Washington School for the Deaf in Vancouver, WA is making the move to provide educational services to deaf and hard of hearing students regardless of location. The statewide educational agency has adopted the Desire2Learn learning management system in an effort to provide direct instruction to students from around the state.
Education software developer Siboney Learning Group has updated Orchard, the company's targeted instruction software for math, language arts, and science for K-9. Enhancements to the software include expanded platform support, a variety of design tweaks, and a new technology that ties in the company's PracticePlanet service to help generate data for developing intervention strategies.
Education technology developer Netchemia earlier this month released netRTI, a response to intervention program targeted at struggling learners and special needs students.
Sebit this week launched a new online educational resource focused on math and science: Adaptive Curriculum. The resource provides a library of math and science activities aligned to state and national standards. It's on display at the FETC show in Orlando, FL.
At the FETC show in Orlando, FL Tuesday, Pearson announced that it's expanded its online math remediation tool, Pearson Perspective, to include video tutorials from Video Math Tutor.
Technology providers Omtool and eSped have partnered to develop a new document management solution for special education in K-12 schools. eSped is a developer of Web-based solutions for special ed, while Omtool is a document capture and management technology provider. The new solution combines the two technologies to help capture, organize, manage, and distribute documents related to special education cases.
Scientific Learning Corp. has announced that it will acquire Soliloquy Learning from JTT Holdings. Both Scientific Learning and Soliloquy provide technology solutions for education. The acquisition will cost SLC about $11 million and is expected to be completed this month. (A definitive agreement to acquire the company was reached in late December.)
The Henry County School District in Georgia has brought educational gaming its its preK and special education students. This semester, the district purchased 21 copies of AT KidSystems' Cosmo's Learning Systems--a combination of hardware and software targeted toward 2- to 8-year-olds.
Aurora University in Illinois has teamed up with HOSTS Learning to provide intervention programs to local middle school students through the HOSTS Mentoring and Intervention solution. Launched in October, the program will run through May 2008 out of Aurora's Institute for Collaboration resource center.
The MIND Research Institute, a non-profit education research and publishing organization, said this week that it's received a $500,000 cash grant from the Cisco Foundation--this on top of a previously awarded grant of about $500,000 in equipment, bringing the total donation to $1 million. The funds will be used to develop MIND's elementary and middle school math programs and make them available over the Internet.