All the kids are using Facebook these days, right? So it makes sense for Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to launch an educational software initiative.
No, your kid isn’t going to graduate from Facebook University (yet), but this initiative is actually part of Zuckerberg and his wife’s commitment to giving back. The couple recently donated $120 million to organizations in the San Francisco Bay area to reach underserved children, and one of those programs involves a public charter school run by Summit Public Schools. The executive director of the school system reached out to Zuckerberg about the lack of quality software at their disposal, so the entrepreneur committed eight of his software engineers to develop programs for the school to use. The goal is to eventually make this software available to all schools, free of charge.
Sounds great, right? The genius–and the bank account–behind arguably the largest global phenomenon ever is committed to creating free educational software. What could possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, critics are already skeptical of the equation that involves children plus Facebook’s lax views on privacy. “Sure kids, play this really great algebra program…while we gather your information, sell it to retailers, and target you with advertising while listing your GPS coordinates online.”
Another mark against this concept is the fact that studies have shown increased access to the latest technology and software platforms doesn’t always correlate to higher academic performance and achievement test scores, especially in specific subjects like reading.
While both Facebook and Summit say they’ll adhere to strict privacy protocols where student information is concerned, there are steps schools should take before sitting their students down at computers for self-paced digital learning. After all, around 500,000 children a year fall victim to identity theft, and school records computers are often the culprit either through hacking or internal data breaches. Ensuring that all computers on the network are protected with the most up-to-date versions of antivirus and antimalware software–like 360 Total Security, which released an update recently on FileHippo–is only the beginning. It’s a good idea to incorporate a VPN as well, but many schools can’t do that for fear of not being able to track student internet activity.
The post Facebook Moves Into Educational Software Space appeared first on TechBeat.
via TechBeat http://ift.tt/1O8Qh40
Zortam Mp3 Media Studio is an all-in-one Mp3 application suite. The application has several modules such us Zortam Mp3 Auto Tagger, Mp3 Organizer, ID3 Tag Editor, Mp3 Player, Mp3 Normalizer, CD Ripper and Mp3 to Wav converter. Key Features Include: With Zortam Mp3 Media Studio you can batch auto tag your Mp3 files using Zortam's database. The...
FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. Among others, the features of FileZilla include the following: Easy to use Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) IPv6 support Available in many language...
VirtualDJ (VDJ) is a feature-packed deejaying software for mixing and playing digital audio and video tracks. The UI resembles a classic DJ setup with a mixer and two turntables but can be expanded to 4 decks or more. It’s vinyl emulation feature allows to control music files on the computer through physical turntables which makes the mixing and sc...
AdwCleaner is an application that searches for and deletes Adware, Toolbars, Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUP) and browser Hijackers from your computer. By using AdwCleaner you will be able to remove numerous types of unwanted programs. This in turn will give you a more streamlined PC and a better user experience whilst browsing the web. Key Fe...
BitComet is a p2p file-sharing freeware fully compatible with BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP downloads. BitComet is a powerful, clean, fast, and easy-to-use BitTorrent client. It supports simultaneous downloads, download queue, selected downloads in torrent package, fast-resume, disk cache, speed limits, port mapping, proxy, ip-filter, etc. Key features...
