Reich College of Education

Meetings/Events

Kudos

Last Friday was full of honors ceremonies; congratulations should go to all of the students earning honors and receiving scholarship awards; the RCOE has awarded over $200,000 in scholarships this year.

Precious Mudiwa (LES) has been notified that she has had a book accepted for publication.

Julia Adams, adjunct for a number of years in C&I, was honored last Friday night with the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Service Award.

Update on Searches

We are about at the end of the “search season” for most positions; on the whole, we have done quite well, filling over 50% of the positions we had open. Nevertheless, we are concerned about the increasing competitiveness among institutions to attract faculty from what appears to be a shrinking pool of qualified candidates in a number of fields. For those positions not filled, we will need to launch our recruitment efforts early in the fall to see if we can fill positions earlier in the year. We can help ourselves by making sure that colleagues we may know around the country are aware we have some vacancies in selected areas.

In the meantime, the search for the director of Teaching Fellows is proceeding and three candidates will be interviewing over the next two weeks for that position. The Research Associate for Teacher Education Assessment was not filled and will be re-advertised immediately.

Faculty and Staff Awards Luncheon

As is our custom, we will be holding our end of the year luncheon on Thursday May 1. Faculty and Staff will be recognized. Faculty awards this year are as follows: Outstanding Scholarship—Alecia Jackson (LES); Outstanding Teaching—Heather Clark (LRE) and Outstanding Adjunct Teacher—Betty Dishman (C&I); I hope all will make an effort to attend—student workers, GA’s, all staff, adjuncts, and faculty are welcome; come and enjoy good food, celebrate your colleagues’ achievements, and enjoy being a part of the RCOE community.

Career Banding

Although the process may still seem a bit of a mystery, putting your job descriptions into the career banding format is essential; this is a good time to be as accurate and precise as possible about your work responsibilities. Although we cannot say with any certainty that more funding will be available for putting people where they should be on the career banding scale, we need to be positioned to take advantage of any such funding should it become available.

Special Recognition

Toni Hamby, second from left, and Katie High, far right, each received a $250 gift certificate from Kasper clothing company in Blowing Rock after writing winning essay in the Dr. David Ball Career Development Essay Contest. Hamby, a special education student, wrote about Reich College of Education professor Dr. Walter Oldendorf, left. (Photo by Marie Freeman, university photographer)

Appalachian State University seniors Toni Hamby of Boone and Katie High of Hickory are the winning writers in the Dr. David Ball Career Development Essay Award. The award was co-sponsored by Appalachian’s Career Development Center and Dr. Kathryn W. Copley. It honors the late David Ball, who was director of the center for 24 years until his retirement in 2006. The students received a $250 gift certificate and an appointment with a personal shopper at Kasper in Shoppes on the Parkway. The clothing store helped outfit them with career wear for their job and graduate school interviews or for their first day on the job.

The essays described the person at Appalachian who was most influential in the students’ career development. Hamby described the influence of Reich College of Education curriculum and instruction professor Dr. Walter Oldendorf. She wrote, “Dr. O once asked me where I saw myself 10 years from now. I said, ‘I’ll have your job.’ If that happens, it will be because he inspired me to do it.” Hamby will graduate in May summa cum laude with a degree in special education.

New Superintendent

You may have heard or seen an announcement concerning the new superintendent for Watauga County; Marty Hemric, an administrator from Wilkes County Schools, has been chosen to replace Dr. Bobby Short who is retiring. Mr. Hemric will assume his duties July 1, 2008.

Netbooks the answer?

Computer companies are rolling out lower-priced laptops designed for education, claiming that the new “netbooks” are better tuned than past models to the needs of young learners—and to the constraints of school budgets. The new models may help revive confidence in 1-to-1 laptop programs, which some school districts have backed away from in recent years because of the high cost of standard laptops, their unproven benefits to student achievement, and other problems.

The financial risks districts take in assigning laptops to all students and teachers can drop when the price is $500 or less, rather than the $1,000 apiece that school districts have typically paid for notebook computers.

On April 8, Hewlett-Packard Inc. unveiled the Mini-Note, a “mini-notebook” that starts at $499. An H-P official said the device is the company’s first computer designed from the outset in consultation with educators.

One week earlier, Intel Corp. unwrapped the second version of its Classmate PC, originally intended for primary school students in “emerging markets” overseas. The new version, which is expected to cost from roughly $300 to $500, depending on features, will be available in developed countries as well as emerging markets.

The chip-maker dubbed the device a “netbook,” a newly defined class of computers. The Taiwan-based AsusTek Computer Inc. also offers a $400 netbook, the Eee PC, for education.

Netbooks share features such as being small, ultralight, and energy efficient, with rugged plastic bodies, compact keyboards, and built-in antennae that can tap into wireless links to the Web. They typically rely on Web-based access to other computers for major data storage and computer applications. Many don’t have hard drives, but instead use less roomy but cheaper “flash” memory cards to save user data. Education Week, April 23, 2008.

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“Change is a Journey, not a Destination.”
—M. Fullan