“Daily access to a newspaper helps raise standardized test scores 10-30%.”
–Newspaper Association of America Foundation
Since the first “newspaper” made its appearance, perhaps in ancient Rome or China, the medium has been an important source of information. Today, newspapers do more than provide information; they serve as teaching tools.
Newspapers in Education forges an alliance between newspapers and schools to promote literacy. Over several decades, the effort has helped teach students to read and think critically and to appreciate how much power they have, as citizens, to determine their own and their society’s destiny.
As “living textbooks,” newspapers help translate the experience of the classroom into the brawling, sprawling hubbub of the world as it exists in all its chaos, and clashes of cultures. Through it all, newspapers remain a resource for teachers, whether in print or electronic.
Newspapers make all the book learning real. They provide context for abstractions. Math becomes a journey through the stock market. Science applies to the tornado in the next county. An election becomes a lesson in political science with real consequences for the student.
Newspapers can and do change students’ lives. They provide a framework for compassion and a logic for tolerance. They place students squarely in the middle of their community and give them a distinct place in the world. They help establish meaning and show students they matter.
Newspapers are a source of power for today’s students, giving them the intellectual tools they need to build a better future for themselves and others.
NIE is a worldwide force for education, with more than 700 newspapers and many thousands of teachers participating. Is your newspaper taking part?
For more information on NIE Programs in your area, visit the Newspaper Association of America Foundation’s website.
To learn how your newspaper can begin participating, contact Tamara Tyree at tamara@rivercitystudio.com.
If you’ve read beyond this post’s headline and haven’t keeled over from geek terminology overload, good for you! It gives you a chance to find out why coding in Vim is so incredibly awesome.
Why is it so awesome? Let’s put it this way: Being able to take down a bug from 400 yards with a single shot is an impressive thing.
So what is Vim? Vim’s Source Forge download page describes it as “a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing.” Wikipedia describes it as being “based not on menus or icons but on commands.”
Now in nerd English: Take a text editor, like Notepad, and strip out all the buttons and icons. Then make a key command that switches from text editing to command mode. You’ve just made every key on your keyboard a shortcut through some complicated task.
To save a file, type “:w”; to delete an entire line, type “dd”; to go to a specific line, say line 5842, type “:5842”; to do a find and replace John with Jane on line 5842, type “:5842s/John/Jane/”; to do a find and replace on the whole document but only replace the first occurrence of John for each line and, if there are other Johns on the line, just leave them be, and, by the way, confirm each replacement, type “:%s/John/Jane/c” – try that in Microsoft Word!
Of course, if you’re writing a form letter, this jumping in and out of the document is not necessary. But writing code is another animal altogether. The code probably spans thousands of lines and maybe many separate files.
Vim is not an easy tool to pick up. There is a solid learning curve and no friendly icons or help menus. That Vim is a developer’s weapon of choice says a lot about his or her skill and determination.
In the last year, we have completely built out the following products for clients or for our software suite:
- Antibody Registry™ system
- ePulsar™ core library, CDN (content delivery network) and CMS (content management system)
- A custom CMS that can split administration across three separate domains/servers
- eBook publishing and sales site that kicks the Word file to a Linux application server that does the conversion on the fly – and the site picks up a confirmation when complete
- Our Newspapers In Education package – NIEHub™
- An intricate application and judging platform for angel investors
- Custom security layer, about which we are sworn to secrecy
Our ability to bend a site to our will sets us apart in the marketplace. We are not forced to churn out only sites using the basic WordPress, Drupal or Joomla platform and unable hold our own when the requested feature is more than the plugin or module can handle.
We love our rock star developers. We do our best to give them what they need then step out of the way and let them rock the house!