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.

Track It Forward Announces New Community Service Directory Feature

OAKLAND, Calif. – Track it Forward, a leader in volunteer time tracking software, is excited to announce the launch of its newest school-focused feature, the Community Service Directory. The Community Service Directory is designed for schools and school clubs and allows administrators to help match students with verified volunteer opportunities in the community.

Students can browse their school’s custom directory to find verified volunteer
opportunities and contact the organizer, all through their Track it Forward account!
School administrators and club advisers can build this custom directory by sharing a link with community organizations. The community organizers can then submit opportunities to the directory with all the necessary information and prerequisites.

Administrators can review each opportunity before it is posted to the Community
Service Directory, which means students will only have access to approved
opportunities for their school. This can improve the student volunteer experience
because students can easily find verified opportunities, which can increase volunteer hours while decreasing inaccurate reporting. …Read More

Cook Center for Human Connection Offers up to $100,000 in Matching Grants for School Calm Rooms

Salt Lake City — The Cook Center for Human Connection, a nonprofit dedicated to mental health and suicide prevention, launched today at the Mental Health Summit, co-hosted with the America Association of School Administrators, the Calm Room Grant to enable schools to create an in-school safe space for students to reset when they feel anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, angry, or frustrated.

The Cook Center is offering a nationwide matching grant of up to $5,000 per school for up to 20 schools to create a Calm Room in their building. A calm room is a supportive therapeutic environment for students to go where they can focus on self-calming efforts and learn to self-regulate their bodies and their emotions. An important component of an overall mental health approach, calm rooms feature quiet spaces with low-stimulation decor and fixtures, soft furniture and carpet, and other materials that reduce stress and foster positive coping techniques.

“More and more schools are developing calm rooms as part of a strategy to improve student well-being based on new psychological research,” said Cook Center CEO Anne Brown. “We are thrilled to offer the grant program to expand these efforts to more schools across the country and help them address student mental health, which has become one of the most critical issues of our time.”…Read More

Vector Solutions Adds Cybersecurity Awareness Courses to its Suite of Online Training Programs for Schools

Tampa, FL – More than 100 school districts are victimized by cyber criminals each year. To help school administrators and staff members protect their school networks and reduce the likelihood of sensitive data falling into the wrong hands, Vector Solutions, the leading provider of training and software solutions to help schools make their operations and communities safer, smarter, and better, has created a set of online cybersecurity awareness training courses. The courses address topics such as creating a cybersecurity culture, preventing social engineering attacks, laws and compliance, best practices, and more. The courses will be available starting Oct. 1, 2022.

“School districts, like many other institutions, are moving more of their operations online – everything from student records management, to administrative functions, to curriculum and instruction. This can help improve efficiency, but it can also increase the risk of cybercrime,” said Rob Buelow, head of product for education at Vector Solutions. “Our goal is to help keep schools safe and operational, and our new courses will help school leaders and employees understand these risks and how to protect their systems and their data.”

The cybersecurity courses are:…Read More

One way to address student mental health? Bring the clinic to school

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

Many Michigan school administrators say they’ve often served as stand-in public health officials during the pandemic. So it’s no surprise that districts across the state are eager to get some backup from a program that opens clinics in school buildings.

School-based health centers make it convenient for students to leave class and walk down the hall for therapy, a medical checkup, or a dental appointment. While the first centers in Michigan opened decades ago, policymakers have renewed interest in them in the wake of COVID and the ongoing student mental health crisis.…Read More

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Introducing a new State and District Data Validation Tool for SKYWARD® Users

KALAMAZOO, Michigan – APRIL 6, 2022 – Level Data, Inc. announces a new suite of data validation tools for districts using the Skyward brand Student Information System (SIS). Level Data is a privately-held SaaS Company working with over 1,200 school districts and more than 5 million students using their data validation, data integration and reporting products.

Public School Administrators and student data specialists everywhere understand that submitting accurate data to federal and state agencies is absolutely essential for their district to receive all the funding they are entitled to from many government sources. State submission specialists at school districts are under significant pressure to secure all the funding they possibly can to bolster their local budgets.

Also of critical importance, data-driven decision-making has proven to be key in providing the highest quality of education to students. These decisions that can positively affect curriculum and other strategies are only as good as the quality of the underlying data. Simply put, districts that do not actively focus on maintaining the highest quality data face a substantial performance and economic disadvantage.…Read More

Extron NAV & Streaming Systems Serve the Chef for St. Helena High’s Culinary Program

