Here are the top books in education for 2008-2009 based on reader reviews and the thought-provoking or intriguing topics.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality by Charles Murray

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn

The Obama Education Plan: An Education Week Guide by Education Week

Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott

Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America by Jay Mathews

Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them by Ross W Greene

Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel T. Willingham

The Leader in Me: How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time by Stephen R. Covey

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina

For more good reads check out Top Education Books of 2007 by the American School Board Journal

Any books that you think should be on this list? Tell us in the comments!

Photo by zsita

Want to reduce incoming calls for event directions and times? Tandem for Schools provides two great communications benefits for your school/district and your parents.

First, every event listed on your Tandem calendar includes complete event details along with a link to Google maps and driving directions that are just a mouse click away.

Second, you can automate parent communications through email notification. Parents can subscribe and automatically receive any updates, location changes or cancellations. Parents can also use Tandem to synchronize with their Outlook calendar or online calendar.  More technical users can subscribe to an RSS feed.

“From my experience this year, this site is absolutely fantastic.  It should be even easier for me next year as the information rolls over from year to year.” – Jared D

We know from our customers that the better the communications with parents and the community, the higher  the participation with the school. Using Tandem for Schools will provide your staff with more time and your parents with better real-time event information.

Want to learn more?

• Sign up for a free trial
• Schedule a personal demonstration
• Read more about Tandem

If you have fiddled with exporting data from Tandem for Schools into Outlook 2003 or 2007 you may have run into some difficulties. If you are running Outlook 2003 one immediate drawback, whether you know it or not, is its inability to subscribe to an ical feed. This means that you provide the URL to an ical feed and your Outlook Calendar goes out at certain intervals to look for changes to events, then updates them for you.

This neat feature happens to be in the much improved Outlook 2007, however, if you are fortunate enough to have Outlook 2007 you may be just as unfortunate to have discovered this next issue. You can’t get events from an Outlook 2007 calendar subscription to sync with your phone. We can hope in the future that cellphone software can subscribe to calendar feeds but that just isn’t going to help us today.

Enter Remote Calendars, an open source Outlook add on for both Outlook 2003 and 2007. This clever little plugin will sync events from any ical feed directly into your personal calendar where it can then be synced with your phone. Download the free Remote Calendars plugin will save you time.

To learn more about the technical side of Tandem for Schools, check out our Support Forum.

USA Today recently wrote about what schools are doing to manage vastly higher fuel costs. Of course,cutting back bus service comes high on the list of somehow mitigating the high costs of fuel recently.  Cutting transportation seems to be the most obvious way to react, but school transportation experts claim that this might jeopardize the safety of students.  Could there be another way?

We’d like to think so.  Cutting costs is always good, especially when working with public dollars that affect parents.  Maybe creating more efficiency administratively is the answer.  That’s how Tandem for Schools comes in.

Tandem for Schools Plus includes sophisticated transportation management tools that will help you manage your school bussing, etc. much more efficiently.

• Request and allocate events.
• Prevent bus and driver schedule conflicts in real time.
• Manage fuel costs with solid accounting features.

Even though gas costs have been coming down in the past few weeks, wouldn’t you like to ease the process of transportation management?  If so, you can try Tandem for Schools FREE for 30 days.  Delve into each and every feature to get a feel for how Tandem can help you.  We’ll show you how it all works!

Just click the link below to schedule a 15-20 minute web consultation to see Tandem for Schools features in action.

We have all been hearing the latest news of financial disasters, tightening budgets, and families that are keep a much closer eye on their spending.  The latest money news hits all of us.  And it hits your school. What the future holds is uncertain.

Will lower home pricess drive lower assessments and thus les money from bond levies, if they pass as people think more about where their money is going?  It’s hard to say, but we have solutions that inform, update, and build your school community, even during the potentially tough times ahead.

Tandem for Schools is a comprehensive calendar tool for schools and districts that offers the following benefits:

• Very simple event and calendar management with less paper.
• Easy, and FREE, school master calendar creation with flexible electronic distribution options.
• Registered users (parents, students, etc.) get updates when events get changed or cancelled, potentially saving wasted trips and gas.
• Very low cost system that will cost no more than $499 per school.  No per user license costs.
• Low cost of ownership.  We host Tandem on our servers and maintain all the technicalities.  All you do is get started entering and managing your events.
• No additional costly and complicated training necessary.

Tandem for Schools will save you:

• Time
• Paper
• Money
• Gas
• and Grief!

