kids Archives

App of the Week: Program a robot buddy

Ed. note: App of the Week picks are now being curated by the editors of Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. Click here to read the full app review.

What’s It Like?

SPRK Lightning Lab is an app that lets kids program their Sphero robots from a tablet or phone. Beginning coders use block-based programming to direct and control their robot. A text-based code viewer is also available so kids can see how their block code translates into actual code. This gives experienced programmers more flexibility and is a scaffold to help students scale up their coding skills.…Read More

How our elementary school got a tech makeover

Kids gravitate to technology in the classroom, so it makes sense for teachers to utilize digital projectors—that is, unless no one can see the lessons they display.

This was our situation a couple of years ago at Northwest Elementary School in Chatsworth, Ga., in the summer of 2014. We were having challenges with the technology in our learning environments: Our digital projectors were eight years old, so the projections weren’t very bright anymore, and it was difficult for our students to see the images on the screen. Worse still, sometimes the projectors wouldn’t boot up at all, or conked out midway through a class, which frustrated teachers who needed them for the day’s lesson.

We wanted to include funding for these upgrades in the budget, but after planning for essentials, there just wasn’t much money left over. We looked at replacing a few digital projectors at a time, but we have 29 classrooms–how would we prioritize which classrooms would get the new projectors first? What do you eliminate from the budget so the kids can have another computer? It was frustrating. We thought there was no way we were going to be able to get everything we needed.…Read More

Principals: The lessons we learned in 2016

[Editor’s note: This story is Part 2 of our 3-part series on Lessons Learned in 2016. Check back tomorrow for Lessons Learned by Educators. Click here for yesterday’s article from Superintendents.]

The best educational leaders are lifelong learners. They are constantly expanding their knowledge, refining their skills, and looking for creative ways to help kids learn. As these four principals look back at 2016, they recall the most important ed tech lesson they learned this year—and look forward to inspiring their staff and students anew in 2017.

World’s largest K-12 reading survey identifies trends, highlights best practices

Tapping into data collected from nearly 10 million K-12 students who read 346 million books and nonfiction articles last school year, Renaissance® releases its ninth annual What Kids Are Reading report. Researchers at the K-12 learning analytics company produce the report, which provides the comprehensive review of students’ reading habits and achievement. What Kids Are Reading: And How They Grow, 2017 includes most read fiction and nonfiction books by grade level, nonfiction selections by gender, and a sampling of popular reading across the curriculum. The report is an important annual reflection on reading trends in U.S. schools.

By analyzing the data and reading habits from Renaissance’s Accelerated Reader 360® platform, researchers compiled national and state reading trends, reading habits by age and gender, and best practices for student growth.

“What Kids Are Reading offers important and unique insight into K-12 reading as we continuously seek to better understand how students read and grow as learners,” said Eric Stickney, director of educational research at Renaissance. “Each year, we discover key insights about our student readers, such as the difference dedicated reading practice can mean to a student previously thought to be constrained by the label of ‘struggling reader’.”…Read More

App of the Week: drag-and-drop virtual bulletin boards

What’s It Like?

Padlet is a website and app that allows kids to collect information from the internet and pin it onto virtual bulletin boards using a simple drag-and-drop system. Videos, text, links, images — basically anything — can be added to a board and organized there, like a page full of Post-it notes. There’s also the option to include rich text (Padlet provides a simple HTML guide in their Help sidebar). You can add as many notes to a wall as you like; it scrolls in all directions.…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

10 back-to-school tech trends straight from parents

As schools around the country begin a new school year, back-to-school shopping is in full swing. And as more classrooms incorporate technology, back-to-school shopping includes smartphones and laptops along with hand sanitizer and notebooks.

In a recent FatWallet.com survey, 42 percent of parents said they plan to spend more on this year’s school supplies than they spent last year.

1. 28 percent of participating parents said they plan to purchase student laptops and/or smartphones.…Read More

CodeCombat adds game, web development to coding platform

CodeCombat, which offers an engaging platform for helping kids learn computer science (CS), has significantly enhanced its platform in time for back to school.

CodeCombat has added major new capabilities including Game Development and Web Development, and quadrupled the number of levels available to users of its original Learn to Code module, giving students plenty of runway to keep enhancing their coding skills.

CodeCombat’s classroom product, which launched just four months ago, is now in use by 45,000 students in grades 4-12 across 1,600 schools in all 50 states – making it one of the fastest-growing companies in the ed tech space.…Read More

These 7 keys are helping one district better prepare its students

In any given third-grade classroom, you can find a student who is reading at a level far beyond their age, and another who is still working on letter recognition. How does a traditional classroom teacher with 25-30 kids manage such a wide range of students? As a district leader, how do I support our teachers and ensure that they are challenging students who are at a higher level while providing struggling students with proper support?

These are the tough questions I asked myself when taking over as superintendent of Maury County Schools in Tennessee in August 2015. Within the first few months, we ditched the old literacy model to adopt a project-based focus; deployed instructional coaches (without hiring anyone); and launched a top-down, district-level approach that quickly gained bottom-up buy-in through school and community support. We also implemented a differentiated literacy program and digital library that measures reading with reading—not quiz scores and points.

Creating the Keys to Success

In my first days as superintendent, I did what I called a “22in22 Tour” where I traveled to all 22 schools in my district in 22 days. I know from experience that the best leaders are the best listeners, so I made sure to take the time to hear what school leaders and classroom teachers had to say about Maury’s administrative approach. I heard loud and clear that there were issues of trust, lack of resources, switching initiatives on a dime, and a need for truly aligned and supportive professional development. That’s when I knew I had to eliminate the top-down approach that the district had taken in the past (and many districts employ) and go through a process to determine our Keys to Success.…Read More

Marketplace trend update: 5 ed-tech developments

Remaining a tech-savvy educator means keeping on top of the myriad changes and trends in education, how technology can support those trends, and how teaching and learning can best benefit from near-constant change.

Below, we’ve gathered some of the latest and most relevant marketplace news to keep you up-to-date on product developments, teaching and learning initiatives, and new trends in education.
Kids Discover‘s interactive digital library, Kids Discover Online, now includes custom assessment capabilities. Kids Discover Online enables educators to mix and match material from science and social studies to facilitate students’ exploration of big ideas through cross-curricular learning. The newly added Assessments tool gives educators full control to create, distribute, and assess custom quizzes, tests, and homework assignments directly within the platform. Read more.

Education network Edmodo‘s latest professional development program for teachers, Edmodo Envoys, is designed to help teachers find and network with one another at the local level and support each others’ professional development efforts. Edmodo Envoys host a TeachUp in their local area and can meet and exchange ideas with educators in their communities whom they might not otherwise have met. Read more.…Read More