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.

Pearson’s Connections Academy and Home Depot’s Path to Pro Program Partner to Connect High School Students to Trade Careers

HOBOKEN, N.J. — Pearson and its Connections Academy, the fully online public school program serving K-12 students for more than 20 years, announced today their partnership with The Home Depot’s Path to Pro program to introduce high school students to careers in the trade industry. Through the partnership, Connections Academy will connect high school students, their families and recent graduates to The Home Depot’s Path to Pro program. The initiative includes the Path to Pro Skills Program, offering on-demand courses designed to prepare participants for six trade-based careers, including electrical, drywall, paint, plumbing, HVAC and general construction.

Interested students explore free programs developed by experts in the construction profession. Once eligible, they can build a free profile in the Path to Pro Network to showcase their skills, upload a resume, apply for more than 2,500 jobs and connect to millions of Home Depot Pro customers looking for skilled workers.

These professional contractors are a part of the U.S. construction industry, which annually must fill nearly three-quarters of a million jobs due to retirements, job changes, and other forms of turnover, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In less than a decade, this sector is projected to grow by another 250,000 jobs that typically pay family-sustaining salaries.…Read More

Certiport Names 2023 Adobe Certified Professional US National Champions

Orlando, Florida – Certiport, a Pearson VUE business and the leading provider of performance-based IT certification exams that accelerate academic and career opportunities for learners, announced the winners of their 2023 Adobe Certified Professional US National Championship.

The Certiport Adobe Certified Professional US National Champions are as follows:

  1. Andrew Jarnac, North Carolina
  2. Kayla Crossen-Zawila, Oklahoma
  3. Lena Sedlmayer, Georgia

Across the US, more than 31,000 students ages 13 to 22 qualified for Certiport’s Adobe Certified Professional US National Championship by earning an Adobe Certified Professional certification in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. Certified students entered original design creations and 40 were selected to compete at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista – Disney Springs® area hotel from June 26-28, 2023.…Read More

Certiport Names 2023 Microsoft Office Specialist US National Champions

Orlando, Florida – Certiport, a Pearson VUE business and the leading provider of performance-based IT certification exams that accelerate academic and career opportunities for learners, today announced the winners of the 2023 Microsoft Office Specialist US National Championship. The champions topped 185 finalists at the live competitive event in Orlando, Florida, and the first-place winners will head to the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship in Orlando, Florida, USA in August. This year marks 21 years since the competition began in 2002.

From across the US, more than 217,000 students ages 13 to 22 entered one of six competition tracks by submitting a qualified, passing score on the following certification exams: Microsoft Office Specialist Word, Microsoft Office Specialist Excel®, and Microsoft Office Specialist PowerPoint®. First-place winners receive an $3,000 USD cash prize, second place $2,000 USD, and third place $1,000 USD.

Finalists were given a printed copy of a document, spreadsheet, or presentation to recreate along with printed instructions and digital assets. They were then scored according to the accuracy of the recreation compared to the original. The champions in each program, along with a chaperone, have won a trip to participate in the 2023 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship in Orlando, Florida, USA July 31 – August 2, 2023, where they will compete against over a hundred other finalists from countries across the globe.…Read More

How to build deep relationships with students

In order for students to actually learn, they need to feel engaged on a cognitive and emotional level. They also need to feel safe. 

Take a minute and think about that: students need to feel safe. 

The first step in students feeling safe in school is having a positive relationship with the adult who is leading their educational journey. As Rita Pearson details in her famous TED Talk, every child deserves a champion or an adult who can make them feel safe and insist on them being the best they can be.…Read More

Pearson Creates New Direct-to-Consumer Division

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, today announces the creation of a new direct-to-consumer division as it looks to further strengthen its focus on building a direct relationship with learners around the world.

The new division will be co-led by two senior executives: Ishantha Lokuge joined Pearson from Shutterfly last year and now steps up to the role of Chief Global Product Officer and Co-President, Direct-to-Consumer.

Lynne Frank, most recently President of International Marketing and Worldwide Planning and Operations at Warner Bros. Pictures, joins Pearson as Chief Marketing Officer and Co-President – Direct-to-Consumer. Together, Ishantha and Lynne will lead the new division focused on direct-to-consumer products and channels, and will report to Andy Bird, Chief Executive.…Read More

The changing role of literacy today, part 2

We know we must teach children to read proficiently, yet the age-old challenge of getting a child to read on grade level still persists. Fortunately, science and technology are providing a roadmap.

