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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.

Pikmykid Achieves Success With Positive Reviews and Excellent Ranking

TAMPA, Fla., Apr. 29, 2022 – Pikmykid, the leading provider of school safety and dismissal solutions, today shares its success among schools nationwide, including its impressive Net Promoter Score (NPS), measuring customer experience and predicting business growth.

The Pikmykid platform has achieved an NPS score of 60, putting the platform in the same category of customer experience management as major brands including Starbucks, Netflix and Amazon, as well as Samsung, Intel and John Deere. Additionally, Pikmykid’s NPS score remains higher than mega-companies, such as Apple and Google.

The intent of NPS is to measure the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used as a proxy for gauging the customer’s overall satisfaction with a company’s product or service and the customer’s loyalty to the brand.…Read More

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

4 ways to improve your district’s data privacy

With K-12 school districts using cloud collaboration platforms more than ever before, the approach to data privacy in schools is looking a lot different than what administrators are used to.

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are keeping students and staff connected. These apps have forever impacted the way education is delivered in school.

School districts suffer from data leaks—when a student or staff member shares data outside of the school district’s domain. At the same time, school districts have become one of the most targeted organizations for cyberattacks. Regardless of whether these incidents are malicious or inadvertent, they should not be happening in the first place.…Read More

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5 strategies to build better information literacy in students

We live in the age of information. Thanks to the internet, we now have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Just think about it: Cooking, philosophy, engineering, literature–anything you could possibly imagine can likely be found using a simple Google search.

It’s pretty astounding when you take the time to consider it. Of course, many of us have learned the hard way that not everything you find online is reliable or true.

This presents educators with a difficult problem. The internet is an inescapable part of our students’ lives. As they grow, students will turn to online resources to help them navigate their education and build upon what they’ve learned. Yet, at the same time, it’s human nature to focus on information that reinforces our preexisting worldview, and many of us passively ingest all kinds of media while browsing social apps.…Read More

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GoGuardian Appoints Former Google Executive Jenny Zhao as Chief Technology Officer

LOS ANGELES–( BUSINESS WIRE)–GoGuardian, the leading education technology company helping K-12 schools maximize the learning potential of every student, today announced the appointment of former Google executive Jenny Zhao as GoGuardian’s Chief Technology Officer. At GoGuardian, Zhao will lead the teams responsible for building digital learning solutions to help educators create engaging and safe learning environments.

Zhao recently served as Senior Director of Engineering at Google. Her multi-decade rise through globally dominant tech companies started at computer graphics innovator Silicon Graphics, where she led advanced simulation middleware solutions for clients including the U.S. Air Force and Disneyland. At Google, Zhao excelled as an engineering director, managing global teams across cultures and geographies, building innovative solutions in Google Pay, Search, and Maps.

“Jenny believes deeply in the mission of GoGuardian and shares our passion for building effective learning solutions that advance educational outcomes,” said Advait Shinde, co-founder and CEO of GoGuardian. “Jenny’s incredible track record of leading people-centered, high-performing engineering teams and driving change at the world’s most successful companies is a perfect fit for GoGuardian at a transformative time for our company.”…Read More

New ManagedMethods Report Reveals 30% of K-12 School Districts Lack Cloud Application Security

BOULDER, Colo.—November 16, 2021— ManagedMethods, the leading Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 cybersecurity, student safety, and compliance platform for education, today announced new research that found gaps in the cybersecurity strategies of district administrators when protecting their cloud collaboration and storage applications. The research findings were released in a special report,  What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You: New Survey Identifies Gaps in K-12 Cloud Security, commissioned by ManagedMethods and administered by the  EdWeek Research Center.

The report reveals 30% of district administrators with at least a medium level of influence on technology decisions do not have a security platform to protect cloud applications. In total, half of respondents either did not have a platform in place or did not know if a platform had been implemented in their district.

“School districts have long led the charge into cloud technology by embracing Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 cloud applications. This new research tells us that some district administrators are unaware of the cybersecurity, safety, and privacy risks that come with using them,” said Charlie Sander, Chief Executive Officer at ManagedMethods. “Technology leaders need to know their cloud environments may be vulnerable, and that it’s their responsibility to secure them.”…Read More

Using digital comments to enhance feedback on student work

As students return to their classrooms for in person learning this fall, many teachers have been reflecting on what elements of remote learning were effective and worth maintaining in a more traditional classroom setting.

In an in-person classroom setting, it is often obvious when a student seeks help from the teacher, and it becomes obvious which students are getting the most consistent support. Some students may feel embarrassed or shy, and thus miss out on receiving support that is crucial to their learning.

Throughout the pandemic, students were completing their work on various online platforms, such as Google Slides and Google Docs. As students worked, teachers had the ability to view their work live and leave feedback in real time using the comment feature available with Google applications (click here for more information about the comment feature on Google products). …Read More

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Learn how this IT team increased teacher support and Google visibility

The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, and that means educators across the globe are still finding inventive and innovative ways to support and teach students in classrooms, during hybrid instruction, and in virtual settings.

The eSchool Media K-12 Hero Awards program, sponsored by Trox, recognizes the determined and dedicated efforts of educators throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Never before have educators been challenged and tested as they were, beginning in March 2020 and up until today, and never before has their resilience been more apparent. Administrators, technology leaders, classroom teachers, and educators in all roles have persevered as they taught each and every one of their students during a global pandemic.…Read More

Experience the Power of a Spoken Word Poetry

Good Deed Entertainment announced today that their spoken word, Rotten Tomato certified-fresh hit film SUMMERTIME, directed by Carlos López Estrada (Raya And The Last Dragon (2021), Blindspotting (2018) and Marvel’s Legion (2017)), and executive produced by Kelly Marie Tran, will be available for fans to own beginning on August 27, 2021 and can be purchased through all major retailers including, iTunes/AppleTV, Amazon, Vudu and Google Play. The film can currently be preordered at iTunes and a full list of where to purchase the film can be found at the SUMMERTIME website.

The film SUMMERTIME takes place over the course of a hot summer day in Los Angeles, following the lives of 27 young adults as they intersect. A skating guitarist, a tagger, two wannabe rappers, an exasperated fast-food worker, a limo driver—they all weave in and out of each other’s stories. Through poetry they express life, love, heartache, family, home, and fear. One of them just wants to find someplace that still serves good cheeseburgers.

The film was developed over a summer workshop with the young poets, who were all part of Get Lit – Words Ignite, an LA based nonprofit that fuses classic and original spoken word poetry to increase teen literacy on the page and in visual media. All 27 poets served as co-writers and stars in the film.…Read More

Enabling the next generation of citizen data scientists

Google has ruined research.

Okay… I’m being hyperbolic. Google hasn’t ruined research. But as a senior data scientist, I do worry that search in the age of Google has outstripped our ability to gather, analyze and truly interpret data.

Thanks to algorithms, predictive text, billions and trillions of bytes of data, cookies, and the like, we’re used to searching for a needle in a haystack and Google returning the exact needle we’re looking for. We’ve been tricked by the fallacy that our answer will be in the top 10 results.…Read More

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