“The latest edition [of Collins Official Scrabble Words] adds nearly 3,000 new words to the existing quarter of a million available to Scrabble players” said Robert Groves, the editor of the reference for the popular Scrabble board game. MySpace, Wiki, gobi, alu, aloo, and keema are among the new words added to the scrabble dictionary.

Groves called the new words “an eclectic mix of new technological jargon, overseas English, recent colloquialisms, street slang, and a few fairly well established phrases that had not made it onto the list until now.”  Staff at Collins Dictionary in Glasgow, Scotland created the list for the updated Collins scrabble dictionary, which publishers call “the most comprehensive Scrabble word list ever produced.”

Groves noted that over 50 percent of British households have the Collins Official Scrabble Dictionary, four million new games are sold ever year, and almost anybody that has played the game has turned to its official scrabble word list to settle the inevitable good natured disputes, which of course arise most often as the game comes to a close and the scores are close.

Groves said that in order to compile the additions to the new list staff reviewed dictionaries going back to 2006, and also used the Collins Corpus, “the world’s largest language database of written and spoken English.”

“It’s like the ‘bible’ really, for Scrabble players. It’s what we use to avoid any major arguments.  It’s fundamental, really”, said Mark Nyman, who noted that the Collins dictionary is generally used everywhere in Canada and the United States where Websters is also used.  The forty-four year old Nyman, who lives in Knutsford in Cheshire, said he is going to Poland this October to try to win the world championship again.

A 6-year-old boy in the US harmed himself and two other kids at his kindergarten school after a gun he brought with him accidentally went off, various reports say.

The unnamed boy reportedly brought to Betsy Ross Elementary School a Kel-Tec 9 millimeter gun which went off after he tried to cock it, local reports say.

In Reuters report, Houston Police Capt. Lori Bender said that the boy was sliding a mechanism when he accidentally pulled the trigger as he was trying to grip the pistol hard enough to cock it.

Bender said that “As soon as the gun went off, it surprised him and he dropped it,” according to the report from Reuters.

The kid, who was taken to Texas Children’s Hospital, is in good condition, according to a statement from a hospital spokesperson on Thursday.

Two other kids, a boy aged 6 and a girl aged 5 who were both grazed by the bullet in the foot or legs, have been released by the hospital.

According to authorities, they are investigating how the boy got the gun which is reportedly owned by a family friend.

US students are rating colleges higher while losing confidence in high schools in the country, a latest survey from The Associated Press and Viacom reveals.

The survey was had 1,104 respondents, all aged 18-24  and was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications on Feb. 18 to March 6 this year.

The survey result shows that 4 in 10 of the respondents were strongly satisfied with high school education, a report from the AP says.

The report says that 6 in 10 respondents were “very” or “extremely” satisfied with their college education.

The survey result shows that 4 in 10 credit high school teachers for helping out.

According to a report from the AP, “most high schools are failing to give students a solid footing for the working world or strong guidance toward college, at a time when many students fear graduation means tumbling into an economic black hole.”

Layoff notices will be sent to all unionized Detroit public school teachers, a notice on the districts public schools’ website says.

The announcement comes from Robert Bobb, a governor-appointed emergency head of the district tasked to reduce the system’s budget deficit.

According to the notice posted at the said site on Thursday, every one of the 5,466 unionized employees and 250 administrators of the district will be sent the layoff notices.

However, the notice does not mean that they will all be fired as it is just a requirement under the current contract of the Detroit Federation of Teachers with the district school system.

Last year, reports say that 2,000 employees were sent similar notices but not everyone was let go.

The statement posted at the site says that the notices which will be sent are “in anticipation of a workforce reduction to match the district’s declining student enrollment.”

The school system of Detroit has been battling a steady decline of population in the city which has also reduced enrollment. The current deficit of the district stands at $327 million.

In a new planned partnership between Washington state and Microsoft, the technology powerhouse will be supplying software and training to every high school within the state.

The news comes from an announcement made on Monday by Washington’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn.

According to Dorn’s statement, he is close to an agreement with Microsoft  for the creation of an Information Technology Academy in Washinton State which will involve every high school statewide.

A report from the Seattle PI says that the agreement will be tackled in a House Education Committee today.

According to the report, the program consists of two main parts which are training and certification.

