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.

American Student Assistance Announces Strategic Alliance with Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship

BOSTON – American Student Assistance ® (ASA), a national nonprofit changing the way kids learn about careers and navigate a path to postsecondary education and career success, today announced that the organization has entered into a 10-year, $25 million affiliation agreement with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), the nation’s leading entrepreneurship education organization.

Through this strategic alliance, NFTE and ASA will expand access to high-quality entrepreneurship education programs, services, and opportunities for middle and high schoolers from rural, marginalized, and economically disadvantaged communities—both in-person and digitally—through school district partnerships, curriculum development and collaborative programming, and business plan competitions. 

The agreement between ASA and NFTE consists of an immediate $5 million unrestricted grant and annual matching grants of up to $2 million for the next 10 years. ASA’s support will help NFTE move from a school-by-school approach to a more systemwide strategy to work with states and school districts to more effectively and efficiently expand the number of schools, teachers, and students that the organization works with each school year. NFTE currently serves 50,000+ students annually across 30 U.S. states. ASA’s support will allow NFTE to expand its position as one of the nation’s largest entrepreneurship education nonprofits.…Read More

Career and technical education needs a mental health revolution

Key points:

  • Students often struggle to transition to the workforce, and mental health can be a big factor in that struggle
  • One educator launched a new approach to student mental health to complement an existing emphasis on pre-vocational skill development
  • See related article: How our district engages students in a CTE program

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

As a longtime public school occupational therapist, I know what students look and sound like when they’re ready to transition from the work lab to the workforce.…Read More

Paycom Donated Nearly $300,000 To Local Public School Districts

OKLAHOMA CITY – Paycom Software Inc. (NYSE:PAYC), a leading provider of HR software, celebrates the end of the 2023 school year by awarding grants to four local public school foundations. These two-year commitments will provide Edmond, Millwood, Oklahoma City and Putnam City with funds needed to support ongoing and new educational programming specific to each district.

“Partnering with the public schools in the area is an important way Paycom supports our communities,” said Tiffany Gamblin, director of human resources business services at Paycom. “We know the power these programs can have on children and young adults. We’re grateful to play a part in helping tomorrow’s leaders shine.”

Each school district has a unique plan for the donations they received from Paycom.…Read More

Millwood Public Schools receives $116,000 from Paycom, benefitting marching band, music program

OKLAHOMA CITY –  Paycom Software Inc. (NYSE:PAYC),  a leading provider of HR software, gave $116,000 to the Millwood Enrichment Foundation as part of a two-year commitment to the school district. The donation is an investment in the future of Millwood Public Schools and brings new resources that support ongoing and new educational programming. One specific area the funding will impact is Millwood’s expanding marching band program. 

“We greatly appreciate this generous donation from Paycom,” said Milo Wilson, president of Millwood Enrichment Foundation. “The funding will help to provide ongoing support for programs at the district and further improve the quality of education in our schools, specifically to improve our music education programs and provide new instruments for students who participate in band.” 

Millwood’s marching band has grown from around a dozen students in 2019 to over 70 students from grades 6-12 today. The first installment of the two-year financial gift from Paycom of $54,000 will directly support this important program. …Read More

5 ways virtual tutoring reinforces our after-school program

We’ve been working to reinforce and reinvigorate our after-school program with the goal of reaching more students who need it. Staffing shortages and not enough hours in the day have made it difficult for us to achieve this goal, but when we started using the FEV Tutor live, 1:1 virtual tutoring platform we realized that we had discovered the missing piece of our puzzle.

At the time, we were really ramping up our summer program and trying to create as much programming as possible for it beforehand. One of the sites integrated the virtual tutoring into its program for four weeks and we received good feedback from the staff, teachers, and students.

We took those results and ran with them, rolling the online tutoring platform out across all 21 of our school sites with a goal of reaching about 2,500 students in grades 3-8. We offer the tutoring in 45-minute, dedicated blocks of time and alternate between math and reading.…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

Only out-of-the-box solutions will fix the real problems in schools

As members of the media have bemoaned the tragic results of students on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as the nation’s report card—many have been all too willing to jump into the game of who is responsible. Yet, few have sought innovative solutions to change the fundamental underlying reality: today’s schools were not built to maximize each and every student’s learning.

Just weeks earlier, a new report titled “Out of the Box,” along with an accompanying afternoon of virtual programming, sought to introduce a way to change that reality through the use of “innovative model providers” to shift us away from the current paradigm of schooling and “support school communities in actualizing the visions they set forth.”

The solutions generally offered in the media to the challenges students face have revolved around things like tutoring, summer school, longer school hours, and more days. Although there’s nothing wrong—and some things right—with those solutions, what none of them do is upend the fact that today’s schools were not designed to optimize learning. Their time-based nature means that they were, in fact, built to embed failure for the majority.…Read More

Epson Technology Enhances Aquarium Education Programs

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif. – As the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. welcomed students back for in-person learning, educators leaned on Epson technology to help enhance education and bring lessons into the spotlight. Leveraging multiple Epson document cameras throughout learning centers at the aquarium, education staff are able to provide hands-on demonstrations to bring engaging lessons to students and visitors of all ages.

“We were so excited to revamp our education programs and bring students back into the aquarium after a few years of virtual programming,” said Alicia Archer, education manager, Aquarium of the Pacific. “The Epson document cameras were teaching tools our staff incorporated into virtual learning. Now that we have launched our in-person programming, these cameras continue to enhance our education programs.”

One of the biggest benefits to leveraging document cameras in their education programs has been the ability to offer a shared learning experience to students. Rather than having to describe something, like a dissection, and then walk table to table to show students, a class can do it all together step-by-step. “We’ve been using the document cameras for our ‘Mysteries of the Deep’ class where we use gel layers on the document camera to simulate going deeper in the ocean. This application with the camera has helped us show how the energy of wavelengths differs, and colors change to bring the visualization to life,” said Archer.…Read More