Check out Tandem for Schools today to see our easy, inexpensive and green solution that will help you make the most our of your school or district budget while strengthening your school community.  Get started with our FREE version, Tandem Basic, with absolutely no cost or obligation by clicking the button:

Or try a FREE, 30-day trial of our complete calendar system by clicking here…

Or fill out this demo request form to have one of our experts walk you through Tandem for Schools with a live web demo.

We call it Tandem Basic.  It’s the simplest way to build school and district master calendars.  Gone are the days of multi-step processes.

Tandem Basic allows you to enter all key dates using a web browser in minutes:

• First and last day of school.
• Holidays
• Early Dismissals
• Staff Days
• Etc.

Once all key dates are entered, Tandem Basic provides a collection of useful ways to distribute your yearly calendar:

• Print out attractive PDF’s to use as handouts or post on the web.
• Post an HTML calendar on your web site with ease
• Provide RSS feeds for your school community to subscribe to
• Provide links for users to sync this calendar with Outlook, Google Calendars, and iCal

And if there are changes?  Easy.  Just log in to the calendar and make changes in minutes.  The changes you make are immediately reflected in all electronic versions you have provided.

The best feature of Tandem Basic is that it is completely FREE.  You can get started now with easy yearly calendar creation.  Just click the big green button…

We are excited to announce the launch of our new and improved website.   Here’s what you can expect:

• All in the information  you need to choose and purchase Tandem for Schools
• More videos to clearly explain how Tandem can work for you
• Improved readability
• Cleaner design

Be sure to check out the site today.  Let us know how we can help you decide on Tandem for Schools as the most complete and easy way to manage your school calendars.

Tandem for Schools is a powerful way to manage calendar events,
and communicatethem as well.  Tandem provides a variety of ways
to distribute your calendar to your
school community:

1. On your school web site
2. As a PDF file
3. As a Calendar Link for iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook
4. As an RSS feed

We have provided a new support link to provide more in-depth information on RSS and XML within Tandem for Schools.  This information will help you supercharge your calendar distribution in all the ways Tandem has to offer.

Find our more about RSS and XML in Tandem for Schools…

And click on links to the left if you need more information about our products.

Webster County Schools in Providence, KY are taking a long, hard look at their fuel costs. A recent article in the Journal Enterprise highlights what may be increasingly to come for many school districts: budget cuts for because of vastly higher fuel prices.

In this case, the district is increasing per mile costs for transportation. This will effect everyone: students, families and staff. And some educational opportunities will fall by wayside. Schools and families alike are feeling the squeeze as fuel costs cut into food budgets, etc.

Passing on higher costs to staff and parents is one answer, and it might be inevitable. But creating more efficiency at the administrative level can likely help significantly.

Tandem for Schools provides tools that may loosen the pinch on higher fuel costs at your school/district.

To help you manage costs and create efficiencies, Tandem offers:

• Sophisticated transportation allocation
• Full-featured budget management
• Pre-trip costing to help you plan field trips and sports away trips

Also, Tandem will vastly improve your ability manage the big picture of your calendar planning, helping you plan more efficient trips and consolidate travel.

We can personally show you the great features of Tandem for Schools. All it takes is 15-20 minutes of your time, and a strong desire to make your trip and calendar planning easier for your school or district.

Or call us at 1.866.685.3449. We’d be happy to help you learn how Tandem can really help save fuel costs… and make your job easier.

It’s already mid-summer and in no time, kids will be coming back to school. Events and activities will again fill the schedule.  Do the tools you currently have make it easy to manage your event and calendar planning?  If not, Tandem for Schools may be just what you are looking for.

Here are some clear benefits:

– Organize – Tandem will help you keep all of your activities and events straight from a central calendar using any web-browser.

– Communicate – Tandem will help your entire school community stay informed.  Parents that are registered users of the calendar can choose the events they want to keep update on.  If events change or get cancelled, they receive immediate notification.  No more onslaught of phone calls into your office when a game gets cancelled.

– Streamline – Because all your events get entered into one database, there is no more need to keep multiple calendars.  And when you add events, Tandem’s conflict checking features will give you the peace of mind that there won’t double-booking of facilities or events.

We’d like to help make your job easier.  Find out how by contacting us for a in-depth walk-through of Tandem for Schools.  One of our representatives will spend 15-20 minutes reviewing all the main features over the web with you.

Click here to scheule a demo now…