Creating Safety From the Inside Out

As we prepare for our return to school this fall, safety will mean a lot more than face masks and hand-washing. As controversy over if schools should reopen and, if so, how they will open continues to rise, the lingering concern is how to keep everyone safe.

This is a familiar topic for educational institutions and something that appears to get tested over and over again. Fire drills, active shooter protocols, security glass, metal detectors—these measures are all designed to, yes, keep those precious souls within the building safe by keeping the threats out. What happens when you experience a pandemic and the threat cannot be visibly seen? Where do you hide? When do you hide? Who do you hide from? Will I get sick? Will I cause someone else to get sick?

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Netex Learning

We offer a complete ecosystem of cloud-based learning solutions. Our platform solutions include mobile apps for offline access and a platform for managing all training - online, classroom or blended scenarios, whilst our products and services include content solutions, focusing on catalogue content, content development services and an authoring tool.

OTHER ARTICLES
Education Technology

4 Tips on How to Convert Long-Form eLearning Courses to Micro Lessons

Article | August 4, 2022

With high hopes of addressing a problem that was getting in the way of everyday business, you invested time and money into creating an eLearning course. Sadly, it hasn’t made a difference. Completion rates are low, the original problem remains, and you now have a new problem: Your lengthy (but useful) course is a dud and is not having an impact. Seems tricky, but rest assured there is a quick fix on your issue. Contrary to long-form training, microlearning offers the same information but packages it into smaller segments. Most micro- lessons don’t exceed 15 minutes, which makes any assignment bearable. Due to time constraints, selected topics need to be focused, simple, and straightforward.

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Online Education

5 Ways to Help Women Achieve Educational Success

Article | July 12, 2022

While the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on our economy, women continue to be disproportionately impacted. Now is the time to look at the long game. What changes can society make in order to insure that when the next big crisis happens, women don’t bear the brunt of it. Education, of course, has always been on the front line of changing societal disparities. However, much of the time we don’t look at the root causes of why young women underperform in certain areas. Below are five ways we can position women for educational success, from girlhood to the moment they walk into their first job. If you are a teacher, give this list to the parents you work with. Help them set the tone now so our girls grow up ready to take on the world. DON’T TELL ME I’M PRETTY Little girls, from the time they are young, are praised for how beautiful they are.  We talk to girls about how they look and boys about what they do. This escalates when little girls hit puberty. This is when girls start deriving their social capital from their looks and their grades start to tank. Fight this trend by praising young women for what they do. Don’t say, “You’re so beautiful!” Instead say, “I love how curious you are about the solar system! You’re such an interesting person to talk to!”   DON’T TELL ME I’M SMART This sounds a little bit strange, but often little boys are praised for their hard work and girls are praised for their inherent intelligence. The problem with this is that when a little girl doesn’t do well she thinks it has to do with how smart she is rather than her work ethic. Her failures become a referendum on her intelligence.  Say, “Wow, you really worked hard” rather than, “Wow, you’re so smart!” You can always work harder, but you can’t change the brains you were born with!    DON’T BE TOO NICE TO ME When young women struggle in the sciences or STEM, often parents try to protect their feelings.  This can take the form of telling young women who are struggling that perhaps their major is just too hard --maybe they should do something that makes their life a little easier. Boys get the message not to give up - girls get the message to take the path of least resistance. Don’t coddle your girls. Hold them to the same tough standard you have with your boys.   DON’T SEE ME ONLY AS A GIRL OR A WOMAN Understand that if you are trying to support women you cannot do that in a White Woman vacuum. If a young woman you know is struggling, look at the other issues that might be intersecting. Does she have a disability? Is she a woman of color? Is she the first generation to go to college in her family? Audre Lorde famously said “there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives.“ Make sure you are not treating every woman as if she is the same simply because of her gender. There could be all kinds of intersections that are also impacting her situation.   DO VALUE MY VOICE If you are an educator, pay attention to who you are listening to. Note how you value different voices. The patterns that impact girls and young women follow them throughout their education and into adulthood. Pay attention to who you’re calling on in class. Whose voice gets more weight? Watch for classroom dynamics that make certain people feel they have the right to speak and others feel they must remain silent. Be sure to encourage every student from kindergarten to PhD candidates to speak up and then make sure you’re listening. It’s wonderful how much weight we give to the voices of men and boys. Women should be afforded the same courtesy. Women’s success doesn’t just come from hiring women or making sure we are paid the same for doing the same work. It comes from making sure every woman, from the time she is a little girl, is given the message that she has worth, and that if she works hard enough, she can achieve her dreams. Let’s not tell our girls that they are pretty flowers who might crumble when life knocks them down. Let’s give them the message that life can be hard, but they can work harder, and if they do, success will be theirs. Eliza VanCort is an in-demand consultant, speaker, and writer on communications, career and workplace issues, and women’s empowerment. The founder of The Actor’s Workshop of Ithaca, she is also a Cook House Fellow at Cornell University, an advisory board member of the Performing Arts for Social Change, a Diversity Crew partner, and a member of Govern For America’s League of Innovators. Her first book, A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space: Stand Tall. Raise Your Voice. Be Heard., publishes May 11, 2021.

