Not Into Video Games? Here's How to Let Students Lead on Teaching with Minecraft: Education Edition

The Minecraft Student Ambassador Sponsor Program helps educators create a Minecraft Student Ambassador Program at their school or district, and helps prepare those young Minecraft experts to coach and assist students and teachers who are new to the game, so more classrooms can benefit from the game’s 700-plus “worlds” or lesson-based games.

How To Start Using Google Add-Ons: Step By Step

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.

An Administrator's Guide to Optimizing School Business Processes Using the Cloud

An expert viewpoint piece lays out the benefits of using the cloud to manage school processes and office business, and a roadmap to optimizing school business processes for K–12 school administrators.

Four Simple Steps to Adding SEL to Any Classroom

A social-emotional learning specialist explains how any educator can begin teaching social-emotional learning in their classroom in four simple steps: planning to pause, practicing, tracking it, and finally, by talking about it.

IT Survey Shows Managing Third-Party Risks Remains a Growing and Unmet Challenge

A recent survey of IT professionals by critical access management provider SecureLink found that managing and monitoring third-party vendors with access to public schools’ networks and data remains a top challenge for education IT practitioners.

Google Classroom Add-Ons Officially Launches, Enabling Integrations with 18 Ed Tech Tools

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.

How to Reframe MTSS to Help Close the Education Achievement Gap

An educator and researcher explains how a simple shift in how educators understand and implement the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) pyramid can help close the achievement gap in K-12 classrooms, schools, and districts.

List of All K-12 Schools Known to be Impacted by Illuminate Breach of Student Data

An updated list of all K–12 schools in the U.S. known to have been impacted by the breach of student data resulting from a cyberattack on Illuminate Education's systems in January 2022.

Over 70% of Schools Say Pandemic Effect on Student Behavior, Socio-Emotional Development, Staffing Grew Worse in 2021–22

The National Center for Education Statistics’ May 2022 School Pulse Panel survey of U.S. public K–12 schools shows that the COVID-19 pandemic continued to significantly impair student socio-emotional development and behavioral development during the most recent school year, and over half reported that chronic absenteeism was worse than the year before, according to the results released this week.

Why Student Data Breaches Are Dangerous & How They May Alter the Ed Tech Marketplace

What do the expanding impact of recent ed tech data breaches — and what the growing dangers of student data breaches — mean for policymakers, parents, IT professionals, and school districts? THE Journal Insider podcast discusses student data privacy, policy, and ed tech procurement with Doug Levin, national director of K12 Security Information Exchange, and Dr. Tim Clark, Vice President of K12 Programs at 1EdTech.

How an Educator’s Persistence Led to a Student Leadership Initiative & the Most Popular Minecraft Edu Game of All Time

When Felisa Ford and her instructional tech colleagues in Atlanta had trouble getting the district's teachers on board with using Minecraft: Education Edition, she created a student ambassador program to empower young Minecraft experts to coach other students and teachers, and it was so successful that Microsoft started a learning path for educators to sponsor their own local student ambassador programs. Then came Good Trouble.

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