Happy New (School) Year, Everyone!

We’re kicking off the academic year by honoring an innovative district and rolling out our redesigned website.

Christopher PiehlerWhen I was in school, August was the saddest month. It was officially part of summer, but you could feel the chill of fall in the air — and you could see it in stores, where shelves that had once overflowed with squirt guns and boogie boards now held row after row of notebooks and pencils. As the editor of an ed tech magazine, though, August is not at all sad. It is instead a month of renewal, when educators and industry colleagues are back from well-earned vacations and getting ready for the upcoming school year, perhaps armed with new gadgets, but definitely full of new ideas about how to teach with technology.

To kick off the 2014-2015 academic year in style, THE Journal is featuring a profile of Richland School District Two (SC), the winner of this year’s Sylvia Charp Award for District Innovation in Technology. Click here to read all about how their thoughtful planning created a learning environment where 1-to-1 and BYOD are the norm, where teachers get plenty of personalized PD, and where an innovation incubator gives grants to educators who come up with ideas to solve the problems that the district is facing. I dare you not to be inspired by their story.

As part of our preparation for the new school year, we have done some renovation around here. As you can see on the homepage, we have refreshed our logo. We have, in fact, redesigned our entire website, adding responsive design so that the site will automatically optimize itself to whatever device you view it on. We also simplified and reorganized the layout to make it easier for you to find the features, news and reviews that will help ease your transition from summer into the new academic year. 

I think our designers deserve an A. If you have a second in between planning meetings and orientations, please do drop me a note and tell me what you think.

You can see more great feature articles in the latest issue of our monthly digital edition.

About the Author

Christopher Piehler is the former editor-in-chief of THE Journal.

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