Why Should You Be Tobacco Free?

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By VA Center for Health Promotion & Disease Prevention

 

Quitting smoking is the single most important thing you can do to improve your health and protect the health of your family members. Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body. Using tobacco causes many diseases and affects your overall health. Quitting smoking or other forms of tobacco has benefits in the short- and long-term for you and your loved ones.

All forms of tobacco are harmful.  This includes cigars, pipes, snuff, snus, chewing tobacco and electronic or smokeless cigarettes.

Tobacco use and exposure to secondhand smoke kill approximately 443,000 people in the United States each year. It is the largest cause of preventable illness and death in the United States.

Tobacco use has been shown to be the cause of:

  • Cancers
  • Heart disease
  • Stroke
  • Complications of pregnancy
  • Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

Secondhand smoke is associated with:

  • Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)
  • Acute lung infections, ear problems
  • More frequent and severe asthma attacks in children

Even when people aren’t smokers, exposure to secondhand smoke can cause them to develop heart disease and lung cancer.

Nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke at home or work are 20%—30% more likely to develop heart disease or lung cancer.

Breathing secondhand smoke has immediate harmful effects on your health and increases the risk of heart attack. People who already have heart disease are at especially high risk.

There is no level of secondhand smoke that is risk-free. Even brief exposure can be dangerous.

Talk to your VA health care provider about help with quitting smoking, including getting medication to improve your chances of quitting and a referral to a VA smoking cessation clinic.

Good things happen as soon as you quit. You will:

  • Have more energy and breathe easier.
  • Save money that you can spend on other things.
  • Find that your clothes, car, and home smell better.
  • Have fewer wrinkles, and no stains on your skin and nails.
  • Discover that food smells and tastes better.
  • Feel good about quitting.
  • Protect your family members and friends from secondhand smoke.

If you are pregnant and quit smoking, your baby will:

  • Be healthier.
  • Get more oxygen.
  • Be less likely to be born too soon.
  • Be more likely to come home from the hospital on the same day that you come home.
  • Have fewer colds and ear infections.
  • Cough and cry less.
  • Have fewer asthma and wheezing problems.

More information

 

Google and Microsoft[R] go to school: the computing giants compete to provide powerful online applications to school districts–for free.(TECHNOLOGY)

District Administration September 1, 2010 | Dessoff, Alan Nelson found what he was looking for with Google Apps Education Edition. “Other solutions were less secure, mature and reliable,” he explains. “Nothing compared with Google’s complete suite.” In April, Oregon became the first state to offer the Google Apps Education Edition to all its public schools when it signed an agreement with the company to make the tools available to any district in the state that requested a Google domain. Of the 221 Oregon districts, 68 signed up within the first two months. “We’ll continue to add more. It’s a combination of cost avoidance and increased functionality. We can’t build what Google can,” says Nelson.

Kentucky Chooses Microsoft Chuck Austin, who spearheaded the search for vendors in the department’s office of education technology, selected Microsoft’s Live@edu, and the state agency rolled it out over one May weekend. It was one of the largest and quickest deployments of the product, and the “largest and fastest cloud computing implementation of all time,” according to Microsoft. Its features were “far greater than anything we could have afforded to offer to every school in Kentucky,” says Terry Holliday, Kentucky’s state commissioner of education.

Free at Last But perhaps most appealing for both states, the powerful applications they chose to implement are free. Nelson estimates that using Google will save the Oregon DOE some $1.5 million in hardware and soft ware licensing and purchasing fees. Austin says Kentucky expects to save $6.3 million in operational costs over four years by using Live@edu. The cost savings are appealing to other states as well: in late June, Colorado and Iowa announced similar statewide agreements with Google to make the company’s applications available to the states’ combined 3,000 schools. here google apps for education

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Google Apps Education Edition is the same suite that Google offers universities and businesses and that the company uses internally, according to Jaime Casap, Google Apps education manager. The applications in the suite include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites, as well as administrative tools, customer support and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.

