Technology in the Classroom: AmeriCorps & Project First

Recognizing a critical education reform issue, the Public Education Network applied to the Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps) in 1994 for a grant to improve educational access to and use of technology. The resulting initiative is Fostering Instructional Reform Through Service and Technology -- Project FIRST. Project FIRST works to integrate technology into public school curricula and to increase community involvement in the process by using the unique resources and capabilities of local education funds (LEFs) and their business partners.Project FIRST and other similar programs are helping public schools across the country to become technologically sophisticated educational institutions. Project FIRST's considerable progress has come about, in part, because it addresses the need to modernize the instructional norms of many classroom settings. Project FIRST is effectively promoting information technology as a means of enhancing teaching and learning -- for both teachers and students.For many students from disadvantaged backgrounds, including most racial minorities, these advances will not be enough to bridge the computer experience gap. According to a study published in the April 1998 issue of Science Magazine, white students in high school and college are still much more likely than black students to have computers in their homes and to use the World Wide Web. While 73 percent of white students had a home computer, only 33 percent of black students did, even when accounting for differences in income, according to another report compiled by Vanderbilt University researchers. Elevating the level of technology use and access in schools located in disadvantaged communities to that in other schools throughout the nation is a challenge of enormous magnitude. There is still much work to be done to ensure optimum learning environments and outcomes for all students. Project FIRST's efforts are a step along the way

Building an Evaluation Framework for The Smith Center’s Education & Outreach Department

The Smith Center, Clark County’s premier performing arts center, offers professional development opportunities through their Education and Outreach Department to teach local educators how to incorporate arts integration strategies into their classrooms. Research has shown that arts education, particularly in the form of arts integration, can bolster student achievement, increase student engagement and motivation, develop critical and creative thinking patterns, and boost social competences, such as collaboration and self-confidence. Given the great possibility of improving student achievement via arts integration and the poor educational outcomes that the Clark County School District has been struggling with for years, The Smith Center’s professional development program has much to offer Southern Nevada

Mathematical Support to Braneworld Theory

The braneworld theory appear with the purpose of solving the problem of the hierarchy of the fundamental interactions. The perspectives of the theory emerge as a new physics, for example, deviation of the law of Newton's gravity. One of the principles of the theory is to suppose that the braneworld is local submanifold in a space of high dimension, the bulk, solution of Einstein's equations in high dimension. In this paper we approach the mathematical consistency of this theory with a new proof of the fundamental theorem of submanifolds for case of semi-Riemannian manifolds. This theorem consist an essential mathematical support for this new theory. We find the integrability conditions for the existence of space-time submanifolds in a pseudo-Euclidean space. Keywords: Submanifolds, Braneworld, Pseudo-Riemannian geometryComment: 10 page

Solar variability indications from Nimbus 7 satellite data

The cavity pyrheliometer sensor of the Nimbus 7 Earth Radiation Experiment indicated low-level variability of the total solar irradiance. The variability appears to be inversely correlated with common solar activity indicators in an event sense. the limitations of the measuring system and available data sets are described