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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.

Powerful training LMS at no charge

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Edified is offering it’s powerful training LMS at no charge to any educational institution through the end of the school year. We have added training courses to help teachers record their lessons to be delivered remotely. These include Zoom, Google Hangouts, Snag-it, SMART and more. Simply follow this link to fill out a short form to get started!

If you are interested in gaining access to Edified you can request access here.

Tools For Learner Productivity
Relevant courses covering the educational hardware and software of leading manufacturers
On-demand training that’s available any time, from anywhere, and from any device…Read More

Full computer science curriculum and coding platform at no cost

During this time, Vidcode would like to support schools in any way they can. As such, they are offering their full coding platform and research-backed computer science curriculum for free to help schools and districts as they plan for potential school closures and student absences.

If your school or district is planning a closure for health-related reasons, you can apply to get access to Vidcode’s full computer science curriculum and coding platform at no cost.

Vidcode will provide you and your students with access to our courses, lesson plans, and virtual PD resources until May 2020 (Vidcode states they will happily extend this offer until your school reopens). Students will be able to access courses from home as a supplement to your other e-learning measures and teachers will have full access to our LMS to monitor student progress.…Read More

4 common barriers to accessible content for all students

This summer, many faculty will work on developing or revising curricular content for their courses. One of the keys in developing new digital materials is verifying that those materials offer accessible content for all students.

Today, most learning management systems (LMS) and software programs offer some level of accessibility compliance checking. However, they are not always thorough or error-free.

Related Content: 5 steps to ensure accessibility…Read More

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5 ways our centralized LMS supports UDL

Applicable to every student in every classroom, the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles of offering multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement help teachers leverage every child’s strengths while supporting a very personalized learning path based on student choice. When your LMS supports UDL, students reap the benefits.

Unlike pedagogies that attempt to teach to a broader group of students with a broad brush, UDL encompasses a wide swath of learning content—lectures, lessons, videos, audio recordings, group projects, individual projects, etc.—to help the modern-day student reach his or her fullest potential.

Related content: 5 ways to leverage UDL for student inclusivity…Read More

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Ensuring accessible content for all students

This summer, many faculty will work on developing or revising curricular content for their courses. One of the keys in developing new digital materials is verifying that those materials offer accessible content for all students.

Today, most learning management systems (LMS) and software programs offer some level of accessibility compliance checking. However, they are not always thorough or error-free.

Related Content: 5 steps to ensure accessibility…Read More

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Using your LMS for teaching and professional learning

Picture this: You roll out a new learning management system (LMS) for students, but all of your professional learning is either hosted on a different platform or conducted in person with notes shared via email afterward. Sound familiar?

It’s more common than you think, but separating the educator professional learning (PL) experience from the student learning experience can actually have a negative impact on both parties’ experiences in the long run.

Related: 3 reasons elementary schools should adopt an LMS…Read More

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3 reasons elementary schools should adopt an LMS—and where to begin

Is it really possible for young learners to effectively use a learning management system (LMS)? This is a common question administrators and educational practitioners ask when considering LMS adoption at the district level.

Through my work with educators across the country, I know the number of elementary school districts and administrators turning to LMS adoption is increasing for all grades—preparing students at a young age to use the technology they will need to master for high school, college, and beyond.

Here are three reasons why districts should consider adopting an LMS for elementary and how they can begin technological integration for all classrooms.…Read More

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How to find an LMS that supports student privacy and data security

As the stewards of student data and information, our school district doesn’t take that role lightly. Proud to be one of just 13 districts nationwide to receive the Consortium for Student Networking (CoSN) Trusted Learning Environment Seal—which designates institutions that have taken measurable steps to implement practices to help ensure the privacy of student data—we knew that our existing learning management system (LMS) wasn’t up to the task.

And with that, we went in search of an LMS that could support our data-privacy commitment, which has been a key focus for at least six years and a keystone of how we make technology-related decisions. While participating in one of CoSN’s working groups, I began identifying which student-data-privacy principles were really important to us as school districts and what it meant to be a district as an exemplar in that area.

Out of that work, CoSN came up with the Trusted Learning Environment, which encompasses 25 different practices within the realm of student data privacy. Missouri’s Raytown Quality Schools was part of the first cohort of seven districts to be awarded this seal, and that meant that we not only had the right policies and procedures in place, but that we were actually implementing them and displaying evidence all the way down to the classroom level.…Read More

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Why combining assessments and LMS technology is essential

Assessments are more than just measuring how well students are doing in particular subjects in school, and they can actually improve student learning. In fact, frequent assessments can have a positive impact on a student’s education from kindergarten through college. While this may make some educators cringe, the reality is that test-enhanced learning, or testing as an aid to learning, has evidence of effectiveness dating back nearly 100 years (Roediger III, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2006).

Testing can help students better retain and recall what they studied, not only for the final exam, but as part of their overall educational development. This is the “testing effect,” or the phenomenon where taking a quiz can enhance later retention of studied materials, and its effectiveness has been demonstrated many times over. Students who take quizzes shortly after they study show better performance on a final test relative to students who only study without taking a practice quiz, even when no feedback is given on the quiz (Roediger III, McDaniel, & McDermott, 2006).

The testing effect, also known as retrieval practice, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning, needs a place in today’s modern learning. It can be implemented in modern learning management system (LMS) and assessment management system (AMS) technologies, like Gauge, to help improve student learning, from their first day in kindergarten to their last day of earning a university degree.…Read More

Google adds new features to Classroom, Forms, and more Copy

As back-to-school approaches, Google has just released a grab-bag of new features aimed at K-12 educators—mostly upgrades to existing Google products like Classroom and Expeditions—announced in a new blog post.

For Classroom, Google’s still relatively new LMS, the company is adding summaries of student work that can be automatically shared with parents by teachers, who can send the summaries (or classroom announcements) daily or weekly as they choose.

Classroom’s mobile app is also getting some tweaks, namely the new ability to annotate documents, turning them into whiteboard-like screens. Teachers, too, can use the annotations to grade assignments, highlight passages, or demonstrate concepts. To help organize classrooms, teachers can now also add topics to posts and students can filter their streams for specific topics.…Read More