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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.
07/20/2022
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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.
07/20/2022
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Discovery Education recently unveiled a new Minecraft: Education Edition channel within its learning platform, which means that the wildly popular educational game is now supported within DE’s platform with instructional resources for using M:EE in the classroom, the companies said.
07/20/2022
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An expert in school safety solutions explains that K-12 administrators must communicate openly and often with students, staff, and families as they prepare a thorough crisis-response plan — and better communication will enable schools to effectively execute preparation, response, and recovery — before, during and after an emergency.
07/19/2022
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K–12 online tutoring platform FEV Tutor has been acquired by San Francisco-based private equity firm Alpine Investors, providing the resources for FEV Tutor to continue growing its product and its reach, according to a news release. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
07/19/2022
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As K–12 educators and school leaders prepare for the start of the 2022–23 school year, unified communications provider ParentSquare has released a Back-to-School Checklist for Successful School-Home Communications, a free guide to help administrators and district communication leaders to revisit and improve their parent-home communications, according to a news release.
07/18/2022
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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.
07/18/2022
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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.
07/18/2022
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People on the Move ed tech newsmakers include Gus Schmedlen at Texthelp; Jennifer Mullin at DreamBox Learning; Donna Blackman at Stride; Cheretta Clerkley at ISTE; Shiren Vijiasingam at Instructure; Shannon Terry and Kate Crawford at Safari Montage; and William Hansen at Building Hope.
07/18/2022
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Schools are far too bogged down in slow, inefficient processes for collecting payments from families for a multitude of student activities and needs, and these processes are ripe for true digitization — an expert in e-commerce payments explains four main benefits for schools of a payments revamp through digitization.
07/14/2022
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A recent survey of teachers by Kahoot reveals that educators see playful learning and student choice in learning methods as vital to helping boost student engagement and outcomes, according to a new report from the ed tech company.
07/14/2022
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Ed tech provider Turnitin has launched a new mobile app for its Gradescope assignment and grading platform that enables students to submit their assignments through any connected smartphone, the company announced this week, following a limited-access pilot in April.
07/14/2022
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K12 Security Information Exchange today released a free Cyber Incident Response Runbook for U.S. public schools, a fill-in-the-blank style guide created specifically to help K–12 school leaders build an effective, comprehensive response plan for any type of cyber incident.
07/13/2022
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Ed tech provider Promethean will host its annual Camp Promethean virtual professional learning event on Thursday, July 14 from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. EDT, and participation is free for educators, the company said in a news release.
07/13/2022
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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.
07/12/2022
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Verizon Innovative Learning has expanded its free project-based summer program, a series of three-week, on-site camps called STEM Achievers, to include middle-school students in more under-resourced communities, a Verizon spokesperson said.
07/12/2022
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The deadline for the $10,000 ClassTag Community Engagement Grant is just nine days away. The program will recognize one school district for a "creative or successful new community engagement initiative" that took place in the 2021–2022 school year.
07/11/2022
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Oct. 1, 2022, is the deadline to apply for the National Society of High School Scholars’ Educator of the Year Awards, with grant funds of $5,000 for the top award and nine finalist awards of $1,000 apiece.
07/11/2022