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Education Technology

Improve Remote Learning With Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Article | October 7, 2022

The fall 2020 semester won’t be business as usual for many higher education students. While some schools — including the University of Notre Dame and Purdue University — recently announced plans to resume in-person classes, others are planning for continued online instruction. According to recent COVID-19 guidelines from Harvard University Medical School, for example, “fall 2020 courses will commence remotely for our entering classes of medical, dental and graduate students.” Meanwhile, the California State University System announced that its planned approach “will result in CSU courses primarily being delivered virtually for the Fall 2020 term, with limited exceptions for in-person teaching.”

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Education Technology

Restoring the Luster of Science

Article | October 5, 2021

Jeffrey Lee Funk and Gary Smith Americans once believed that science was on our side. Radar, microwaves, penicillin, helicopters, magnetrons, and nuclear weapons helped win World War II and fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Vaccines for polio, smallpox, tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella literally wiped out diseases that once killed millions. Televisions, polymers, radial tires, Velcro, vinyl, and freezers made our lives more comfortable. Nuclear power promised us energy too cheap to meter. We celebrated the space program that sent astronauts walking on the moon and splashing back home again. The annual meetings of the American Association for Advances in Science were regularly covered by the media. New electronic products and medical technologies continued to astonish in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. How things have changed! The last blockbuster technologies were the iPhone and iPad more than ten years ago and they are, at best, indirectly linked to scientific advances. Nanotechnology, superconductors, quantum computers, and fusion still seem far away as do replacements for integrated circuits, silicon solar cells, and lithium-ion batteries. A week before the 1980 presidential election, President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan held their only debate—and Reagan sealed the deal by asking Americans, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Nowadays, too many Americans don’t feel better off than they were 10 or even 20 years ago and the elite are tempting targets. Millions of jobs left the country while economists proclaimed that it was all for the best. Now experts predict that robots and AI will eliminate millions of more jobs—not just blue-collar workers, but accountants, journalists, lawyers, architects, doctors, and nurses. The predictions sound like boasts and make the ruling elite look like the enemy. Bill Gates tells us to stop eating meat while he flies around the world in his private jet. Politicians tell us to wear face masks while they party in McMansions inside gated communities. Universities say they need more government funding while professors are paid more money for doing less work then most taxpayers. Scientists say they need more largesse while they live among the elite and well-connected. The rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in less than 11 months was an absolutely stunning achievement, done with real science applied to a promising but unproven type of vaccine called messenger RNA (or mRNA). Instead of nationwide celebrations, there was fear and paranoia. Here are some comments in response to a March 2021, CNBC news story on government guidelines for COVID-19 vaccinations: I still haven’t gotten one, never will and no one is going to tell me what I can and can’t do vaccinated or not!! Flu shots are proven to make you 38% more likely to catch another respiratory virus like Covid. Easy way to target the elderly. Don't be fooled people. Biggest scam in our lifetime. I won’t vax I won’t mask I won’t follow mandates or guidelines and I’m armed. Millions believe that 5G is being used to spread COVID-19 (and they have burned down cell towers to stop it) and that COVID vaccines are a nefarious plot (and they refuse to be vaccinated). A recent survey found that 44 percent of Republicans, 24 percent of independents, and 19 percent of Democrats believe that Bill Gates is developing a COVID-19 vaccine that will implant microchips in us so that our movements can be monitored. Science was supposed to replace superstition and rumours with logic, reason, and empirical evidence. It still can. How do we collectively resurrect the reputation of science? A starting point is better science education. Memorizing the names of the parts of a cell and then forgetting them after a test is not scientific understanding. Nor is deciphering the periodic table or memorizing trigonometric formulas. Science is fundamentally about being curious—about how things work and why they sometimes don’t work. Richard Feynman’s journey to Nobel laureate began with a boyhood curiosity about how radios work. He tinkered with them, took them apart, and put them back together. He fixed other people’s radios. He loved it. He later wrote about his life-long curiosity: When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment. Kids don’t have to become Nobel laureates to appreciate how science can satisfy their curiosity. Kids who appreciate science can grow up to respect science and become scientists. Another part of the problem is that far too many superbly intelligent, voraciously hard-working scientists devote so much of their time to generating the papers and citations that are now required for promotion and funding. Anirban Maitra, a physician and scientific director at MD Anderson Cancer Centre, wryly observed that, “Everyone recognizes it’s a hamster-in-a-wheel situation, and we are all hamsters.” The public wants to see technologies that improve our lives, not long CVs filled with papers no one reads. We need scientific advances that are useful and affordable. We also want stable jobs with decent pay. Semiconductor factories once provided good jobs but these were shipped overseas and new ones haven’t been created from new commercialized science-based technologies. Where are the American factories producing products based on nanotechnology, superconductors, fusion, quantum computers and new forms of semiconductors, displays, and solar cells? American scientists are the best in the world and real science can produce useful innovation and good jobs, but these need to become our priorities. Jeffrey Funk is a retired Associate Professor, most recently from the National University of Singapore and now an independent technology consultant. He received the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award for lifetime contributions to the social science aspects of mobile communications. His research has been reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Gary N. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. His research on financial markets, statistical reasoning, and data mining often involves stock market anomalies, statistical fallacies, and the misuse of data. He is the author of The AI Delusion, (Oxford, 2018) and co-author (with Jay Cordes) of The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science (Oxford 2019), which won the Association of American Publishers 2020 Prose Award for Popular Science & Popular Mathematics, and The Phantom Pattern Problem (Oxford 2020).

