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.

Vivi and Headspace Partner to Bring Mindfulness to K-12 Classrooms

MELBOURNE – Vivi, the leading classroom communication and collaboration platform built exclusively for education, today announced an exciting new and unique partnership with Headspace, a global leader in mindfulness and meditation, with a goal of improving social-emotional health for all students. The partnership will give all Vivi users access to easy and effective mindfulness and meditation practices created by Headspace, designed for use in K-12 classrooms.

“We are excited to give teachers and students easy access to resources needed to build mindfulness skills, to help them focus, recharge, and get the most out of every lesson,” says Simon Holland, co-founder of Vivi.io and a key driver of the partnership. “By delivering access to mindfulness and meditation practices designed specifically for K-12, we hope we can play a role in reducing stress and anxiety in the classroom and further improving emotional health and wellness for all students and teachers.”

A study has shown 30 days of Headspace resulted in 32% decrease in stress, eight weeks of Headspace resulted in a 19% decrease in anxiety symptoms and Headspace has improved focus by 14%. Until now, it has been challenging for teachers to gather insights on students’ social and emotional needs and support them in the moment. By pairing Vivi’s emoji-based polling ability with Headspace’s mindfulness practices, teachers can administer a quick, confidential, whole-class check-in to get a temperature read on how students are feeling about the day or lesson, and then offer targeted support to those students in need.…Read More

NetSupport further enhances classroom.cloud’s online safety provision by including integration with Microsoft Teams

NetSupport today announced that its newest solution for classroom management and online safety, classroom.cloud, will now further enhance students’ online safety at all times – and, critically, in any location – by including integration with the widely-used communication and collaboration solution, Microsoft Teams.

With many students equipped with their own school learning devices to enable blended and individual learning to occur both inside and outside of school hours via platforms such as Teams, online safety no longer stops at the end of the school day or applies to only certain applications.

Schools can now widen their safeguarding provision by connecting their Microsoft 365 tenancy to classroom.cloud to allow keyword and phrase monitoring of  Teams channels and chats. Powered by more than 14,000 phrases across multiple languages, classroom.cloud’s keyword and phrase monitoring tool enables schools to monitor what topics their students are typing or searching for across diverse applications and learning environments – helping to identify, support and protect students engaged in any concerning activity. It also allows schools to share and exchange local terms with other schools and add any new ones to their database to further broaden their eSafety net.…Read More

Rave Mobile Safety Launches Rave Collaborate for Tactical Incident Collaboration

Rave Mobile Safety (Rave), the critical communication and collaboration platform customers count on when it matters most, announced the launch of Rave Collaborate™, a new solution for Tactical Incident Collaboration. Rave Collaborate addresses needs unmet by traditional incident management solutions with an intuitive tool to coordinate preparedness and response for both planned activities and unplanned emergencies. In addition to task management, reminders and activity tracking, Rave Collaborate is integrated into Rave Alert™, a proven, industry-leading mass notification system, as well as other communication and IoT technologies, to provide a central platform to manage your organization’s preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation needs.

Developed with extensive customer input, Rave Collaborate is designed to bring order and clarity to chaos and confusion in the critical early minutes and hours of an event. Rave’s solution supports the full spectrum of compliance, business continuity, health, safety and security scenarios. From regulatory compliance and daily COVID-19 protocols to severe weather or server outages, the ability to immediately notify stakeholders, establish clear responsibilities and provide direction for tactical decisions is key to providing and restoring a safe and secure environment.

“Safety is a collaborative exercise, and responding to any situation requires immediate notification, decisive action and coordinated response,” said Todd Piett, CEO, Rave Mobile Safety. “With Rave Collaborate, responders and incident managers have a central command system integrated with critical communication technology to increase situational awareness and monitor the response timeline. Our goal is to enable response teams to do all they can to keep employees, students and communities safe.”…Read More

New Mexico Adopts Rave Panic Button to Improve School Safety

Rave Mobile Safety (Rave), the critical communication and collaboration platform customers count on when it matters most, announced New Mexico as the latest state to deploy its Rave Panic Button in all K-12 schools across the state, joining Oklahoma, Delaware and Louisiana in statewide deployments. The growth in Rave Panic Button deployments comes as new features are added to the platform to further enhance the tool’s ability to get help where it’s needed most during an emergency, as well as strengthen internal critical communications.

As schools navigate safety threats both old and new, they need fast, smart, reliable technology that can create a direct connection with 9-1-1, first responders and on-site personnel to activate an immediate response to any type of emergency—from day-to-day medical incidents to crisis situations. Rave Panic Button will now fill that need in New Mexico, covering nearly 350,000 students across all K-12 public schools, creating a fully interoperable school safety platform statewide.

The app has already been implemented in nearly 50 states and is used in over 10,000 schools across the U.S., including those in Washington, D.C., and Florida, where 25% of the student population statewide is protected by Rave Panic Button.…Read More

New Data from Rave Mobile Safety Shows Schools’ Top Safety Concerns About Returning to the Classroom

Rave Mobile Safety (Rave), the critical communication and collaboration platform customers count on when it matters most, today announced a new survey report that reveals the top safety concerns that school administrators, teachers and staff have about returning to the classroom, as well as the steps they are taking to create a safe environment. Chief among those concerns are the mental and physical health of both teachers and students and enforcing social distancing practices. The report also addresses what learning will look like once everyone does return to classrooms and managing a hybrid learning environment.

