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.

Funding an assistive listening system in your school

Untreated hearing loss can have lasting effects on students’ academic achievement, social relationships, and self-esteem. The Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) reports that even mild hearing loss can cause a child to miss as much as 50 percent of classroom discussion. Without appropriate management and support, children with mild to moderate hearing loss achieve one to four grade levels lower, on average, than students with typical hearing, according to American Speech Language Hearing Association.

The CDC reports that nearly 15 percent of children ages 6 to 19 have low- or high-frequency hearing loss of at least 16-decibel hearing level in one or both ears. Noise-induced hearing loss also is on the rise among young people. This is largely attributed to listening to music through earbuds at high volume. And hearing loss isn’t just affecting students. Nearly 48 million American adults have hearing loss. Assistive listening technology can help everyone in school environments, with and without hearing loss, hear more clearly.

An assistive listening system (ALS) is a wireless system with a transmitter and one or more receivers that send audio – from a teacher’s microphone, TV, or other sound sources – directly to headphones, hearing aids, or cochlear implants without amplifying ambient noise. Assistive listening systems provide a vastly improved experience for those with hearing loss.…Read More

How K-12 IT leaders can protect schools from ransomware

Cyberattacks on public schools are becoming more common and more severe every year. Between 2020 and 2021, more than 56 percent of K-12 education organizations suffered ransomware attacks with an average cost of $268,000.

Most recently, an attack on the LA Unified School District in September 2022 conducted by the Russian hacking group Vice Society shut down access to emails, computer systems, and applications for more than half a million users. Before that, a ransomware attack on the school system in Buffalo, NY cost the state more than $10 million in damages.

How can these K-12 school districts defend themselves from these ransomware attacks? And why are they being targeted so frequently?…Read More

KinderLab Robotics Donates Robot Kits to Connect Schools in Pennsylvania and Guatemala

Waltham, MA — KinderLab Robotics today announced that it has donated four KIBO robot kits to La Puerta Abierta, a school in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. Part of a partnership with Sewickley Academy, near Pittsburgh, PA, this donation will foster cross-cultural collaboration between the schools. Sewickley’s 5th-graders, who have experience teaching younger students about robotics through the school’s Big Buddies program, will offer guidance to La Puerta Abierta’s 1st-graders as they work on fun, hands-on programming challenges.

La Puerta Abierta, which relies heavily on volunteers and donations, was co-founded by Amanda Flayer, who was a Peace Corps volunteer with Michelle Bonham, a Lower School Spanish teacher at Sewickley Academy. The two schools have previously collaborated by having their 5th-graders create a bilingual book together. When La Puerta Abierta secured mathematics professor and data analyst Gaspar Yataz Pop as a volunteer to teach robotics using KIBO, the idea for the STEAM-powered collaboration between the schools’ students was born.

“We look forward to giving our elementary school students the opportunity to engage with another culture,” said Beau Blaser, director of technology at Sewickley Academy. “Through coding and collaboration, they’ll be learning to connect ideas and concepts together from a great distance. That can lead to an appreciation of the different cultures, but also a realization that there’s a lot of commonality across the human experience. What better way to do that than with some of our youngest learners? They’ll see that anybody can become an engineer or express their artistic ability—you can be anything you want to be in this world, whether you’re from Guatemala or Sewickley, Pennsylvania.”…Read More

Promethean Announces the All-New ActivPanel with ActivSync, Delivering a Transformational and Intuitive User Experience

SEATTLE, WA and NEW ORLEANS, LA–June 27, 2022– Promethean, a leading global education technology company, has announced the all-new ActivPanel with ActivSync that delivers the most robust, seamless, and secure user experience yet. With the new interactive panel, Promethean meets the needs of teachers and IT administrators with intuitive, cutting-edge technology that enables a seamless classroom experience. With its easy, secure sign-in options, streamlined connection to content, flexible lesson delivery software, and personalized user experience, ActivPanel 9 offers the tools needed to transform how teachers use technology.

