…

Today's high degree of technology saturation is creating a generation of learners who exhibit a distinctly different set of learning characteristics than their predecessors. These differences will require health and physical educators to investigate new and innovative strategies in an attempt to meet their unique needs. This article examines four…

This article synthesizes 15 years of research in middle school classrooms that have started to integrate new literacies into their daily teaching and learning. Trends of the data suggest there are certain salient characteristics of middle school teachers and students in these grade levels that make such innovations more successful with them than…

Thomas Freidman (2005) asserts that technology has created a transnational platform for communication, collaboration, and competition that is stimulating global opportunity for all individuals. After years of robust study abroad programs and the recent "bricks and mortar" expansion of U.S. higher education overseas, we are now seeing the true…

This study investigated the longitudinal trends of academic articles in Mobile Learning (ML) using text mining techniques. One hundred and nineteen (119) refereed journal articles and proceedings papers from the SCI/SSCI database were retrieved and analyzed. The taxonomies of ML publications were grouped into twelve clusters (topics) and four…

Professional societies, established to support academic and professional staff in higher education, need to be vigilant of regional and international trends that affect their core business. In this paper, we provide an analysis of political, economic, social and technological factors that are impacting upon the Australasian higher education…

Literacy skills honed from reading books and writing papers has long been recognized as invaluable to building and sustaining intellect. Educators are charged with strengthening literacy programs, and they typically rely on conventional practices and increased time focusing on text-based media to do so, yet their efforts have not significantly…

The article will discuss culturally responsive leadership theory as a means to developing pre-service Master of School Administration (MSA) students as culturally responsive leaders who understand and are able to bridge differences that arise in diverse educational settings. The issues explored include those related to the cultural heritages and…

Educating students to traditional literacy standards is no longer enough. If students are to thrive in their academic and 21st century careers, then independent and creative thinking hold the highest currency. The authors explain in detail how to add these new components of literacy: (1) Solution Fluency; (2) Information Fluency; (3) Creativity…

At the 2011 ALA conference, social media was still a topic of many discussions. For the past few years, librarians have shared their efforts to incorporate social networking applications like Facebook and Twitter as part of library services. Some librarians have taken on the challenge of establishing a social network for their library, while…

The year 2010 saw a major revolution in tablet technology with the introduction of the Apple iPad. Curious about the potential of this new technology for libraries, a group of librarians at Ryerson University in Toronto seized an opportunity to investigate the emerging role of the tablet in the daily academic lives of students. The group found…

In recent years public libraries have experimented with user-generated or community-contributed content through the interactive tools of Web 2.0. For some commentators this not just establishes a new relationship between libraries and their publics, but signals the end of information hegemony and an "expert paradigm". Such claims need to…