A district administrator explains how their new school-home communications platform gives them not just two-way communications with families, but also the ability to meet parents where they are — and how implementing the platform has solved numerous challenges for the district staff and teachers, for parents, and for students.
- By Christine Jordan
- 08/04/22
In an open letter this week to U.S. Department of Education Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon, 15 education, technology, and civil rights nonprofits called for the department to put schools and online activity monitoring providers on notice that such monitoring must not result in discrimination or violation of students’ civil rights and liberties.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 08/03/22
School cybersecurity nonprofit K12 Security Information Exchange is holding a free professional development webinar, “The Long Tail of K–12 Cyber Incident Response and Recovery,” for education sector IT practitioners on Aug. 16, featuring an extended case study of Northshore School District’s response and recovery work following a crippling ransomware attack targeting the Washington district in 2019.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 08/03/22
To start using Google add-ons, district admins will need to set up add-ons and can then enable access for educators; admins need to have the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade assigned to each educator that they want to have access to add-ons, Google wrote on its blog announcing the launch. Here are step-by-step instructions for getting started with Google add-ons.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 08/01/22
Google today announced that the Classroom Add-Ons feature, in beta since last summer, is rolling out to all Teaching & Learning subscribers and Education Plus subscribers in time for fall semester, enabling access to 18 popular ed tech tools from within Classroom.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 08/01/22
K–12 cloud-based software provider PowerSchool today launched a new Data-as-a-Service platform called Connected Intelligence that aims to unify, integrate, protect, and analyze school districts’ data from all sources as well as external data that impacts educators' decision-making such as labor market information, according to a news release.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 08/01/22
K–12 learning platform Discovery Education this week unveiled a new layout and look for both teachers and students, doubled the size of its ready-to-use quiz library, improved search filters, added an Explore page with personalized content recommendations, and launched new professional microlearning focused on competency-based education with content partner Marzano Academies.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 07/29/22
A security technology executive offers insights for K-12 leaders considering security technology solutions and says schools must make such decisions the way they would with any other business function — that is, they should factor in people, process, and technology or PPT, and must first understand the specific problem that they are trying to address.
U.S. students’ aptitudes far outweigh their interest in career clusters where significant job growth is forecast, revealing an exposure gap that will continue impacting the workforce as a skills gap unless schools can better help students find their “why” and then draw connections to related career options, according to a new study from student aptitude and career guidance platform YouScience.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 07/27/22
Digital achievements-and-rewards system RedCritter has launched a new platform called CritterCoin where schools can build their own free system to implement Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports with points, rewards in the form of digital coins and non-fungible tokens, and a school-specific rewards store.
- By Kristal Kuykendall
- 07/25/22