Confession I always had students who entered my fourth grade class reading significantly below grade level. And each year, when I passed them on to fifth grade, those students were still behind. I did everything I knew how to do — I taught Guided Reading lessons, provided independent reading time, found them books to love, replied to readers’ response journals- but no matter what I tried in my Balanced Literacy classroom, the achievement gap persisted.

Teacher question: When working with state educational standards are the expectations for the student to be able to accomplish each of the standards with grade level text. Some of us believe that if a fourth-grade student can determine the main idea in a second-grade text that the student has mastered that standard. Please help us settle this argument. Shanahan's response:

Recently, The Washington Post published an article about the latest hostilities in the “reading wars.” I noticed it because the columnist, Jay Matthews, quoted from this blog.

Teacher question: Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing? Shanahan's response: You came to the right place. I think your school is making a big mistake not giving sufficient attention to writing.

Teacher question: You wrote recently that it was a good idea to teach comprehension skills, but our school district says we shouldn’t, that it’s prior knowledge that matters. Do you know the baseball study? Have you read Natalie Wexler’s research? It is really difficult to trust research when everyone tells us something different. Shanahan's response:  I feel your pain.

Teaching students to read is the first job of our schools. How can we help all students become strong, confident readers? Literacy for All: Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia was held on February 20, 2020 in Annapolis, Maryland. The event was hosted by National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL), Decoding Dyslexia Maryland (DD-MD), and community partners. Reading experts from NCIL shared best practices in early screening and interventions supported by decades of reading research.

Teacher’s question: Our school psychologist tests all of our boy and girls for RAN. He says it is the best predictor of reading ability. How can I improve my students’ RAN performance? Shanahan’s response: If someone tells you that you can teach RAN, run!

If you’re new to Java—or new to programming—this best-selling book will guide you through the language features and APIs of Java 11. With fun, compelling, and realistic examples, authors Marc Loy, Patrick Niemeyer, and Daniel Leuck introduce you to Java fundamentals—including its class libraries, programming techniques, and idioms—with an eye toward building real applications.

When you have questions about C# 8.0 or .NET Core, this best-selling guide has the answers you need. C# is a language of unusual flexibility and breadth, but with its continual growth there’s so much more to learn. In the tradition of the O’Reilly Nutshell guides, this thoroughly updated edition is simply the best one-volume reference to the C# language available today.

Level up with Tableau to build eye-catching, easy-to-interpret data visualizations. In this follow-up guide to Practical Tableau, author Ryan Sleeper takes you through a collection of unique tips and tutorials for using this popular software. Beginning to advanced Tableau users will learn how to go beyond Show Me to make better charts and learn dozens of tricks to improve both the author and user experience.

Data in the genomics field is booming. In just a few years, organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will host 50+ petabytes—or over 50 million gigabytes—of genomic data, and they’re turning to cloud infrastructure to make that data available to the research community. How do you adapt analysis tools and protocols to access and analyze that volume of data in the cloud? With this practical book, researchers will learn how to work with genomics algorithms using open source tools including the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK), Docker, WDL, and Terra.

How can you use data in a way that protects individual privacy but still provides useful and meaningful analytics? With this practical book, data architects and engineers will learn how to establish and integrate secure, repeatable anonymization processes into their data flows and analytics in a sustainable manner.

Want to create devices that interact with the physical world? This cookbook is perfect for anyone who wants to experiment with the popular Arduino microcontroller and programming environment. Updated for Arduino 1.8, the third edition includes more than 200 tips and techniques for building a variety of objects and prototypes such as IoT solutions, environmental monitors, location and position-aware systems, and products that can respond to touch, sound, heat, and light. You don’t need to have mastered Arduino or programming to get started.

Jenkins X is a powerful tool that can automatically create and deploy cloud-ready, fully functional out-of-the-box CI/CD pipelines in any environment running a Kubernetes cluster. This practical book shows programmers, systems developers, DevOps engineers, and other professionals how to harness the power of Jenkins X and its implementation of CI/CD and DevOps best practices—everything from basic use in multiple environments to advanced customization and configuration.

Hit the ground running with React, the open source technology from Facebook for building rich web applications fast. Updated for the latest React release, the second edition of this hands-on guide shows you how to build React components and organize them into maintainable large-scale apps. If you’re familiar with JavaScript syntax, you’re ready to get started.

If you’re looking to make a career move from programmer to AI specialist, this is the ideal place to start. Based on Laurence Moroney's extremely successful AI courses, this introductory book provides a hands-on, code-first approach to help you build confidence while you learn key topics.You’ll understand how to implement the most common scenarios in machine learning, such as computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and sequence modeling for web, mobile, cloud, and embedded runtimes.

Get the authoritative guide on Actions, the new distributed programming model that works with existing and new programming languages alike. Written by one of the model’s creators, this introduction shows you how Actions not only unifies stateless, stateful, and actor programming models but also runs everywhere—in the cloud or on the edge.

Improve your understanding of Scrum through the proven experience and collected wisdom of experts around the world. Based on real-life experiences, the 97 essays in this unique book provide a wealth of knowledge and expertise from established practitioners who have dealt with specific problems and challenges with Scrum. You’ll find out more about the rules and roles of this framework, as well as tactics, strategies, specific patterns to use with Scrum, and stories from the trenches.

