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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 and Central Access Announce Partnership to Advance School Safety and Efficiency

TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 18, 2022 –  Pikmykid, the premier school safety and dismissal platform, today announces its partnership with  Central Access, the leading provider of K-12 education technology tools for the state of Mississippi.

Through this partnership, Pikmykid and Central Access will bring the best Student Information System (SIS) and dismissal technology to the educators and parents of Mississippi, starting with a fully integrated solution with Application Programming Interface (API) integrations. As the two companies continue to grow together, customers can expect to see deeper, more extensive integrations and capabilities.

“Central Access and Pikmykid have shared several customers over the years, and we’re excited to bring an even better experience to those users,” said Saravana Pat Bhava, CEO and Co-Founder of Pikmykid. “This partnership was one of the easiest decisions we’ve made going into 2022, and we’re truly honored to be the exclusive provider of safety and dismissal technology for Central Access clients.”…Read More

How to unlock the true power of student and teacher videos

When educators can create and share videos, districts are able to knock down content silos and better communicate with students, families, and colleagues.

Sharing asynchronous video knocks down barriers between your teachers and students in any classroom environment; gives parents and families more visibility into their students’ successes; and offers a simple and secure solution to provide secure spaces for students to grow.

Join a panel of educators and edtech experts to learn how making the sharing of video content simple for teachers and students will turn their creations into high-impact learning assets while maintaining a safe and secure learning environment.…Read More

5 tips to increase parent engagement

Parent-school relationships have always been a vital part of student success, but the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful parent engagement was emphasized by the pandemic.

When schools moved to remote instruction, communication between parents and educators soared. Teachers and administrators worked with students’ families to try to establish stability and continuity. Priorities such as setting up remote learning structures, developing a distance curriculum, and offering social and emotional support required increased collaboration with home. 

Parents have become used to increased information and communication from schools. …Read More

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Benchmarking Toolkit for 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated an extant trend toward digitized communications, and highlighted the weaknesses in many schools’ and districts’ communication plans. School communication is currently strong in some areas, notably general parental engagement and support, but it has major weaknesses. These include school-teacher and school-student communication in schools, as well as communication with a hard-to-reach quartile of parents. Schools must address these and transfer the lessons of the coronavirus pandemic to their communication plans with schools back to in-person teaching.

Unistellar Research: Got Questions About Outer Space? Forget Google—Just Ask Your Kids

San Francisco—February 3, 2022— A pathbreaking study just confirmed something that many parents already suspected: young Americans have a voracious interest in outer space, already know a lot about it, and are eager to learn much more. But while most parents are excited to know that their kids are interested in space, and are eager to encourage that interest, they’re unsure about how to do it. The study was released today by Unistellar, the pioneer of New Astronomy, whose smart telescopes give space lovers novel tools so they can explore the cosmos in new and exciting ways. The survey queried more than 500 American parents with children ages 7-14.

Our kids have their eyes on the skies

According to parents, there are a vast number of young space lovers in the U.S.—93% of American kids are interested in outer space, and 84% became even more interested in the subject over the last year. The numbers tell a dramatic story:…Read More

PowerSchool to Acquire Kinvolved, Expanding K-12 Platform to Provide Critical Messaging and Communication Solution

FOLSOM, Calif. PowerSchool (NYSE: PWSC), the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kinvolved, a leading provider of K-12 communications, attendance, and engagement solutions supporting over 250,000 students and used within three of the top four school districts in the U.S. Adding Kinvolved’s leading communication engine to PowerSchool’s  Unified Home solution will enable schools and districts to strengthen and simplify overall communications and notifications between school and home to increase engagement and help reduce absenteeism.

“Collaboration between teachers, parents, and students is one of the most important aspects of an effective education, and we know it’s a top priority for our customers to have efficient, centralized notifications and communications integrated with PowerSchool” Tweet this

“Collaboration between teachers, parents, and students is one of the most important aspects of an effective education, and we know it’s a top priority for our customers to have efficient, centralized notifications and communications integrated with PowerSchool,” said Hardeep Gulati, CEO of PowerSchool. “We look forward to welcoming Kinvolved to our PowerSchool team, and together making a bigger impact on improving student engagement and outcomes.”…Read More

5 ways a more equitable school-home communication system helped our district

The pandemic has forced districts to rethink how they communicate with parents, and things aren’t going to go back to the “way they were” anytime soon (if at all). Forced to operate remotely, and without much warning, our district knew it had to move away from snail mail as a primary mode of school-home communication and over to a more modern, fast, and efficient solution.

Fortunately, we already had a safe and secure platform for school-home communication in place before the pandemic; it was just a matter of ramping up our usage of the technology, getting parents and teachers trained on how to consistently use it, and then putting it into action.

With Aeries as our student information system (SIS) and ParentSquare tightly integrated into it, that’s exactly what we did.…Read More

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Happy habits: SEL matters more than ever

“My hope is these extra couple of days will allow everyone to take a little extra time for themselves and their families. Family is, after all, much of what Thanksgiving is all about.”

–Dr. Kelvin R. Adams, Superintendent of Schools, St. Louis Public Schools

Like St. Louis, school districts across the country opted to add an additional partial or entire week off during the holiday season/winter break to allow the students and adults to find time for and take care of themselves.…Read More

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Making the most of your return to school

Even though schools are back to in-person learning, the pandemic taught us something about how automating processes can save time–and if educators need more of anything, it’s time.

Students, parents, and staff can work smarter and more effectively with self-service forms, electronic signatures, pre-populated agreements, and automated approval processes.

You can transform your agreement process by eliminating paper, automating workflows, and connecting the systems within your organization as you learn best practices for human resources, special education/student services, and procurement.…Read More

Schools, at halftime, need to put funding into play for the second half of the year

As we enter into another winter season living with the pandemic, special education services are not where schools hoped they would be, with many feeling that they are still falling behind rather than beginning to catch up.

New York City recently announced delays to its academic recovery program for students with special needs. New York, like many others, is stretching limits to get programs activated, even allowing for educators not specifically trained in special education to staff programs. In addition to the urgency they are feeling every day to serve parents and children, there’s another good reason to expand programs right now: funding.

It was good news when states and districts received $190 billion in federal aid from three relief packages in the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. But it’s a jaw-dropping amount of money, with limits on when and how to use it for special education. For once, the challenge on the ground for schools is not how to manage a tight budget. It’s how to manage the rush of money that’s available: when to get it, how best to use it, and how to be accountable for it.…Read More

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