core Archives

These schools are leveraging E-Rate for a complete digital transformation

Textbooks and blackboards have become a thing of the past in K-12 schools as educators collaborate with IT teams to shape a full digital core curriculum as part of their educational strategy for 2017 and beyond. In a 2016 survey conducted by the Consortium for School Networking (COSN), 90 percent of IT administrators at K-12 schools expect that curricula will be at least 50 percent digital over the next three years.

As the world undergoes a digital transformation—with connectivity and access to computers and mobile devices playing an increasingly prominent role in everyone’s lives—elementary schools know they need to incorporate technology in the educational process to prepare their students for future success. To support these initiatives, the Federal Communications Commission’s E-rate program has recently been expanded to provide schools nationwide with subsidies for high-speed broadband and gigabit wireless networks.

According to the “2016 Digital Curriculum Strategy Survey Report” sponsored by Ruckus Wireless, hardware and network spend is estimated at $16.2 billion in 2017. Whereas currently 78 percent of students have device and network access for almost a full day, the expectation for this year is that schools will have close to one-to-one access, or one device per student.…Read More

What is Obama’s K-12 education legacy?

Common Core, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—just a few top-down, often-controversial, metrics-heavy K-12 reform initiatives favored by the Obama Administration that seemed to have a lot more traction during the President’s first-term with Education Secretary Arne Duncan at the helm than during the second term.

“President Barack Obama will perhaps be best remembered for what many considered a top-down approach to education reform, and Arne Duncan was the architect of that strategy,” writes Tara Garcia Mathewson for EducationDIVE. From a strong support of Common Core to even the ESSA, “a strict emphasis on standards is one of the biggest marks of the administration.”

[For the higher education version of this story, click here.]…Read More

Education.com unveils guided curriculum for math, reading

Education.com, an online education destination for teachers, parents, and homeschoolers looking to help their kids succeed in school, announced a new guided curriculum that changes the way they help their preschool and elementary children develop essential skills.

The new skills-focused curriculum combines 30,000 expert-created resources from the industry’s most comprehensive learning library with step-by-step guided lessons mapped to specific skills, to more easily and effectively strengthen the math, reading, and writing skills that are essential for school success.

At the heart of education, children need to develop foundational math and reading skills to succeed in school. All kids struggle with these core skills at some level, and their parents and teachers equally face fundamental challenges in trying to help them: identifying the most essential math and reading skills, finding various ways to keep a child engaged in learning, and finding an educational solution that connects foundational skills to the learning needs of the individual child. Education.com’s new math and reading platform uniquely helps parents and teachers address these challenges by combining easy to follow step-by-step lessons with a variety of learning formats for a multi-sensory approach aligned to the essential skills kids need to learn.…Read More

Free learning platform targets improved media literacy

KQED Teach, which launched on July 11, provides a series of free, self-paced courses to help K-12 educators develop the media skills necessary to bring media production and communication to their learning environments.

These courses will take place in an online platform developed by KQED Education that tracks user progress and encourages sharing and feedback through an integrated social community.

KQED Teach participants will have access to a wide range of social media and digital media tools allowing them to construct and remix media in multiple formats and across a variety of platforms while addressing many writing, reading, speaking and listening skills required by both the Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards.…Read More

Casio intros new lampfree projectors that save energy

Lamp-free/laser projectors feature 20k hour operating life

Casio America is spotlighting its full lineup of LampFree projectors at InfoComm 2016, the pro-AV industry’s largest event. Seven of the company’s newest models, including three from the Core Series and four from the Advanced Series – including the new XJ-F210WN were on display at the recent InfoComm 2016 conference.

“It’s always exciting to showcase our products for the industry and we are looking forward to exhibiting at InfoComm 2016 to further demonstrate our commitment to AV professionals,” said Joe Gillio, Senior Director Strategic Planning and Marketing, of Casio’s Business Projector Division. “We consistently strive to develop products that benefit a range of industries, including business, education, and hospitality, by providing the latest features as well as a lower total cost of ownership.”

All LampFree projectors, including the four new WXGA and the three new XGA models, that will be on display, are designed and manufactured in Japan by Casio in the company’s premium Yamagata factory. Casio’s Advanced LampFree projectors have all of the features and performance that Casio’s customers have come to rely on, in a compact design at a more affordable price point.…Read More

These 9 apps help every student hit Common Core Standards

Scaffold Common Core standards for students with these educator-picked apps

As schools everywhere shift to the Common Core, teachers are now realizing that they must now be able to determine the both the factors within a given text where students will need scaffolding as well as the type of scaffolding appropriate for the activity. Fortunately, there are a number of free apps that can help.

The Common Core app organizes the Common Core standards by subject area (math traditional, math integrated, language arts, history/Social Studies, and science and technology) and grade level. This app also includes the Common Core appendices from the Common Core website. The organization within the app places the information in one single location for ease of use.

Apps for Common Core provides the common core standards and shares apps by grade level and standard. This particular app seems to include more resources for the primary grades and contains more extensive mathematics than English Language Arts resources.…Read More

Common Core is changing how schools teach ELA and math

New report finds Common Core is affecting reading and math — but not test scores

States considered strong adopters of Common Core are more likely to see a de-emphasis of fiction and a decline in advanced math enrollment among middle school students, according to a new report that also found a trivial difference in test scores between states that have and have not adopted the standards.

The report, from the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, pulls data from surveys conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to see how far Common Core recommendations have seeped into states’ instruction, comparing data from 2011 to 2015. The question of whether students should focus on analyzing fiction, which has been traditionally favored by schools, or nonfiction, which is favored by the CCSS, was considered a major implementation hurdle just a few years ago.

On that point, it appears Common Core’s suggestions are winning out over entrenched practice. In 2011, according to the data, 63 percent of students had teachers who said they emphasized fiction, compared with 38 percent of students with teachers who said they were emphasizing nonfiction — a 25 percent gap. By 2015, however, that gap had shrunk to just eight percent, with 45 percent of students who have teachers emphasizing nonfiction. The gap shrunk for eighth grade students from 34 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2015.…Read More

South Carolina adopts science video service

Supplementary STEM videos serve to engage students in science learning

Students in South Carolina will soon have access to short Twig Science and Tigtag Science videos through a new statewide partnership.

The South Carolina State Board of Education approved the adoption with Carolina Biological. These supplemental STEM resources can enhance science curriculum connecting science teaching and learning to career and college readiness.

South Carolina schools and Districts can now use State Board of Education approved instructional materials funding to purchase and implement Tigtag (K-5) and Twig (level 6 and above) online learning tools to supplement core curriculum programs (such as the Smithsonian’s K-8 STC Program™ – also adopted by the state) or other textbook or inquiry programs used in South Carolina schools.…Read More

New Va. high school to focus big on coding

Students will enter an innovative program that teaches core graduation skills alongside industry internships and computer science

High school isn’t what it used to be.

That’s the consensus of a growing number of educators who say how and what students are taught must change in order to better prepare them for a rapidly changing workforce that demands new skills.

With that goal in mind, a group of 13 Richmond-area school systems have banded together to start a new regional high school that will allow students to meet their core requirements while getting an education focused on computer science.…Read More