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Special Notice
JES & Co. is delighted to join other well-known organizations such as Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, Hootsuite, New York Times, ProPublica, GetSatisfaction, AOL and about 70 other major Web 2.0 initiatives in surviving nearly four days of Amazon Cloud outage. Like our fellow Cloud users, we use Amazon's Web Services for their robust reliability, ease of management and low cost (well, two out of three ain't bad). We were shocked, shocked! to discover that Amazon's reputation for reliability had some flaws. We are pleased that Amazon's recovery efforts brought our servers back to life (on Easter no less!), no harm done. Despite this experience, we remain perversely confident in Amazon's services although, like many of our fellow organizations, we are taking additional steps to ensure the reliability of our own services in the event of future torrential downpours from Amazon's Cloud.
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The Global Learning Resource Connection (GLRC)
Welcome to the Global Learning Resource Connection (GLRC) newsletter. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and more. Just click the social buttons of choice at the top of this newsletter. You can also click the Facebook Like button at the top of the newsletter! The GLRC is a JES & Co. program built on the Achievement Standards Network (ASN), The Gateway to 21st Century Skills (the Gateway), and the Open Metadata Registry(OMR). GLRC newsletters will keep you updated on the GLRC domestic and international activities, promoting worldwide expansion. For more information go to http://bit.ly/hVDXuU.
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What People are Saying
"The Gateway will provide an excellent framework for assessing the value of the GLRC effort through its automated means of data collection and teacher access."- John Wilson, Executive Director, National Education Association (NEA)
In support of the Global Learning Resource Connection: "The K-12 education community is continuing to grow their use of digital resources. However, ensuring that our selected, quality materials are searchable and relevant is of critical importance. High quality metadata ensures that our education community is linked to great content and that content is aligned to ever evolving standards."- Lee Sartain, Education Policy Specialist, The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, North Carolina State University
"NCVPS has served over 65,000 student enrollments over its brief history, and has over 400 teachers working with those students. The partnership with the Global Learning Resource Connection (GLRC) will allow these teachers and students access to an increased expanse of relevant educational content in an efficient and seamless manner."- Chanin Rivenbark, Chief Technology Officer, North Carolina Virtual Public School
"The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) provides a model for profiling curriculum statements and linking those statements to education resources using various RDF vocabularies. By profiling curriculum statements to learning resources, more precise matching is achieved". - Les Kneebone - Project Manager, Education Services Australia Ltd.
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What's New
Diny Golder, the Executive Director of JES & Co., will be speaking on Wednesday May 18th at the international IMS Learning Impact conference in Long Beach, California. Her topic will be Breaking Down the Walls between the Library and the Classroom.
Stuart Sutton, Lead Technical Scientist for the Achievement Standards Network, will be speaking at the EdReNe 6th seminar on repositories of learning resources in The Hague, Netherlands, May 18-19, 2011. Stuart will be discussing how the ASN and curriculum alignment can be deployed in Europe.
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GLRC Sponsors, Partners, Contributors, and Subscribers
The Global Learning Resource Connection (GLRC) is an international collaboration of world class compacorrelated to learning objectives available for use in the classroom with the help from many of our Premier Sponsors and Partners including The American Association for the Advancement ofnies, organizations, education agencies, and nations. The GLRC is making resources Science, The American Association of School Librarians, Cengage/Gale, Center for Natural language Processing, Cisco, Education Services Australia, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Library of Congress, Michigan eLibrary, Microsoft, National Education Association (NEA), National Science Foundation, Teach Engineering, Teachers Domain, and WGBH (PBS- Boston).
In addition to our Premier Sponsors, here are the categories of sponsors, partners, and subscribers and the number of entities in each category: International (12), National (6), State (8), City (3), Organizations (21), Companies (17), Press (6), Colleges or Universities (42), and Districts (8). Click here to see who the sponsors and partners are: http://www.jesandco.org/glrc-sponsors.
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Refining GLRC Tools
JES & Co. has a new mapping tool that is designed for people - people who need to clearly relate standard statements to assessment items, and who need to draw a close relationship between a lesson plan, an assessment item, and a standard. The mapping tool also allows for users who need machines to read the results of mapping high school graduation requirements to college entry requirements, and to a resource that can meet both requirements at the same time. Resulting machine readable data enables a learning management system to take over and create individualized e-portfolios or individualized student learning plans, thus removing the not likely to happen soon from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) discussion. JES & Co.'s mapping tool will bring resource sharing and discovering processes to a whole new level, a level necessary to support today's teachers, librarians, states, and nations operating in a standards-based environment that is expected to support individualized education.
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Achievement Standards Network (ASN)
The Resource Description Editor (RDE) is finally here. The RDE is designed to be used by those familiar with describing learning objectives yet not familiar with the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the basis for creating linked-data. Standards authors can work in the RDE's user friendly interface and create ASN RDF/XML linked data before they know it.
JES & Co. has designed the RDE to be configurable so that it can meet any publisher's or organization's way of describing learning objectives yet provide an underlying layer for interoperability with other products. The RDE is the first education focused Semantic Web tool of its kind. Perhaps that is why it is so valuable to the education community's solutions providers.
Where do learning objectives and learning resources meet? At JES & Co.'s Mapping Tool which is currently under development. Using the JES & Co. Mapping Tool, a user will be able to easily align ASN learning objectives together (think Common Core State Standards) or correlate them to learning resources in a machine readable format. Please stay tuned for more news about JES & Co.'s Mapping Tool as development progresses.
With the RDE work coming to an end, JES & Co. is now focusing on updating the ASN web services. The ASN has a new website and a new standards viewer. Both are in beta mode but can be seen live here. The ASN also provides a new way to parse and display ASN standards data by using a new manifest file which can be seen in the ASN Standards Locator. This new manifest file (which will be featured in the next release of ASN RDF/XML) contains the hierarchical structure of a standards document with all the URI's and preference labels pre-resolved for easy display. Because the manifest files are in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), it makes incorporating ASN data into your website even easier. We will be announcing the new version of ASN RDF/XML and the new ASN web services as they come online in the coming weeks.
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The Gateway Digital Library Continues to Grow
The Gateway serves over 4.5 million queries a month from teachers - teachers from all over the world. The National Education Association is the proud sponsor of the library and has a large following of appreciative users. Thank you NEA.
Some of the recent resources featured in March:
For resources about Harry Potter, click here:
http://bit.ly/eZsei1
For resources addressing constellations, click here:
http://bit.ly/gEkb9E
For resources addressing the Japan disasters, click here:
http://bit.ly/hEBWx9
For resources about earthquakes, click here:
http://bit.ly/e3Wjqm
For resources about Tsunamis, click here:
http://bit.ly/e13PSw
To see the March update for the Gateway, click here:
http://www.jesandco.org/images/stories/TheGateway/March2011GatewayReport.pdf
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| Call to Action |
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Get involved.
Correlate your resources to curriculum standards.
Publicly register your vocabularies and ontologies for interoperability.
Invest in future GLRC development.
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For complete details, please contact Terry Smithson at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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| Gateway Spotlight! |
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The Gateway was used by educators in 188 countries last month. The top 10 countries to use the Gateway in March were the 1) United States, 2) Great Britain, 3) Canada, 4) Germany, 5) Australia, 6) India, 7) China, 8) France, 9) Sweden, and 10) Portugal. The Gateway is sponsored by the NEA as a benefit to both its affiliate states and its members. You can see it at: www.thegateway.org
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