After listening to more than 1,300 customers across the globe, Promethean designed the interactive panel to facilitate navigating a changing environment. The only interactive panel with ActivSync, Promethean’s patented technology, eliminates digital barriers between devices and enables increased connectivity, customizable settings, and enhanced mobility so that teachers can move around the classroom freely. Furthermore, Promethean redesigned the user experience, providing a solution for instructional models, such as hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous learning that integrate hardware and software in all scenarios.  

“With our commitment to providing educators the ability to transform learning and collaboration, ActivPanel 9 is our most innovative release to date,” said Lance Solomon, chief product officer at Promethean. “We addressed the challenges teachers, IT administrators, and district officials face by creating an interactive panel that is more secure, easier to use, and works better with other technology in their classrooms.”…Read More

Why districts need to think creatively–inside the box

Scott Bailey, Superintendent for Desert Sands Unified School District (CA), didn’t let the pandemic get in the way of his team’s plans. Instead, he used the disruptions as an opportunity to accelerate.

In this episode of Getting There: Innovations in Education, Scott breaks down his work to innovate within the confines of a public institution. The district primarily serves five communities in the central Coachella Valley: Bermuda Dunes, Indian Wells, Indio, La Quinta, and Palm Desert. Students from other areas of the desert also take advantage of the quality education provided by our schools.

More than 27,000 students attend 34 schools in the district including traditional high schools, alternative high schools, middle schools, elementary schools, and 16 preschools, including a federally funded Head Start program. Two elementary schools currently offer full dual immersion in English/Spanish to kindergarteners and first graders.…Read More

PenChecks Trust and EduNetwork Partners Team Up to Launch the Second Annual Financial Future Challenge

Teaching Money Management Skills to Young Students

La Mesa, CA. April 20, 2021 – PenChecks Trust and EduNetwork Partners have teamed up for a second year of the Financial Future Challenge, a national program challenging students ages 7-14 to learn good money management skills at a young age and create entries into the challenge to teach their peers what they have learned.

The program includes a website with a curriculum introducing concepts in savings, spending, investing, and giving with hands-on group and individual activities. This year we have added an online savings tracker for students to set goals and track their progress along the way.  The program sets students up with lifetime skills to help them achieve future financial success.…Read More

These 8 schools have A+ mobile device programs—here’s why

Technology continues to raise the bar of what is possible in education. As more schools discover the power and benefits of education technology, mobile devices such as Chromebooks, Macs and iPads in the classroom are becoming commonplace.

Here are eight innovative, real-world examples of schools that are using mobile devices along with a mobile device management (MDM) solution to unlock what’s possible in the classroom:

1. School District of La Crosse: Providing Student Equity for All & Managing a Massive Student iPad Handout…Read More

The app that lets you create Khan Academy-style videos in 60 seconds

How flipped educators can create video tutorials a la Khan in no time flat

P West Screen snip 2Blended learning and flipped learning just got a whole lot easier.

Anyone can now create learning resources for students in little more time that is required for a normal explanation of a topic.

  • Recording solutions to math problems — almost as quick as solving the problem on paper.
  • Highlighting important text, and explaining concepts along the way — a breeze.
  • Sketching, labelling and explaining diagrams with audio annotation — child’s play.
  • Providing personal feedback on a student’s work — super simple.
  • Taking a photograph of anything – an art work, an experiment, a building – and then drawing on it while explaining concepts — quick and easy.

The recordings can then be played on virtually any device, and are easily placed in a LMS or OLE (Online Learning Environment).…Read More

The inside story on LA schools’ iPad rollout: “a colossal disaster”

Scarcely a month ago, on August 27, the Los Angeles County Unified School District placed the first iPads in students’ hands at the outset of a $1 billion plan to give one to every single student in the nation’s second largest public school district ($500 million for devices, plus an additional $500 million for internet infrastructure upgrades, raised through construction bonds), according to The Hechinger Report. The project is now being resoundingly panned, as reports surfaced quickly of high school students going around the security software on the iPads to surf for non-approved content. The district has called a halt to students bringing iPads home amid disputes over who will be held responsible for loss or damage–parents or taxpayers…

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