Curriculum | Feature

A CoSN Conference Rewind

I attended the Consortium on School Networking's annual conference last week in Washington, DC. The most important reason for a magazine editor to attend something like this, of course, is to get new ideas, learn what people are talking about, and identify potential sources for future stories. However, I have to confess, one of the nicest things about attending an important conference is to realize everybody's talking about some particularly hot topic--and you've already published a story about it!

• By Michael Hart
• 03/09/12

I attended the Consortium on School Networking's annual conference last week in Washington, DC. The most important reason for a magazine editor to attend something like this, of course, is to get new ideas, learn what people are talking about, and identify potential sources for future stories. However, I have to confess, one of the nicest things about attending an important conference is to realize everybody's talking about some particularly hot topic--and you've already published a story about it!

That's the case with at least two important features in the February/March issue of T.H.E. Journal, both of which you can link to from this issue of T.H.E. Insider. The first has to be technology-supported writing initiatives that cross curriculum lines. By way of initiatives already underway in a number of school districts--including those in Littleton, CO, and Saugus, CA, which contributing writer Jennifer Demski writes about this month--writing skills are no longer the province merely of English language teachers. With technology now available, it's possible for students to hone their important writing skills in almost every class they take.

The second has to do with the continually unfolding saga of Big Data. In the most recent issue of T.H.E. Journal, three researchers from Edvance Research--Kathleen A. Barfield, Jenifer Hartman, and Dixie Knight--give school administrators some ideas about how they can use the massive amount of data often available to them now as "early warning systems" to identify students that may be at risk of dropping out years before they actually reach that point.