This time, last year, Angela Rynicki was in bad financial shape.
"I was behind in my rent, my utilities were shut off, and I wasn't driving my vehicle due to the fact I didn't have car insurance on it," said Rynicki.
Needing a help up, she called 211 and discovered she was eligible for the earned income tax credit. That meant $1,900 dollars in the bank.
"The EITC made it possible for me to catch my bills up, pay my landload up, pay my shutoffs and I paid six months in car insurance," she said.
Thousands of Michigan workers could be eligible for the tax credit and not know it. They could be missing out on federal credits up to $5,751 dollars and state credits up to $1,150 dollars. Eligibility is based on your income and family size.
"If you can get a few hundred extra dollars back into your pocket, it means being able to catch up on your rent, utility bills, buy some food for your kids," said Gilda Jacobs, CEO of the Michigan League for Human Services.
These are folks that need to go spend those dollars at the grocery store, the restaurant, Consumers Energy, Board of Water and Light, so it comes right back and builds our community instantly," said Ingham County Treasurer Eric Schertzing.
Governor Snyder originally wanted to get rid of the state credit, but agreed instead to reduce it. Last year families got $430 on average from the Michigan EITC. This year they'll get between $130 to $140.
To make sure you get all the credit you deserve, there are "Show Me The Money" Day events across Michigan on Saturday. Lansing's event is from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Capital Area District Library. For more information, go to showmethemoneyday.org.
College Goes Digital With iTunes U App. The result would look a lot like Apple's new iTunes U app, it seems. The new app lets you browse through courses at partner universities, tap to enroll, browse course material, take notes, view the syllabus, and a lot more. --NS
--Updated 11:06 a.m. EST
Apple's got itself a host of new publishing partners. Those on board include: textbook king Pearson, McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Dorling Kindersley (yes--that means dinosaur pictures on the iPad!) --NS
--Updated 10:50 a.m. EST
Apple Launches Free E-Book Creator App. Apple's iBook Author let will anyone with a Mac (and the will) to create their own ebook or e-textbook in what seems like a WYSIWYG, fuss-free way. The app accepts drag and drop gestures for documents and widgets. Code-savvy book authors can create their own custom widgets using Javascript and HTML. The app publishes straight to the Apple app store. --NS
Apple Announces iBooks 2. Apple's first announcement for this morning is a series of interactive e-textbooks that allow mutli-touch gestures to navigate through text, 3D images and videos. iBooks 2 is free to download on the iPad as an app. iBooks 2 is the first of two big announcements Apple's planning at their education event in New York this morning. --NS
Apple Event Today. Stay tuned for updates. --NS
Kodak Files For Bankruptcy. Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 early today. --NS
Facebook's Activity Apps Go Live. Facebook and scads of publishing and entertainment companies let loose the promised activity buttons, first announced at f8, at an event thrown by the social network yesterday. The rollout includes 60 new apps including ticketing services, recipe apps, travel apps, and more. --NS
Senators Show anti-SOPA Support. At last count, Ars Technica reports, PIPA has found 18 new opposers. --NS
Lovefilm Links Up With LG. LG is its latest squeeze--owner Amazon has signed a deal with the TV manufacture to have its smart sets stream films and shows from Lovefilm's quickly expanding digital library. --NS
Apple’s Education event is kicking off in a few minutes and Geek.com will be tracking it minute-by-minute. We’ve heard that Apple plans to majorly disrupt the textbook market, though various leaks and commentary over the past few days have questioned just how major of an announcement this will be. Education, he says, is in the dark ages.
The iPad, it turns out, is a great tool for learning. It has over 20,000 education apps built just for it and there are over 1.5 million iPads in use in education today.
Number one: reinventing the textbook. Textbooks aren’t portable, they aren’t durable, they aren’t searchable, and their not interactive. iBooks 2 is “the next textbook experience for the iPad”.
The first demo is of a biology textbook. It’s vibrant, interactive, multitouch-friendly, and interactive. There are image galleries and large, beautiful pictures. The iBook store will have a textbook category. iBooks will update soon and everyone will have access to a free sample. iBooks 2 will work on the iPad or iPhone, it’s free, and it will be available today. But how do you create a textbook? you used a Mac application called iBooks Author. Books are built the way you’d work with something like Pages, using drag-and-drop layouts, a WYSIWYG editor, and so forth. Advanced functions can be handled through HTML5 or Javascript. Functions like the glossary are built right in so they don’t have to be formatted manually. iBooks Author is free.
High school textbooks will be $15 or less. Books can be updated continuously. Major partners include Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill, each of whom will make 90% of their texts available. Some of the texts from McGraw include Algebra I, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. DK Publishing will offer Dinosaurs, Insects, Mammals, and My Fist ABC.
As noted above the EO Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, lead by Harvard biologist EO Wilson is on board as well. Their book will be Life On Earth, and it’s an iBook store exclusive. The first two chapters will be free. (Also, it looks like a Apple Schiller a nice shout out to EO Wilson, who has done some extremely important work in biology, specially in the study of ants. His book “The Ants” written with Bert Holldobler is legendary in the field.)
So that was all just the first part of today’s event. Over 1000 universities use iTunes U. It’s a top free education tool with over 700 million downloads total, mostly of lectures. It’ll be just like iBooks, but for lectures and other iTunes U content. There will also be classroom tie-ins, like offering professor off hours schedules, posting assignments, send out messages to the class, and so on. Lectures can be downloaded or streamed.
The iTunes U app is available today and it’s free.
Thanks for reading along.
THEY'VE killed off CDs and revolutionised the music industry. Now, if rumours are to be believed, Apple has its eye on the least rock and roll thing you can think of: school text books.
Not as sexy as an iPad 3 but the tech giant's rumoured plan to give anyone the tools to create a text book on their tablet or smartphone has the potential to change more people's lives.
Steve Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson said the late Apple guru had his "sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform.
According to tech site Ars Technica, Apple won't be expanding into text book publishing, rather it will be designing software for ebooks.
Senior instructor at the International Information System Security Certification Consortium Robert Slade told news.com.au that the move by Apple can’t hurt as the "quality of almost all school texts is absolutely appalling”.
However Mr Slade disagreed about the importance of tablet computing in schools.
Dr Shaun Nykvist, Senior Lecturer in ICT Education at the Queensland University of Technology told news.com.au that though he strongly believed in the use of educational tablets, Apple’s efforts would be irrelevant unless equity and access problems were addressed.
“First we had textbooks and then text books for CD- Roms and textbooks with websites and now we’re getting the added benefit of mobile apps where you’re getting many textbooks and multimedia all in one,” said Dr Nykvist.
Minister for School Education Peter Garrett declined to respond to news.com.au’s request for comment.
Apple isn’t the only tech giant developing educational aids for students. Australian tablet designer Evolve III built their Windows 7 “Maestro Black” tablet specifically for educational purposes and will be supplying the tablet directly to schools and educational institutions.
