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Online Programs That Let Parents Track Grades in Real Time Are Popular but Can Raise Stress – New York Times
Posted on: May 4, 2008
Getty Images(woman) and Iconica/Getty Images(students); Illustration by The New York Time
ON school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses.
But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say.
When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment.
“He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. PowerSchool alone is used by 10,100 schools in 49 states.
Although a few programs have been available for a decade, schools have been using them more in recent years as federal reporting requirements have expanded and home computers have become more common. Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.
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Hollywood Newsroom noted
that Google ads are now popping up for searches on “Tom Cruise” that say “Official Tom Cruise Site. Stay Tuned for the Official Launch of TomCruise.com. Check it out!” or alternatively “Official Tom Cruise Site. The Countdown is On. TomCruise.com launches May 5th. Get the scoop!” and links to TomCruise.com.
Because it’s a Saturday and I’m interested in Tom Cruise in the same way people are interested in accident scenes as they drive by, I decided to dig a little.
The site currently shows a countdown clock that ends on 9 AM Monday morning (somebody please double check the math for me). The domain name was registered by an attorney, Benita Das, at the Los Angeles law firm Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger. Das is not listed as an attorney on the firm’s directory, but I did find a reference to her back in 2002. Is this one of the law firms that Tom Cruise uses? I have no idea. They do practice entertainment law, though.
The domain was first purchased on November 6, 1996, but very little was done with it until now. The last update to the whois information was April 28, 2008. My guess is that the law firm bought the domain name on Cruise’s behalf. That would explain why the attorney is the registered owner, at least for now.
Just yesterday Cruise was back on the Oprah Winfrey show promising to “strictly divide” talking about his absolutely insane personal causes, and film promotion. Which topic will be the focus on TomCruise.com? Who cares. This is likely the last time I’ll visit the site.
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Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat.
“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ”
Since then, of course, Kodak, which once considered itself the Bell Labs of chemistry, has embraced the digital world and the researchers who understand it.
“The shift in research focus has been just tremendous,” said John D. Ward, a lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who worked for Kodak for 20 years. Or, as Mr. Sasson put it, “Getting a digital idea accepted has sure gotten a lot easier.”
Indeed, physicists, electrical engineers and all sorts of people who are more comfortable with binary code than molecules are wending their way up through Kodak’s research labs. “When I joined, I knew my salary came from film sales,” said Dr. Majid Rabbani, an electrical engineer who joined Kodak in 1983. “But I knew that I would eventually produce paychecks for others.”
Kodak is by no means thriving. Digital products are nowhere near filling the profit vacuum left by evaporating sales of film. Its work force is about a fifth of the size it was two decades ago, and it continues to lose money. Its share price remains depressed.
But, finally, digital products are flowing from the labs. Kodak recently introduced a pocket-size television, which is selling in Japan for about $285. It has software that lets owners of multiplexes track what is showing on each screen. It has a tiny sensor small enough to fit into a cellphone, yet acute enough to capture images in low light.
The company now has digital techniques that can remove scratches and otherwise enhance old movies. It has found more efficient ways to make O.L.E.D.’s — organic light-emitting diodes — for displays in cameras, cellphones and televisions.
This month, Kodak will introduce Stream, a continuous inkjet printer that can churn out customized items like bill inserts at extremely high speeds. It is working on ways to capture and project three-dimensional movies.
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After a months-long standoff, Microsoft and Yahoo are now engaged in active merger talks, people involved in the discussions said Friday.
Microsoft, which had threatened to abandon its bid, has increased its offer “by several dollars” per share, one of those involved said.
A deal, however, was not close Friday night, these people said.
The merger talks represent an enormous breakthrough after weeks of behind-the-scenes discussions without any progress. The exact terms being discussed could not be learned.
The talks would explain the public silence from Microsoft this week. It has refused to disclose its plans, despite its earlier threat to start a proxy contest if Yahoo did not reach a deal with it by last Saturday.
A person involved in the talks cautioned that they could still be postponed or collapse entirely.
Shares of Yahoo rallied on news of the renewed talks. They closed at $28.67, up $1.86, or almost 7 percent. Microsoft shares edged down slightly.
Some Yahoo shareholders said that the flurry of phone calls they are receiving from both Yahoo and Microsoft has intensified. The two companies have been trying to find out what price large shareholders would find acceptable.
In recent days, Microsoft has privately raised the possibility of increasing its offer, currently valued at about $29.30 a share, to as much as $33.
Some shareholders have signaled they are holding out for more than $35. One shareholder said he believed an offer of $34 would probably be sufficient to consummate a deal.
Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment.
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