Anaheim, California (December 22, 2021) – St. Helena High School is a top-ranked institute of learning in California’s Napa Valley wine region. The county is filled with luxury hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants, such as The French Laundry. Because of this wealth of fine dining and high-end accommodations, the high school’s culinary classroom received a new AV system that enhances instruction on-site as well as for students attending from home. The school administrators brought in E.R.I.C. Low Voltage Services to design and program and Consolidated Networks Corporation to integrate a NAV Pro AV over IP system, along with the SMP 111 streaming media processor and other products from Extron. “Integration of Extron’s NAV Pro AV over IP system and the SMP 111 streaming processor lets the students at home be on the same page as those in the classroom,” says Brian Baesler, Program Manager at Consolidated Networks Corporation. “This makes the AV system just what the chef ordered.” St. Helena High’s culinary classroom includes six full commercial kitchens, and the instructor is Chef Karl Turner III. Originally, the students gathered around the outside of one kitchen to watch the professional chef prepare and plate the gourmet dishes. Now, a NAV Pro AVoIP system ties three broadcast-quality 4K HDMI PTZ cameras to the existing 55” displays, as well as provides content to the streaming system. An Extron NAV E 101 encoder mounted with each camera shares video from the chef’s grill/range station and the two food preparation stations. A fourth camera and encoder are being installed for a heads-on view of the chef at work. The chef’s PC and a TLP Pro 1225TG 12″ Tabletop TouchLink Pro Touchpanel are installed on a shelf beneath one of the prep tables, protecting them from heat and splashes. The PC is connected to an Extron NAV E 201 D wallplate HDMI encoder. To support the PC’s USB signals, an Extron MediaPort 200 HDMI and Audio to USB Scaling Bridge converts USB to HDMI. The bridge enhances the computer-sourced content for the students attending class from home.  The SMP 111 streaming media processor captures and distributes the camera feeds and other resources for selectable live streaming. Five Extron transmitters stream AV signals over the 1 Gbps Ethernet network. An Extron NetPA U 1004 power amplifier with Dante and DSP 100 watts per channel drives the 70 V distributed audio system. From concept to commissioning, the entire project was completed in two weeks. CNC credits this in part to Extron’s well-designed products and the support engineers. The administration is quite pleased with the success of the AV system upgrade in the culinary classroom, and Chef Turner III is happy with how easy it is to use. To read the full St. Helena High School Culinary Classroom case study, click here. Extron – The AV Technology Leader Every day, millions of people around the world are having their experiences enhanced by Extron audiovisual signal processing, distribution, and control solutions. We design advanced technologies to create better looking images, higher quality sound, systems that are easier to control and work more reliably. Our powerful asset management tools are helping technology professionals efficiently manage large numbers of audiovisual systems deployed throughout their enterprises and institutions. Extron AV technology solutions serve the diverse needs of organizations around the world and are deployed in a wide variety of corporate, educational, government, healthcare, retail, and entertainment applications. To learn more about Extron, click here. Extron®, NAV®, MediaPort®, and TouchLink® are registered trademarks of Extron. Dante® is a registered trademark of Audinate Pty Ltd.

Our rural district’s 4 steps to a new post-pandemic learning reality

Maintaining the continuity of student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has been an extremely challenging feat for most school districts across the country. However, in the nation’s rural school systems, school administrators and teachers face a unique set of challenges. I believe that the way my school system is overcoming these challenges provides rural school districts a new blueprint for teaching and learning in the evolving COVID world.

My school system is located in Elko, Nevada, and like everyone else, we were impacted by COVID during 2020-2021. The Elko County School District covers 17,203 square miles of mountainous terrain and has major industries of ranching and gold mining. When our schools closed at the onset of the pandemic, providing all students with reliable access to the internet was our first priority. Next, we ensured all students had access to a suitable device, which in our district’s case, was a Chromebook.

While our school system was impacted by the first wave of COVID infections like many others, the second wave of COVID in the Fall of 2021 hit the community extremely hard. A massive surge of cases throughout the county created new challenges as students had to be quarantined at home for long periods due to COVID exposure. The uncertainty of whether a student would be in-person or remote from one day to the next remains a constant battle. …Read More

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Schools are getting creative as they strive to improve indoor air quality

After shouldering responsibilities for keeping students and staff safe and healthy in a global pandemic – you may have felt the weight of the world on your shoulders for the past several months or still feeling this with expectations for next year.

The changes and demands of the past year are a lot for school administrators – and their heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems – to handle. As we are hearing from public health experts and air quality specialists, effective ventilation systems are essential to help reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 virus or any other airborne illness in public facilities, from office buildings and restaurants to schools.

In his book Healthy Buildings, author Joseph G. Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program and associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, concludes that up to 90 percent of schools in the U.S. are not meeting the minimum ventilation standards set by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).…Read More

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4 ways digital tools streamline summer program administration

Summer school is more important than ever this year as school administrators establish new learning programs to give K–12 students an opportunity to catch up on schoolwork and enrichment programs they missed during the pandemic. The federal government is also paying extra attention to summer programs, earmarking $1.2 billion in its massive relief package.

By the end of the 2020–2021 academic year, most U.S. schools were open, but administrators are still taking precautions to mitigate potential virus outbreaks among staff and students. This will be the norm for the foreseeable future since vaccines are widely available for staff and older children but haven’t yet been approved for younger kids.

Last year, teachers and school administrators adopted digital tools in greater numbers than ever before. Companies offering tools like online forms saw a spike in demand, and they are now seeing it rise again as schools organize summer learning programs.…Read More

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5 ways to make the summer count for students

For students, summer break often feels fleeting. In what seems like minutes, sunshine and freedom are quickly replaced by books and backpacks once again. 

However, if you are a parent trying to engage your child for the summer, these same two months are anything but fleeting as you balance planning for your child with other obligations. 

And if you are a school or district leader in 2021? Summer offers two months to reignite a love of learning in students and support unfinished learning through acceleration or remediation. You also face questions about how to best help staff and students return to school after a tumultuous year.…Read More

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