Key findings of the report include:

  • Social distancing and mental/physical health of school staff are the top health and safety concerns for the new year as the coronavirus evolves. Social distancing is a top concern for those returning to school (77%), followed closely by teacher/staff physical health (70%) and mental health (69%), as well as student mental health (69%) and physical health (67%). To address these concerns, schools will be putting up signage promoting social distancing (74%) and issuing daily temperature checks (69%) and wellness checks (57%).
  • State and local governments will be the major influencers about when schools reopen and teachers and students return to the classroom — and many are starting early. While parent preference (43%) and a belief in the importance of in-person learning (50%) are factors in the decision whether to return to the classroom or not, most school leaders report that state (81%) and local (57%) governments are major influencers in that decision. Additionally, 44% report that their school districts are going back before September, compared to 6% considering a December or later return to in-person learning.
  • Hybrid learning is the most likely class model for students and teachers this year, meaning that schools also need to overcome distance learning challenges.As circumstances force schools to consider alternate learning models, a hybrid approach of in-person and remote learning is the most popular solution (75%). For that model to be successful, schools need to consider the challenges that emerged from classes held remotely this spring, chief among them being students lacking internet access and low student and parent engagement.

“This year, ‘school safety’ has taken on an entirely new level of meaning, from meeting CDC standards to caring for the mental health of those in the building,” said Todd Miller, Chief Operating Officer, Rave Mobile Safety. “Clear communication about safety standards and compliance with everyone involved in that effort, from teachers and administrators to parents and students, has never been more critical. We are proud to support schools in these efforts through tools that enable daily wellness checks and frequent communication with all stakeholders, which help promote health and safety and create a sense of consistency during a disruptive, stressful time.”…Read More

Public and Private Organizations Nationwide Choose Rave’s Coronavirus Recovery Solution to Safely Reopen and Keep Communities Informed

Corporations, educational institutions and government agencies across the United States are relying on Rave’s Coronavirus Recovery Solution to equip them with the recovery tools they need to design and deploy a successful and safe reopening strategy during the pandemic, including streamlined communication workflows, automated daily health checks, support for individual wellness and engagement with key constituents.

Rave Mobile Safety (Rave), the critical communication and collaboration platform customers count on when it matters most, announced that new corporations, educational institutions and government agencies across the United States are relying on Rave’s Coronavirus Recovery Solution to equip them with the recovery tools they need to design and deploy a successful and safe reopening strategy during the pandemic, including streamlined communication workflows, automated daily health checks, support for individual wellness and engagement with key constituents.

As the response to and recovery from COVID-19 evolves, organizations across the country must plan for how they will adhere to national and local guidelines while creating a safe environment for their staff and community. Key to achieving that is a scalable, flexible and reliable communications and technology strategy that ensures everyone has the latest accurate information to make informed health and safety decisions as different guidance and policies are recommended. Rave’s solutions are flexible, allowing organizational leaders to choose the functionality that works best for their population—from protecting at-risk individuals through real-time monitoring; timely, targeted and personal notifications; and coordinated responses across 9-1-1, first responders and emergency management to workforce health monitoring, self-reporting and health check channels.…Read More

Getting the most from collaboration tools

Communication and collaboration are not the same thing. There are many tools that allow educators and administrators to talk to each other, but to take advantage of edtech’s promise, they should also be able to use collaboration tools to work together on the same projects.

In her presentation, “Collaboration Near and Far in Digital Professional Learning Communities,” Geri Gillespy, administrator of digital integration at West Ada School District in ID, talked about how to get the most out of online collaboration tools.

Related content: 7 collaboration tools for the modern classroom…Read More

3 often overlooked, but completely logical, ways to effectively engage parents

Research clearly shows that students perform better academically when schools build positive relationships with their families. That’s why parent engagement is a key part of our strategic plan in Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools. Although building a strong connection with a group that isn’t present in school every day can be a challenge, there are strategies to make it easier for both teachers and parents.

A large part of strengthening parent engagement is meeting families where they are, which is increasingly online. Students, and their parents, spend a great deal of time on social media websites checking for updates and sharing information, and we wanted to create the same type of highly engaged online community for our schools—like a Facebook for academics.

When our team went through the process of identifying an online parent engagement platform in 2013, we had unique needs to meet the demands of a 215,000-student district. For us, the Edsby learning management system (LMS) was a strong fit to meet privacy and equity concerns, while supporting a wide range of functionalities.…Read More

Why keeping parents and kids connected in the early years is critical

In more than 60 percent of all two-parent households, both parents work, and in nearly all of these households, at least one parent is employed. This means that the vast majority of parents in our country experience regular and prolonged periods of time away from their children. Since parental involvement is one of the most influential factors in students’ academic success, the question then becomes how to help working parents stay abreast of what their child does when they are apart.

As a lead teacher at a YMCA Early Childhood Center, I believe children of all ages benefit from having their parents and teachers on the same page with their growth, health, and education on a regular basis. We offer care for more than 3,500 children (from infants through preschoolers) every year.

Being a YMCA facility, we teach kids to make healthy choices, as well as teaching them the ABCs, and other important life skills, like good sportsmanship and how to be themselves. We know that the values and skills children learn early on become the building blocks for their future lives.…Read More