Expert Perspectives


How to Help Students Cope with Test Anxiety

Test anxiety is a real problem, affecting 25% to 40% of U.S. students. Anxiety, along with academic stress, can appear as physical symptoms (such as headaches, nausea and sleeplessness) and psycho-emotional symptoms (like difficulty concentrating or increased irritability).

4 Ways IT Teams Can Secure the Future of Esports in Education

Electronic sports, better known as esports, is a massive industry. As of 2022, 532 million people watched video gaming events worldwide.

How to Start Teaching Game Design to Get Students Excited About Computer Science

Christopher Kerr, president of the Connecticut Computer Science Teachers Association and a computer and information science teacher, shares his practical tips for engaging students with the exciting world of computer science and supporting them to realize their full potential.

Going Digital with Student Records

When it comes to records management, many K–12 school districts are still using microfiche, paper, and PDFs. For districts still managing and processing student records in a paper-based format, it might be time to look toward technology to help efficiently and securely manage student records. Check out how digital student records can make administrators' (and families') lives easier.

image shows a Pivot Interactives digital science experiment with a runner going uphill and measuring ruler overlaid

The Best Ed Tech Innovations Will Be Emergent – If We Do This Right

Without minimizing the need to honor students’ privacy rights, we as an ed tech community should also not miss the opportunity to search for the new emergent patterns that will no doubt appear when we look at how students, teachers, and their data all interact. It’s these new patterns, like ripples in the sand, that will likely offer insights into the heretofore most intractable questions in education.

image shows stacks of old laptops in various states of disrepair

Got Chromebooks? First Steps to Securely and Sustainably Reusing and Recycling School Devices

An expert offers tips for K-12 administrators and their IT teams on how to make the most out of their investment in Chromebooks with security and sustainability in mind, and recommends schools revise their IT equipment policies to address used and end-of-life devices, including Chromebooks.

illustrated drawing of a microbit plugged into a laptop

How We Launched a Districtwide Computer Science Program with Just 4 Teachers and No Formal CS Training

At this California school district, a new weekly prep period for all teachers opened the door for four Teachers on Special Assignment to travel to each campus and teach Computer Science to primary students once a week — here's how the TOSAs (with no formal training in computer science) dove into the new subject to add computer science instruction to every classroom grades K-6.

image shows a stack of file folders

Shifting from Paper to the Cloud: How K-12 Schools are Digitizing Operations

Digitization is the key to eliminating backlogs of paper processes made worse by staff shortages and other post-pandemic challenges. Schools can create modern and digitized systems that make documents searchable and accessible — eliminating the time required to file and search through boxes for old student transcripts, test scores, health records, and more.

image shows a man sitting at several computer screens that each say RANSOMWARE and the man holds his head in his hands looking overwhelmed. Text reads Post Cyber Attack Top Do

After a Cyber Attack: Three Do's and Don'ts for K-12 Leaders and IT Teams

Charlie Sander of cybersecurity firm Managed Methods shares some tips to avoid making a cyber incident on a K-12 school even more costly, for district leaders, risk management planners, and IT practitioners: What to expect and some do’s and don’ts to move forward while minimizing an cyber attack's negative impacts and costly disruptions.

Paint a Picture Through Coding

The top 20 most in-demand skills required by U.S. organizations are all computer-science based. Industries globally continue to voice their concern over the lack of tech skills among high school and college graduates. The skills gap is so large that with the right skills, students can almost walk out of school and into a highly lucrative career.