In the training component, students and teachers alike will be trained through online courses and Microsoft materials. The second component will enable teachers and students to be certified in numerous subjects in the field from basic to advanced.

The Seattle PI report quotes Dorn saying that “We’ve been working on this plan for about four months.”

“We’re very close to an agreement. But the agreement requires legislative approval before we can make it available to students. The cost is $2 million. That small investment could get us a program that would cost school districts $30 million if they purchased this program individually,” he said.

Virginia Tech University will be fined $55,000 for lapses in the handling of the 2007 shooting at the campus which claimed 33 lives.

According to an investigation of the U.S. Department of Education, the institution took too long to notify students that there was a gunman roaming around campus and shooting at fellow classmates.

Last year, the investigation ruled that the warnings sent by Virginia Tech to students, faculty and staff took too long to be disseminated.

In April 16, 2007, South Korea-born Cho Seung-Hui, a student at the institution shot and killed 32 classmates before turning the gun on himself.

According to a report from the Agence France-Presse, the institution’s administration “took more than two hours to issue an alert to campus students, faculty and staff after the first two people were shot and killed.”

Virginia Tech says, however, that they believe that the school administration “acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time,” the AFP report says.

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According to a paper entitled “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” better teachers will improve the performance of students, which has long been rated average, despite the US’ being a wealthy nation.

The study which analyzed data from achievement tests of achievement tests of students aged 15 years in developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other countries says that improved quality of teachers is the key to the elusive goal of improving performance of students in the US.

The US has had a long history of trying to perform better in education. However, when performance of students from the US is compared to the performance of students in 70 other countries involved in the study, the authors of the paper found that US students even fared below average in math while performing average on reading and science.

According to the study, keeping first-rate teachers is important for a country which aims to improve performance in education. Matching these quality teachers to lower-performing students is also better than reducing classroom size, the paper suggests based on previous studies.

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A recent study released by the US government reveals that students from urban areas in the country fair poorer in science than their counterparts from other areas.

According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress Science report, students from urban areas, mostly from low-income households from those areas, had lower scores than their peers from other parts of the country.

The study included 17 urban districts which all scored lower than the national average, reports say.

The Nation’s Report Card showed that these students had lower science proficiency scores and should be a cause for concern for the education system.

Alan Friedman, National Assessment Governing Board member said, “Whatever we are doing in science education in these big city public schools, it isn’t working for the vast majority of our students.”

“Even for students who don’t enter careers requiring some science competence, as citizens they will soon be involved in issues like climate change, energy policy and medical research,” Friedman said.

wallyg / Flickr / (CC BY-NC-ND)

Stanford University has been invited by New York to build an engineering campus in the city, Mercury News reports.

According to the publication, Stanford President John Hennessy revealed the invitation at the US Senate’s Academic meeting on Thursday.

If the plan would be given a go, it would create a Stanford campus in New York City “that would confer a Silicon Valley degree in the global center of culture and commerce,” the publication wrote.

Speaking at the said meeting, Hennessy said, “Stanford has served as an intellectual incubator for the emergence of Silicon Valley and has the potential to do so again.”

He told the meeting that, “The challenge is one that Stanford is highly qualified, perhaps uniquely qualified, to take.”

He said that New York’s offer taps into the strengths of the academic institution, “particularly the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes” Stanford.

Mercury News says that New York does not have a top-ranked applied science research and graduate school, effectively putting the city at a disadvantage over the Bay Area, Boston and other regions which attract technology companies.

The federal student loan repayment default rate jumped from 11.8 percent to 13.8 percent starting fiscal year 2008 from one year prior, the Education Department said. The figures show the number of defaults within three years.

The increase in the number of defaults of federal student loan repayment indicates that U.S. graduates are finding it hard to look for jobs to repay their student loans.

Some observers also say it shows proof that education officials ought to monitor for-profit colleges closer since these schools tend to have the worst default rates in the nation.

“These numbers paint a troubling picture of life for students after they leave a for-profit college,” Sen. Tom Harkin said in a statement.

Harkin, who is the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee added that graduates of for-profit schools “are dramatically worse off” than graduates of non-profit private or public schools.

The government’s decision to revise the gauge of defaults from a two-year period to a three-year period also played a part in the doubling of the federal student loan repayment default rate.