The Education Edition is free in districts, he says, because Google cares about education, but also because the company wants to create future customers. “Google has always had an education look and feel to it,” he says, citing the company’s start as a research project by two Ph.D. students at Stanford University. “Our core values are around making sure we organize the world of information and make it accessible and useful, so it makes sense to make these tools free in education,” Casap declares. He is hopeful that K12 students who get used to Google Apps will continue to use it. “We are building users for life,” he explains.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Similarly, Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s vice president of worldwide education, cites the company’s “rich commitment to education” that starts with founder Bill Gates, who “had a dream when he started Microsoft to enable everyone to use technology,” Salcito says. The company’s core philosophy is to “help individuals reach their potential. That’s what classroom teachers do every day,” he adds. “Because we sell to industries and commercial entities, we’re able to offer Live@edu free for education.” Saving Money Matthew Constant, director of instructional technology in the Daviess County Public Schools, one of the Kentucky districts implementing Live@edu, says he cannot estimate how much his district will save, but he expects to reduce costs for paper, network storage and electricity to power servers the district no longer needs. Constant says Daviess County administrators and teachers are excited about the collaborative tools they are getting with Live@ edu that will facilitate students’ interactivity with their teachers and each other. All 3,100 high school students in the district have laptops, and Constant says, “We’ll be able to teach them how to collaborate in the online space,” he says. go to web site google apps for education

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Starting Gradually In the Clarkstown (N.Y.) Central School District, which previously used a patchwork of unrelated applications, both network and Internet-based, “the last year and a half with Google Apps has been transformational,” asserts John Krouskoff, director of instructional technology. Google’s suite “has become a cornerstone of practically everything we do because of the flexibility that is built into it,” adds John Calvert, the district’s technology learning facilitator.

Clarkstown’s objectives were to create a collaborative and accessible curriculum planning system, reduce its use of paper, and empower teachers and students with 21st-century resources. The district began by introducing teachers to the Google Calendar “because teachers understand calendars and could adapt it to their own uses very comfortably,” Calvert says. Then, using Google Sites, the district’s IT team built resource sites for every curriculum area within each grade level, organized by unit. Teachers started creating unit plans and other resources collaboratively in Google Docs and sharing them as Web pages with their colleagues. “For the first time in the history of the district, we built a platform for sharing work, ideas and professional development across the district.” All students in grades 6-12 in the Astoria (Ore.) School District are using Google Apps this year, including Google Sites for creating online portfolios that hold all of their schoolwork. Technology director Scott Holmstedt, who created a template for the portfolios, explains that each student’s personal site will grow so that, by their high school graduations, students will have a documented collection of their academic accomplishments, such as research papers, awards and records of their community involvement. The portfolios will be easily viewable online by parents, teachers and college admissions officers.

Training Teachers Statewide in Oregon and in districts elsewhere that adopt either Google Apps or Live@edu, professional development of faculty and staff is key to making the most of the programs. “It’s the teachers I’m most concerned about,” says Nelson, noting that state authorities in Oregon’s four educational service districts train teachers both personally in group sessions and remotely online.

Google also offers a Teacher Academy that gives 50 participants at a time hands-on experience with Google’s products and other technologies in an intensive, and free, one-day program. Upon completion, Academy participants become “Google Certified Teachers” who can share what they learn with their colleagues. Google is currently developing training materials for the Google Apps Education Edition that administrators will be able to use to train teachers in their districts.

Austin says the Kentucky Department of Education has a tech support agreement with Microsoft that allows the agency’s technology specialists to work directly with Microsoft engineers and product teams if it has problems. He cites the value of having “a single point of accountability” for support. “You never want to be in a situation where you have multiple moving pieces in a solution and different vendors have ownership, because when something goes wrong, they all point to each other and say, ‘It’s their problem.'” Whether they are using Google or Microsoft, administrators are confident that the benefits of each validate the decisions they have made. “Google Apps has changed our culture from the technology standpoint, and given the current economic times, it has been a lifesaver,” asserts Graden. “We’re really excited about the collaborative tools that are coming on board here with Live@edu,” declares Constant.

But, administrators acknowledge that it isn’t easy to choose between the technology titans when considering online applications to implement in a district. “It’s an awesome battle between them for the K12 market,” says Austin. Nelson agrees. “They are doing equally great things. The competition between them is extraordinary.” Alternatives to Google Apps and Microsoft Live@edu Cisco www.cisco.com eBOARDsolutions www.eboardsolutions.com eChalk www, echalk.com ePals www.epals.com Gaggle vvww.gaggle.net SchoolFusion www.schoolfusion.com SCHOOLinSITES www.schoolinsites.com SchoolTube www.schooltube.com Schoolwires www.schoolwires.com SchoolWorld www.schoolworld.com TeacherTube www.teachertube.com TH(i)NQ ED www.thinqed.com Alan Dessoff is a contributing writer for District Administration.

Dessoff, Alan

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