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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.

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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.

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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.

FCC logo, E-rate tag icon, text says Deadline for Comments Feb. 13 Read Why Participation is Crucial

FCC E-rate Change Would Be Huge Boost to Districts' Cybersecurity Funding, Efforts

K–12 school systems are trying to fend off an increasing number of cyber threats with limited IT resources, and they need all the help they can get. Allowing schools to use federal E-rate funding for cybersecurity services such as next-generation firewalls, distributed denial of service protection, and intrusion detection and prevention would go a long way toward solving this challenge — and K–12 stakeholders should make their voices heard on this critical issue, immediately, says a Funds For Learning executive.

Get More Math logo and THE Journal logo with screenshot from Get More Math website on tips for spiral review and math retention

Rethinking How We Teach Math: Three Tips for Better Long-term Retention

Students need to learn not only math shortcuts, processes, and formulas — they also must learn the underlying concepts behind them. Students need a deeper conceptual understanding of math so they can transfer their knowledge to new contexts and are less prone to making mistakes. They also need more time for learning math in school and more focus on long-term retention.

Sample fraction math problem illustrating why math schema is more important than skills alone, and THEJournal.com logo

Schools Must Adopt the Science of Math

With so-called learning loss from the pandemic continuing to harm students, schools can't just return to normal methods of teaching math. Fortunately, researchers have a strong understanding of how people learn math, just as they did with the now widely accepted science of reading. However, that understanding is taking too long to filter into classroom instruction.

4 Considerations for Tutoring in the Wake of NAEP

How can district leaders best mobilize the tutoring infrastructure they’ve invested in over the last 18 months?