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Love Direct Instruction? Want to live in Australia? Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA) is seeking a Director of Instruction. The Academy, which has operated three schools in the far north of Australia since 2010, plans to expand into other sites in Queensland and across Australia.

The Director of Instruction is charged with leading the reform efforts for underperforming schools to bring student performance up to meet national standards and to develop schools that will serve as strong models for improving the education of children in Australia. Potential applicants must have at least five years experience teaching and supervising the implementation of DI programs and exhibit strong supervisory and management skills. Additional qualification requirements and application information is available in the job posting, available here: http://ow.ly/vA3q9. 

Applications are due by April 28, 2014. For questions, email Lisa Heubusch at lheubusch@cyaaa.com.au.

The phonemic awareness concept has had a significant influence on understanding reading and its acquisition. Students with it tend to become better readers than those without it. This feature has led to interest in teaching it prior to reading instruction. However, this focus raises several issues about phonemic awareness that are as yet not fully resolved. Is phonemic awareness causal to reading acquisition? Consequential? Or is there a mediating variable between it and reading? Is the confusion due to differences in the chosen assessment methods? Can and should it be taught independent of graphemes? If it is to be taught, which activities are important? Rhyming and alliteration? Onsets and rimes? Elision? Blending and segmenting? All of the above?

Click here to read on and find out!

If you're a user of Essentials for Algebra (EFA), you may have encountered trouble with your display CD that accompanies the program. The National Institute for Direct Instruction learned recently that the EFA display CD does not work with Macs, although it should still work with PCs. If you put the EFA display disc into a Mac, you will likely get an error message indicating "Power PC applications are no longer supported". This problem is related to how newer Mac operating systems are configured.

McGraw-Hill Education has addressed this problem by making the displays available through their online system, ConnectED. Users with a ConnectEd account should be able to access the displays through this system. If you do not see EFA as a program in your ConnectED account, you will need to contact your McGraw-Hill representative for a redemption code. Only McGraw-Hill can issue these codes.