Biz-Tech

Intel Teach celebrates 10 m target

Intel Corporation celebrated 10 million teachers trained through Intel(r) Teach, a professional development program that enables educators to integrate technology into their lessons to promote problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills among their students.

Working with national, regional and local educators and governments in more than 70 countries, Intel Teach is the largest and most successful program of its kind.

In fact, according to Intel’s estimates, more than 300 million students have been prepared to learn, lead and succeed by teachers trained in Intel Teach.

“Solving tomorrow’s challenges begins in today’s classrooms,” Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said. “We invest in teachers so that they will inspire our students to be innovative, creative and prepared with the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are imperative to our future. While we celebrate reaching 10 million teachers through Intel Teach today, we continue to focus on developing the next generation by improving the quality of educational opportunities around the world.”

In Sri Lanka, the Intel(r) Teach Program is the largest, most successful program of its kind and has, to date, trained over 21,000 government teachers from the Western, Uva, Central, Sabaragamuwa, Northern, Eastern, and Southern provinces.

An End of Training (EoT) Analysis of Intel(r) Teach in-service program of 2010 conducted by Lanka Market Research Bureau (LMRB) revealed that over 95% of these teachers have benefited through integration of technology into their teaching and passed on illustrated effective uses to their students and their school work.

Intel EM Country Business Manager Indika de Zoysa said, “We work with government and policy makers to add quality to education and our efforts have indeed heralded a new beginning in the IT sector in this country. The turnout in support of this program has been outstanding and today we are extremely happy to recognize each and every person for their efforts put in.”

Intel Teach started as a simple idea, in which education is centred on student learning through project-based experiences instead of lecture and memorization. It included technology not just because technology was fun and different, but because computers and software appropriately integrated into the classroom promote students’ problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills, areas called 21st century skills by educators.

Independent evaluation of the Intel Teach program revealed participating teachers reported their students were “motivated and involved in the lesson” and that “student projects showed more in-depth understanding” than other comparable work.

Now in its second decade, Intel Teach, which relies on a combination of online and face-to-face instruction, continues to build more flexible course offerings and train teachers around the world.

Intel Teach is but one element of Intel’s commitment to education, which includes extensive efforts by employee volunteers to help improve education around the world.

Explorer 9 geared to block Malware

NSS Labs, the leading independent security product testing organization, recently shared the outlining of their comparative test results of malware protection. While one part focuses on the global results, the other is specific to the Asia Pacific region.

The outcome of the polls showed Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) as the most effective browser at blocking socially engineered malware, beating competitors by a large margin. IE9 detected 96 percent of malicious links worldwide via its SmartScreen URL reputation feature, and another 3.2 percent when its Application Reputation feature was enabled. Next was Google Chrome 12, which caught 13.2 percent of the threats; Apple Safari 5, which detected 7.6 percent; Mozilla Firefox 4, which also detected 7.6 percent; and Opera 11, which found 6.1 percent.

While the web is a wonderful place, there are many dangers online that can put you and your computer at risk. The threat is even more imminent when it comes to business environments. The browser is the first line of defence against attacks from the web and it plays an important role along with anti-virus and other security software to help keep you safe online.

The SmartScreen filter in Internet Explorer helps protect users from socially engineered malware attacks by stopping an attack before it has a chance to infect your PC.

They stride to protect Windows customers by delivering a robust set of built-in security, privacy, and reliability technologies.

The SmartScreen filter in IE 9 includes Application Reputation and improvements to SmartScreen URL reputation. Internet Explorer 9 provides the first download manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection and introduces Application Reputation.

Application Reputation is a groundbreaking browser feature that uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files, and show more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious.

Users today are often conditioned to ignore generic warnings that are shown for every download, and reducing the frequency of these warning by using reputation data has been shown to help customers make significantly better decisions.

Other browsers show the same warning whether a file is an extremely common program or a likely piece of malware.

Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser that uses application reputation to help users make safer decisions.

Other regional tests released by NSS for socially engineered malware targeted at users in Asia Pacific and in Europe showed similar and consistent results.

In all cases, Internet Explorer 9 leads across all browsers in protecting users be it individual or business customers from these live threats of malware.

These findings come at a time where a lot of interesting discussions are taking place regarding browsers and business customers.