Rosetta Stone Announces Winners of the Emergent Bilingual Educators of the Year Award Program

Rosetta Stone Inc. announced the 10 winners in its first Emergent Bilingual Educators of the Year award program. A total of $20,000 in grant donations and $75,000 in subscriptions to the Rosetta Stone® English for Education language learning program were awarded to teachers of English learners (EL).

Victor Machado, an ESL teacher at East Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, won the $10,000 grand prize, along with a schoolwide semester’s subscription to Rosetta Stone English. The two runners-up are Timothy McGrath and Virginia Valdez. McGrath is a K-5 ELL teacher at West View Elementary School, a small inner-city school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Valdez is a kindergarten teacher at Minnie Mars Jamieson Elementary at Chicago Public Schools. Each won $5,000 grants as well as the schoolwide semester’s subscription to Rosetta Stone English.

Machado was nominated by the Bilingual Department Chairperson Brian Donovan who submitted an essay describing how Machado helps his students. Donovan wrote of Machado: “He is able to synthesize all the tools required to educate a student and turn his class into a fun engaging ESL lab, where technology is used to leverage student achievement and where students take ownership of their education.”…Read More

BetterLesson and Adobe release 300+ strategies for creativity, student engagement

As educators across the country work tirelessly to provide engaging lessons in new and ever-changing environments, there are still understandable concerns about low student engagement, low teacher morale, and a lack of professional development to meet teacher and students’ needs.

To support educators with student-centered learning, BetterLesson and Adobe have teamed up to create 325 free instructional strategies that build creativity, collaboration, and communication skills using products in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. The strategies span middle school to higher education contexts, across a variety of subjects including math, science, social studies, and literacy.

Each strategy was created by an experienced educator, selected and supported by BetterLesson through their “Master Teacher Project” model. Thirty-three educators from across the United States (and two from abroad) met in Professional Learning Communities and received targeted feedback on their strategies from veteran instructional coaches.…Read More

Renaissance Launches Major Updates to Star Spanish Assessments

Renaissance, the global leader in pre-K–12 education technology, has enhanced Star Spanish, its assessment platform for students who speak, or are learning to speak, Spanish, with new reports and the first authentic K–12 learning progression for Spanish available in the country.

Star Assessments are available in both English and Spanish in order to give educators insight into the abilities, skills, and progress of emergent bilinguals, dual-language learners, and immersion students.

“We’re so excited to be able to offer educators the tools they need to uncover student understanding and track learning progress for students who speak Spanish,” said Doris Chávez-Linville, Director of English Learner Innovations at Renaissance. “Educators are experts at removing barriers, and we’re thrilled to help them take an asset-based approach to bilingualism, where the focus is on what students know and can do, and how educators can build on this.”…Read More

School innovation in a challenging year

Across the country, redefining the status quo has become the status quo for K–12 schools. Wide-scale remote and hybrid learning, mask-wearing culture, and “pods” all fall outside the bounds of what most of us imagined as mainstream schooling before this year.

But despite how schools all face a similar set of challenges, innovation towards new solutions—especially student-centered ones—can be a surprisingly lonely endeavor. Many of the leaders and educators responsible for designing and implementing new approaches are left asking: hasn’t anyone done this before? And how do I find out?

Related content: 9 innovation tips for pioneering schools…Read More

Schell Games’ Virtual Reality Educational Tool HistoryMaker VR Now Available For Free

With a majority of schools participating in distance learning this year, Schell Games announced its virtual reality education tool HistoryMaker VR is now available for free on Steam for all to use.

HistoryMaker VR is an immersive content creation tool that helps students learn history in an entertaining and engaging way. This innovative application allows learners to display their knowledge of history, civics, and social studies, while offering educators and parents a new way to improve student engagement, increase lesson retention, and introduce an exciting alternative to textbooks and Zoom lectures. HistoryMaker VR seamlessly integrates into curriculums and includes classroom guides and recommended activities for teachers and parents to use.

Using an Oculus Rift/Rift S headset and a PC, learners and/or educators can upload a script, prep the stage with a variety of props and set pieces, and record themselves giving a speech as one of eight diverse characters in U.S. history, including Benjamin Franklin, Harriet Tubman, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and more. At the end of the recording, speeches can be exported as a video and shared with others, without the need for a VR headset. The videos can even be edited with any video editing tool, giving learners another opportunity to demonstrate their creativity and skill.…Read More

CVS Health and Discovery Education Team Up for Substance Misuse Prevention Day of Learning

CVS Health and Discovery Education are coming together to present a Day of Learning on October 27, 2020. This event occurs during Red Ribbon Week, the largest drug-use prevention campaign in the nation, and will debut to communities across the United States the newly announced Dose of Knowledge digital education resources.

Dose of Knowledge, part of CVS Health’s Pharmacists Teach program focused on substance misuse education, offers a suite of no-cost digital resources focusing on the facts about prescription and illicit drug misuse. Designed for students in grades 6-12, Dose of Knowledge empowers pharmacists and educators to discuss the importance of healthy lifestyle choices with students.

Intended to spark critical discussions about prescription medication misuse awareness, the Day of Learning will showcase these new resources for educators, students, and families. The Day of Learning will empower youth and adults alike to more deeply engage in the topic of prescription safety and discover the tools needed to face substance misuse head on. Join in on Facebook and Twitter with #DoseofKnowlege.…Read More

Digital signage offers teachers the tools they need to succeed

Many of us can recall scratchy, static-muddled murmurs of elementary and high school administrators making announcements over the public address system, accepting such antiquated technologies as the norm.