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Spotlight

Netex Learning

We offer a complete ecosystem of cloud-based learning solutions. Our platform solutions include mobile apps for offline access and a platform for managing all training - online, classroom or blended scenarios, whilst our products and services include content solutions, focusing on catalogue content, content development services and an authoring tool.

Related News

Gaggle’s New Investing in Student Safety Report Helps District Leaders Identify the Return on Safety Investments

Gaggle | May 19, 2020

All educators would agree that it’s vital to protect students both physically and digitally, but how do they measure the return on their safety investments? In its latest report, Investing in Student Safety: The Costs, the Benefits, and the ROI, Gaggle helps readers consider the financial, logistical, and legal aspects of a comprehensive student safety plan. The report examines the logistics involved in addressing external and internal threats to student well-being, from developing a comprehensive safety plan, including implementing district cybersecurity, to cultivating positive school climates and cultures. It also discusses the costs associated with safety plans and the state funding options that are currently available.

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School Districts Partnering with Gaggle Saved the Lives of Over 900 Students in 2019–20; Severe Domestic Abuse Reports Rose 79% During School Closures

Gaggle | August 12, 2020

During the 2019–20 school year, Gaggle was instrumental in saving the lives of 927 students. While this number represents a general increase of 28% over the preceding school year, a significant difference emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The pre-pandemic increase in lives saved was 11%, but during the pandemic, the increase rose to 32%. These are just a few of the startling statistics in Gaggle’s annual national student safety report, Through the Gaggle Lens: The State of Student Safety 2019–20 School Year.

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Gaggle’s New Investing in Student Safety Report Helps District Leaders Identify the Return on Safety Investments

Gaggle | May 19, 2020

All educators would agree that it’s vital to protect students both physically and digitally, but how do they measure the return on their safety investments? In its latest report, Investing in Student Safety: The Costs, the Benefits, and the ROI, Gaggle helps readers consider the financial, logistical, and legal aspects of a comprehensive student safety plan. The report examines the logistics involved in addressing external and internal threats to student well-being, from developing a comprehensive safety plan, including implementing district cybersecurity, to cultivating positive school climates and cultures. It also discusses the costs associated with safety plans and the state funding options that are currently available.

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School Districts Partnering with Gaggle Saved the Lives of Over 900 Students in 2019–20; Severe Domestic Abuse Reports Rose 79% During School Closures

Gaggle | August 12, 2020

During the 2019–20 school year, Gaggle was instrumental in saving the lives of 927 students. While this number represents a general increase of 28% over the preceding school year, a significant difference emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The pre-pandemic increase in lives saved was 11%, but during the pandemic, the increase rose to 32%. These are just a few of the startling statistics in Gaggle’s annual national student safety report, Through the Gaggle Lens: The State of Student Safety 2019–20 School Year.

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