Teachers in Utah will receive free training to help them deliver cloud-computing courses and more through Amazon Web Services' AWS Academy. The state hopes to provide the Amazon training to about 5,000 students by June 2022.

Two years ago, the American Dairy Association North East began offering virtual farm tours for schools whose students couldn't visit dairy farms. The program, hosted through the video conferencing platform Zoom, allows students to see how the farms work, and speak with farmers about day-to-day operations and how the modern dairy industry uses technology.

Nurses and nursing students at the Southern Illinois University School of Nursing are part of an outreach program aimed at bringing free COVID-19 testing to communities through the Madison County Mobile Testing program. Valerie Griffin, a doctor of nursing practice with SIU's School of Nursing, said the program is a "wonderful interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration" that gives students training in COVID-19 education and clinical experience in underserved and rural health areas.

Colleges' transfer processes need to be streamlined to ensure that more students from minority groups and low-income backgrounds finish their degrees, write William Crowe, Shanna Smith-Jaggars and Chris Soto, members of the national Tackling Transfers Advisory Board. Career counseling needs to be coordinated, financial aid needs to be transferrable and credit needs to be accepted universally for dual-credit courses, military service and workplace learning, they recommend.

In July, the unemployment rate dropped to 10.2% with 1.8 million jobs added, while the number of workers filing for unemployment benefits fell to the lowest level since March. But nearly a third of workers who were called back to work have been laid off again, according to a Cornell University survey, most often in states that saw a summer surge in COVID-19 cases.

Boyce Technologies, which manufacturers ventilators that are being used to treat coronavirus patients, has been hit with ransomware by the DoppelPaymer gang. The hackers are threatening to post data stolen from the company, which was manufacturing 300 ventilators a day before it was attacked.

Second-quarter approvals of construction permits in Los Angeles fell 45% from a year before while plan checks were down 31% and building inspections were off by 15%. The city's construction industry has lost an estimated 2,670 jobs since March 2020.

Fifty-one percent of school districts are preparing a hybrid model of instruction for the fall, blending online and in-person instruction, according to data from the Center on Reinventing Public Education. About one-third of districts have not yet announced their plans, according to the sample of 477 districts studied.

Join ACTE's newly combined Business & Marketing Education Division for a live webinar on Aug. 10 at 3:00 p.m. ET to discuss the free digital marketing skills resources on Facebook's Blueprint Educators Portal to support your remote learning efforts and how ACTE educators have leveraged this content with their learners. Register now.

The Horatio Alger Association is now accepting applications from students who have completed high school and will be enrolled in a CTE program at an accredited non-profit postsecondary institution in the fall. This year, the association will award 1,020 scholarships at up to $2,500 each. Applications are due Aug. 15. Encourage your students to apply.