Two high schools in Minnesota are using Pearson Education's WriteToLearn to help students build literacy skills and prepare for the new Minnesota writing assessment.

The schools are Dunwoody Academy High School, a new technical charter school in north Minneapolis administered by Dunwoody College, and Robbinsdale Cooper High School, part of the Robbinsdale Area Schools in New Hope, Minn.

With WriteToLearn, students practice essay writing and summarization skills, and their efforts are measured by a "Knowledge Analysis Technologies" (KAT) engine. The KAT engine is an automated assessment technology that evaluates the meaning of text by examining whole passages, not just grammatical correctness or spelling.

"WriteToLearn is an awesome program that gives each student feedback right away, which is something a teacher cannot possibly have time to do," said Duane Dutrieuille, dean of academic and student affairs at Dunwoody Academy High School.

Provide rich multimedia resources

Back to the book analogy, its as if the book will not open and let itself be read unless you can prove to the publisher that you are keeping the book in a locked room so no one else will ever read it.  And it is Microsoft who has enabled this, by providing the the tools to do so in their operating system.  Remember the fallout from Sony putting spyware, err copy protection, in their CD's -- turns out that that event was just a dress rehearsal for Windows Vista.

As Rosoff's statement implies, many of Vista's DRM technologies exist not
because Microsoft wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest
of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered intellectual property
owners.

"Microsoft was dealing here with a group of companies that simply don't trust
the hardware [industry]," Rosoff said. "They wanted more control and more
security than they had in the past" -- and if Microsoft failed to accommodate
them, "they were prepared to walk away from Vista" by withholding support for
next-generation DVD formats and other high-value content.

Microsoft's official position is that Vista's DRM capabilities serve users by
providing access to high-quality content that rights holders would otherwise
serve only at degraded quality levels, if they chose to serve them at all. "In
order to achieve that content flow, appropriate content-protection measures must
be in place that create incentives for content owners while providing consumers
the experiences they want and have grown to expect,"

Nope, no arrogance here.

Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft, asserts that
this process does not bode well for new content formats such as Blu-ray and
HD-DVD, neither of which are likely to survive their association with DRM
technology. "I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM
included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint," Rosoff
stated. "It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when
it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to
impose."

free office suite

OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.