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.

The 10 most popular learning channels for kids

Even before COVID-19 forced the closure of schools around the world, the internet had become a virtual classroom with a growing number of engaging learning channels for students.

More than a year into the pandemic, parents are still turning to online resources to find activities for their children–but social media can be a challenging place when it comes to choosing content.

A new resource from Connections Academy features some of the most popular learning channels online, analyzing the number of subscribers they have and how many people have watched their videos to reveal the top 40 best educational influencers parents can trust. …Read More

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Viewpoint: A rational approach to student-teacher ratios

The "Overall Level of Effort" approach might provide a model for traditional schools to follow—and it suggests that one size need not fit all when it comes to student-teacher ratios.

What number of students should each teacher teach? How many is “too many”?

As a lifelong passionate fan of the teaching profession, I used to believe these questions had a pretty simple answer: The fewer the better. Throughout the class-size debates of the past 15 years, which have led to limits in the range of 20 students per teacher in California, Florida, and elsewhere, I was firmly in the “small is beautiful” camp. And while I still believe in the power of personalized instruction at the hands of a teacher with the time to focus on one student at a time, I have come to regard arbitrary student-teacher ratios as a holdover from the Industrial Age of education. Here in the Information Age, we have more precise instruments at our disposal. It turns out that the right answer is: It depends.…Read More

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Speech therapy moves online

Online speech therapy gives some schools a much-needed solution.

Offering speech therapy to students can be a challenge for school districts: Speech therapists are in short supply; it can be expensive to hire a speech therapist, particularly if a district uses a contractor who must drive from school to school and charges for driving time; and rural schools might have a hard time finding a speech therapist in their area, while urban schools might struggle with retaining speech therapists.

Connections Academy, a provider of nationally certified K-12 online curriculum, is addressing these problems by offering an online speech therapy option for school districts. The program, beginning in the 2011-12 school year, will let students—equipped with a computer with high-speed internet access, along with a webcam and headset—interact online with state and nationally certified speech therapists via web conferencing software.…Read More

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