With over 75 million downloads per month, Spring Boot is the most widely used Java framework available. Yet Spring Boot’s simplicity can also be confusing. How do developers learn enough to be productive immediately? This practical book shows you how to use this framework to write successful mission-critical applications. Mark Heckler from VMware, the company behind Spring, guides you through Spring Boot’s architecture and approach, along with topics such as debugging, testing, and deployment.

If you’re training a machine learning model but aren’t sure how to put it into production, this book will get you there. Kubeflow provides a collection of cloud native tools for different stages of a model’s lifecycle, from data exploration, feature preparation, and model training to model serving. This guide helps data scientists build production-grade machine learning implementations with Kubeflow and shows data engineers how to make models scalable and reliable.

Working with unbounded and fast-moving data streams has historically been difficult. But with Kafka Streams and ksqlDB, building stream processing applications is easy and fun. This practical guide explores the world of real-time data systems through the lens of these popular technologies and explains important stream processing concepts against a backdrop of interesting business problems.

Reinforcement learning (RL) will deliver one of the biggest breakthroughs in AI over the next decade, enabling algorithms to learn from their environment to achieve arbitrary goals. This exciting development avoids constraints found in traditional machine learning (ML) algorithms. This practical book shows data science and AI professionals how to perform the reinforcement process that allows a machine to learn by itself.

Blue Label Telecoms wrote down its entire stake at Cell C in 2019. And after calling in a valuation specialist, its value remained at R0 in the first half of the group's 2020 financial year.

The Public Investment Corporation has terminated the employment contract of Executive Head of Listed Investments Fidelis Madavo, it said in a statement on Monday.

OLX Brazil, the 50/50 joint venture between Naspers-owned Prosus and Adevinta, which is owned by Norway’s Schibsted, will buy its competitor Grupo Zap in a deal worth almost R10 billion.

Pillay who retired as Cell C chairman in October 2019 is a qualified lawyer and was previously the chairman and CEO of Primedia.

ADvTECH attributed the expected rise in earnings to one-off transactions including "bargain purchase gains" arising from the Monash SA acquisition, foreign exchange movements and insurance proceeds related to a previously reported fraud event.

China’s Huawei, which for years has denied violating American trade sanctions on Iran, produced internal company records in 2010 that show it was directly involved in sending prohibited US computer equipment to Iran’s largest mobile-phone operator.

The technology giant says it is moving to remote work in order to help reduce the spread of coronavirus.

MTN on Friday announced a drop in the price of monthly data bundles and customers will now pay R99 for 1GB, 33% lower than previously.

Amazon said it would hire 100 000 warehouse and delivery workers in the United States to deal with a surge in online orders, as many consumers have turned to the web to meet their needs during the coronavirus outbreak.

The communications regulator is asking telecom companies to consider lowering the cost of data in a bid to ensure productivity during the period the coronavirus outbreak.

Amazon.com said it's temporarily closing a small New York warehouse after one of its associates tested positive for the coronavirus. As Fred Katayama reports, it highlights the operational risk it faces as the disease spreads.

Datatec tells shareholders that the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak has reached every region where the group operates.

The equipment donated includes 20 000 laboratory diagnostic test kits, 100 000 medical masks, and 1 000 protective suits and face shields.

WhatsApp on Tuesday placed new limits on message forwarding as part of an effort to curb the spread of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.

Around 2 300 Telkom employees have opted for voluntary severance packages since the start of a business restructuring process early this year, a spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Weak encryption technology has given rise to the phenomenon of “Zoombombing”, where uninvited trolls gain access to a video conference.

The first shipment of personal protective equipment procured by Naspers has arrived in South Africa on Monday, the company said.

Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency could now launch in mid-November after a revamp aimed at mollifying its many critics.

A lack of high demand spectrum has been a long-running complaint by SA telecoms groups, who say that it is needed to reduce data prices and increase speed.

Can an app contain the pandemic? Interest is growing in smartphone technology as a potential key to ending lockdowns and reopening economies around the world.

Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a 5 billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S. It’s an easy question. There are so many possibilities. The first one most folks think of is, the teacher. If teachers did better, kids would do better.

Confession I always had students who entered my fourth grade class reading significantly below grade level. And each year, when I passed them on to fifth grade, those students were still behind. I did everything I knew how to do — I taught Guided Reading lessons, provided independent reading time, found them books to love, replied to readers’ response journals- but no matter what I tried in my Balanced Literacy classroom, the achievement gap persisted.

Teacher question: When working with state educational standards are the expectations for the student to be able to accomplish each of the standards with grade level text. Some of us believe that if a fourth-grade student can determine the main idea in a second-grade text that the student has mastered that standard. Please help us settle this argument. Shanahan's response:

Recently, The Washington Post published an article about the latest hostilities in the “reading wars.” I noticed it because the columnist, Jay Matthews, quoted from this blog.

Teacher question: Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing? Shanahan's response: You came to the right place. I think your school is making a big mistake not giving sufficient attention to writing.