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Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Clever Releases Latest Identity Management Tool, Adding Microsoft Active Directory Support to Google Workspace

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 14, 2022 – Clever, the most widely used and trusted digital learning platform in U.S. K-12 schools, today announced an expanded identity management offering with new support for Active Directory, used by thousands of districts to manage users’ access to software applications and devices. Clever IDM helps school districts automate provisioning and management of their Active Directory and Google Workspace user accounts, saving districts time while helping to improve account security.

Clever Identity Management (IDM) was built to address growing school district concerns about cybersecurity threats in K-12 education that have accompanied rising edtech use. The last few years have increasingly shown school districts to be a target for cybercriminals posing a distinct challenge for overtaxed IT teams.

With Clever IDM, student, teacher, and staff accounts are automatically created once they’re added to the district student information system, meaning every user has access to learning resources from their first day of school. As users join, leave, and move around within a district, Clever IDM keeps their accounts current – ensuring everyone has the right access at the right time. The new solution saves district administrators hours of work a week, with the same level of reliability and trust that more than 65% of U.S. K-12 schools have come to expect from Clever – and at a significantly lower cost than alternatives on the market today.…Read More

How we created a computer science curriculum in 5 steps

Even with a strict budget, limited teacher expertise in computer science, and the chaos of a pandemic, the Metropolitan School District of Pike Township (MSDPT) launched a comprehensive and engaging K-5 computer science curriculum for every student.

As an instructional specialist at MSDPT during the launch, I now understand how much collaboration, clever resource management, and hard work are required to run a successful K-5 computer science program. 

As computer science has been launched into the national spotlight, schools across the country are finding ways to integrate STEM themes into early education. Although we faced challenges at MSDPT, we were able to find solutions that fit our budget and empowered our existing faculty to teach this specialized subject with confidence.…Read More

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Codecademy Expands Online Coding Education

Codecademy, the online education platform empowering millions of people to learn code, announced two new initiatives for students and teachers, including its first-ever student membership and a new partnership with Clever, the most widely used single sign-on (SSO) portal in K-12 schools nationwide

With many schools going fully or partially remote this fall, Codecademy is making its learning platform more accessible for students and teachers. For college students, Codecademy is launching a new Pro Student membership, which includes complete access to Codecademy’s catalog for a more affordable price.

Codecademy is also providing free access to its online coding courses for high school teachers and their classes via a new partnership with Clever. Codecademy Pro courses will be available in Clever Library, a catalog of high-quality digital resources that teachers can deploy to their classroom within seconds. High school teachers can access Codecademy’s interactive curriculums for free, empowering their students to learn how to code in a fun and engaging way online.…Read More

Free Family Engagement Tool For Impacted Schools and Districts

PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit,  is committed to helping school and district leaders who are mobilizing to implement remote learning plans in response to COVID-19. We know how critical it is for you to support students’ learning while also keeping families connected. PowerMyLearning Family Playlists® can help make that transition smoother.

  • Unlike other online initiatives, Family Playlists use families’ phones, so families can fully participate without having a laptop or computer at home.
  • Family Playlists can be delivered in over 100 languages, ensuring seamless two-way communication between families and teachers.
  • Family Playlists are easy to integrate with Google Classroom and Clever.

 

PowerMyLearning is offering our Family Playlists program completely free of charge to all schools and districts impacted by COVID-19 from now through the end of the school year.…Read More

How to get students interested in STEM

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) are not just important topics for school children—they are essential to our culture. These fields help the environment, revolutionize healthcare, innovate our country’s security, and ensure our global economic competitiveness.

According to the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the U.S. is not producing enough STEM undergraduate degrees to match the forecasted demand, creating a national workforce crisis. Fewer people pursuing STEM degrees means fewer scientists finding clever solutions to antibiotics resistance, fewer technophiles turning data into targeted healthcare, fewer engineers designing homes and buildings to withstand rising seas and powerful storms.

We must empower future generations with the tools and knowledge they will need to solve the global problems they will inherit, and that empowerment starts with education.…Read More

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New book illustrates the 5 most important leadership skills

Leaders aren’t just principals, CEOs, and presidents, a new book asserts, but rather people from all walks of life benefit from leadership skills and training. That’s especially true in education where everyone from parents to teachers to students are often called upon to serve in leadership roles. But what does that entail?

The book, Life Lessons in Leadership: The Way of the Wallaby, uses a literary style similar to Spenser Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? to illustrate real-world lessons through the stories of engaging fictional characters. Co-authored by ed-tech pro Ann McMullan — formerly the executive director for educational technology at Klein ISD in Texas — and journalist Michael Barrett, the educational and entertaining self-help book teaches essential personal leadership skills through a clever combination of literary text targeted to adult leaders, combined with captivating, childlike stories.

Each of the book’s five short chapters focuses on an essential leadership skill and begins with McMullan’s lessons, written in prose, describing the importance of that skill. As the book flows from one chapter to another, McMullan demonstrates how each leadership skill builds on the others and how all are critical to the success of any leader.…Read More

Clever gets $10 million from sequoia to provide a standardized API for school data

Clever launched about a year and a half ago to provide a standardized API for K-12 schools that allows them to unlock and share data with outside developers, TechCrunch reports. It’s managed to get 10,000 schools signed up to use its tools since then. Now, according to our sources, the company has raised $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital. The funding comes as Clever is finding ways to make schools more connected and accessible for developers. Most schools today use a variety of legacy Student Information Systems (SIS) as a way to store student data. But many of those systems tend to be outdated or custom-built, meaning that the information held within — which includes class lists, attendance, and grades — can’t be shared or accessed by outside developers…

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