Science tells us that when we are born, we house all of the tools to learn to speak. On the other hand, we must learn the skill of reading. There is no corresponding “reading center” to the language center in our brains. Instead, every child must go through the meticulous task of learning to read; through the amazing adaptive abilities of the brain we can acquire a skill that was invented only a few thousand years ago.

According to Professor Maryanne Wolf, John DiBiaggio professor of citizenship and public service, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, “It took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet … our children have to reach those same insights about print in roughly 2,000 days.” Those 2,000 days are roughly from birth to about first grade—in other words, at a fairly fast pace.…Read More

Pearson unveils Beta-4

Pearson has unveiled the Beta-4, the latest revision of a nonverbal measure of cognitive abilities in adults, originally developed by the U.S. Army during World War I. With today’s Beta-4, clinical psychologists can obtain a quick assessment of adults’ nonverbal intellectual abilities.

Beta-4 is easy to administer and score and is useful for reliably screening large numbers of people for whom administering comprehensive test batteries would be time-consuming and costly. The test has a variety of occupational and educational applications and is great for use with diverse adult populations within a wide range of language skills and levels of cognitive ability. Appropriate uses include prison systems assessing the intellectual ability of inmates, companies evaluating the employment readiness of potential new hires, and vocational schools determining placement of students. Available in both English and Spanish, Beta-4 is also appropriate for use with English as a Second Language individuals, as no reading or verbal response is required.

Updates in Beta-4 include new norms and test items; updated, contemporary artwork; extended age range; low floors for individuals with average and lower cognitive abilities; high ceiling with more challenging items; and simplified and streamlined instructions to make it easier for individualized administration or proctoring in group settings. Supported by research with clinical group studies, the Beta-4 includes five subtests: coding, picture completion, clerical checking, picture absurdities and matrix reasoning.…Read More

Pearson Realize course content now works with any LMS

Interoperability certification gives teachers, students freedom to assign and use any Pearson content regardless of LMS

Pearson announced a new iteration of its main content delivery system for K-12 schools that will allow them to experience learning, assessment and data applications seamlessly, saving thousands of hours and dollars in the process. Traditionally, teachers, students and administrators have to deal with multiple logins and repetitive data entry. Pearson Realize is now fully compatible with IMS Global’s Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI™) standards, making almost all of the company’s K-12 content and data easy to use, access and analyze, regardless of the school’s learning management system (LMS).

IMS Global is a non-profit organization that sets standards for digital educational content. Leading IMS members like Pearson are committed to creating content and applications that “play nice” with one another so that accessing content from multiple sources and publishers is a unified, continuous experience.

“When we say we put digital content at teachers’ and students’ fingertips, that should be the reality. Now fully compatible with all learning management systems, the digital content delivered through Pearson Realize should make learning and assessing student performance easier, and that’s why we’re committed to interoperability,” said Marc Nelson, vice president of product management at Pearson. “We’re proud to support IMS and the future of digital education, where educators can easily select the digital products that meet their students’ needs without having to worry about whether or not they work together.”…Read More

Certiport announces CERTIFIED 2016 Educator Conference

Professional development conference helps educators bring the full promise and potential of technology certification to the classroom

Certiport, a Pearson VUE business, a test delivery solution provider for the global workforce and academic markets, announced the CERTIFIED 2016 Educator Conference, a conference dedicated to helping educators bring the full promise and potential of technology certification to the classroom.

Educators are invited to attend CERTIFIED from June 28-30, 2016 in Orlando, Florida at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista. Registration is open now at www.certiport.com/certified.

CERTIFIED 2016 is ideal for secondary education teachers, college faculty, and administrators who are working to empower their students by bringing certification opportunities into their school and classroom.…Read More

The good, the bad, and the ugly of today’s online testing

How three different districts fared as they conducted PARCC testing for the first time

testing-parccWhen teachers, students, and administrators at Sheridan School District No. 2 met earlier this month to kick off The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) testing, they had felt pretty sure of themselves. After all, the Denver-based district of 1,600 students and five schools had worked hard to prep itself for the computer-based K–12 assessments in English language arts and math. “We spent a lot of time and money on preparation,” says Superintendent Michael Clough.

But it all fell apart pretty quickly.

Within just a few hours of the first test being administered, it became clear that the district wasn’t as ready as it thought it was. “The first day of testing can be described as nothing short of a disaster,” says Clough. “Now that the first round of testing is complete, we’ll have to start unpacking things and figure out exactly what went wrong.”…Read More