Fortunately, a better way has emerged. Today, educators can install screens in classrooms that easily and effectively serve many purposes over the breadth of a typical school day, including pushing out important messages and reminders.

A public address system gives a school principal or someone else in the building one shot each morning to reach yawning youngsters with key information. A screen in each classroom changes the dynamic from easily tuned-out audio to hard-to-miss visual messaging that can run for as long as necessary. That messaging can also be scheduled and targeted by location and serve many needs, limited only by imagination.…Read More

Using data to strengthen writing instruction

Writing is often difficult for educators to teach, challenging for students to do, and hard for administrators to monitor and evaluate. Yet writing well—and the high-quality writing instruction behind it–has become an increasingly important 21st century skill due to online college and job applications, as well as the reliance on email and collaborative documents in many 21st century careers.

Ways to compile and use data to guide writing instruction were explained during an edWebinar sponsored by Texthelp, which featured Joni Degner and Mark Schwartz, a Director and a Product Evangelist for Texthelp. The software automates and accelerates many aspects of the writing-evaluation process, though each teacher’s grading and feedback also remain crucial parts of the process.

Related content: 10 writing lessons for distance learning…Read More

Trox Launches New SHIELD Protection Program for Chromebooks and Other Mobile Devices

Trox, a leading North American provider of education technology and collaboration solutions, today announced the launch of its new proprietary Trox SHIELDSM Protection Program for Chromebooks and other mobile devices.

Trox SHIELD helps educators protect their technology investment by ensuring that mobile devices and remain in circulation. Offering a zero cost of ownership guarantee for devices, Trox SHIELD extends the original manufacturer’s warranty and covers accidental damage. Trox certified technicians repair damaged devices, which allows IT teams to focus on supporting students and teachers.

“Demand for Chromebooks and laptops is at an all-time high for schools. Devices that are damaged in transit puts significant strain on limited budgets and IT resources,” said Sarah Kydd, Chief Operating Officer, Trox. “With many schools offering remote or blended learning, ensuring that students have working devices is more important than ever. That’s why we added Trox SHIELD to our robust lifecycle management services.”…Read More

2020 Green-Garner Award Recognizing Outstanding Leadership

As part of its support of urban education, Curriculum Associates has partnered with the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) as a sponsor of the 31st annual Green-Garner Award. This year’s award recipient, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa of Dallas Independent School District in Dallas, Texas, was selected for this esteemed honor for his strong dedication to the needs of students, profound commitment to improvement, and significant community involvement and leadership.

“We are proud to partner with the CGCS as they recognize exemplary leadership in urban education through this coveted and long-standing award,” said Woody Paik, executive vice president of Curriculum Associates. “Superintendent Hinojosa is an exceptional district leader who is so well-deserving of this recognition. His ongoing work, as well as his commitment to urban education as a whole, has positively impacted students and educators across the district.”

The Green-Garner Award, which is presented each year at the CGCS’s Fall Conference, recognizes a board member or superintendent for their outstanding contributions in urban education. As the nation’s highest urban-education honor, the award is named in memory of urban school leaders Richard R. Green, the first African-American chancellor of the New York City school system, and Edward Garner, a businessman and former school board president of the Denver Public Schools. Superintendent Hinojosa was chosen for this recognition among 20 superintendent nominees from districts across the nation.…Read More

5 simple ways to integrate STEAM education into elementary classrooms

As educators, our goal is to shape our students’ lives by teaching them in ways that produce well rounded individuals. Whether STEAM education is new to you or you’re already familiar with it, it’s a great way to excite students about learning.

Some people like to debate STEM vs. STEAM. In case you’re unfamiliar with these terms I’ll tell you what they mean. STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math. STEAM is all of those, plus the A for Arts. I once had an actual rocket scientist (he’s a genius & a truly brilliant man) debate STEM vs. STEAM with me. He said there is no place for art in STEM education. Well, I disagree!

When you look at a beautiful building or a breathtaking bridge, do you not see the artistic value? When engineers design something, I have to think that they take the aesthetics of their design into account to produce something unique and beautiful!…Read More

New Gaggle White Paper Helps Districts Understand and Support Students Struggling With Mental Health

According to the NEA, at least 10 million students ages 13–18 were suffering from depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or bipolar disorder before the crisis of the pandemic. Now, with the social isolation and increased stress caused by the novel coronavirus, schools and districts are facing even more extensive student mental health needs. To help educators understand and respond to this deepening crisis, Gaggle has published a new white paper titled “Addressing the Crisis in Student Mental Health: How Districts Can Identify and Support Struggling Students.”

The white paper reveals some of the research citing the rise of anxiety and depression among teens as well as causes of the “mental health tsunami” among teens and young adults. “There is real urgency for early treatment of mental health disorders,” said Gaggle CEO and founder, Jeff Patterson. “Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among 10- to 19-year-olds in the United States. The Center for Suicide Prevention and Research reports that one in six teens has seriously considered suicide in the past year.”

To help teachers and administrators develop more comprehensive services to support students’ physical and mental health, the white paper shares solutions such as additional student services, more professional help, schoolwide interventions, social and emotional learning, and community-wide conversations. Additionally, the paper discusses how districts use Gaggle’s safety management solution as part of their physical and emotional safety initiatives. It shares four case studies highlighting different ways of accomplishing this goal. The white paper also mentions the new Gaggle Therapy service, which matches students who need mental health support with counselors licensed in their state for weekly teletherapy sessions.…Read More