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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.

The best ways to approach high-impact tutoring

What do we even mean when we say “high-impact tutoring?” As schools grapple with so many of the effects of unfinished learning, tutoring has emerged as a potential approach for addressing students’ educational needs.

“High-impact tutoring” is defined by the National Student Support Accelerator as a form of teaching 1:1 or in a small group toward a very specific goal. It is a form of tutoring that leads to substantial learning gains for students by supplementing, but not replacing, students’ classroom experiences and it’s intended to respond to individual students’ needs by complementing what they’re learning in the classroom.

High-impact tutoring is not just homework help, nor is it just test prep, so there is key differentiation between it and what most people conceptualize “tutoring” to be. It’s an intentional, multifaceted program that’s geared toward accelerating student learning. High-impact tutoring is not intended to solely focus on remedial skills; it’s about addressing the skills that are necessary for the student to make progress and advance to those instructional next steps.…Read More

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Are you teaching with Minecraft and Roblox? You should be

Millions of students use Roblox and Minecraft to create characters and build entire worlds. As educators search for ways to boost student engagement as they inject real-world relevance into their lessons, finding creative reasons to use these platforms in the classroom becomes their goal. Should you start teaching with Minecraft and Roblox?

“Why Minecraft? Why Roblox? Your students are already on these platforms and they absolutely love them. That doesn’t necessarily make for a great teaching tool right off the bat, but the engagement is there,” said Matthew Kreutter, a product manager for Connected Camps, during an ISTE Live22 session.

A Connected Camps team led session attendees through some brief examples of how they can begin teaching with Minecraft and Roblox with simple coding and building activities.…Read More

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How 3D printing is changing education

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we must invest in educational technology. When schools use technology to improve the quality and quantity of educational content, learners will thrive. Amid this technology-driven educational environment, 3D printing offers students the following: helping to facilitate differentiated instruction, increasing student engagement, expanding practice opportunities, and scaling up standardized instruction.

No More One-Size-Fits-All Teaching

Differentiated instruction is a teaching approach that tailors instruction to all students’ learning needs. Most students are unlikely to get much from “one-size-fits-all” instruction. Instead, it should vary based on students’ interests, preferences, strengths, and struggles.…Read More

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SplashLearn Announces SpringBoard Math Challenge 2022 Winners

San Francisco, CA, 22 June 2022: SplashLearn, the game-based learning program used by millions of students, announced the winners of its massively popular annual competition – the SpringBoard Math Challenge. The 8th edition of the SpringBoard Math Challenge 2022 was rolled out for elementary classrooms across North America on March 1, 2022 (the competition ended on May 8, 2022). Over the duration of this 10-week math challenge, SpringBoard saw participation from over 400,000 students from 20,000+ classes!

Arpit Jain, CEO, SplashLearn, said “SpringBoard is over and I’m thrilled for all the winners. SplashLearn would like to congratulate each and every school, teacher, and student who participated in the competition. We are glad to be part of their journey as they collaborate and celebrate learning. The competition has motivated students to stay engaged and excited, which has always been our goal with everything we build at SplashLearn.”

SplashLearn announced Matthew Norris’ class from Sunset Park Elementary, North Carolina as the National Champions of SpringBoard Math Challenge 2022, US. The 1st runner-up was Lisa Machado’s class from Pacific Union School, California and the 2nd runner-up was Erin Noel’s class from Petersburg Elementary School, Illinois. Along with national winners, the top classes on the state leaderboards also won prizes. All the participating students will also receive a ‘Certificate of Participation’.…Read More

Do we do our best work for machines?

The revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has been a long time coming. Since the mid-1980s, scholarly journals have been predicting the widespread adoption of AI in education. However, momentum is accelerating.

Just four years ago, a study predicted that AI in education and learning would increase 47.5% through 2021; as it turned out, the prediction was conservative.

The current landscape…Read More

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What’s so great about online teaching?

Had I been asked what I thought about online teaching two years ago, I would probably have given you quite an earful of the many known shortcomings of virtual teaching modalities, including the challenges to student engagement and community building. Ask me now and my answer could not be more different. Amid the latest push for a return to in-person teaching, many instructors have been adamant about the advantages of digital classrooms and look forward to continuing teaching online in a post-pandemic world. I am one of them.

I teach sociology at CUNY, the largest urban university in the U.S., which serves a very diverse student body of mostly first-generation college students. By the time the COVID-19 outbreak officially struck in mid-March 2020, I, along with millions of instructors around the globe, had to figure out how to move my in-person classes to virtual platforms. Many of us were caught off guard during the initial phase of “emergency remote teaching” and had no choice but to invest, learn, and experiment with technology by trial and error.

With incentives from the administration, we hurried to get online certifications and took summer workshops widely offered by our teaching centers and IT departments. When we succeeded, it was often not by replacing the in-person teaching with virtual scenarios, but by combining the best of both worlds: the interpersonal dynamics of face-to-face interactions with key high-tech tools that enhanced our online classrooms. If it is true that practice makes perfect, the more we conducted our business remotely the more we tightened up our craft. In this piece, I will tell you how this happened.…Read More

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National Readiness Report: A Look at COVID-19’s Impact on Learner Readiness and How Institutions Can Improve Student Success

PITTSBURGH, PA – It goes without saying that the COIVD-19 pandemic has impacted higher education and students across the globe. But to what degree? And how can institutions respond to the shifts in learning? SmarterServices recently published data that reveals both individual and technical skills have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the degree to which learner readiness has changed over the past ten years. Learner readiness has seen statistically significant changes and institutions may need to reevaluate their programming to improve student success.

Data on how COVID-19 has impacted learner readiness comes out of the National Readiness Report, published by SmarterServices. The report provides measures of central tendency for learner traits such as life factors and individual attributes as well as several skill sets, including on-screen reading rate and recall, technical competency, learning management system competency, general technical knowledge, and keyboarding rate and accuracy.

The attributes and skills are measured by the SmarterMeasure Learning Readiness Indicator, which has been taken by over 6 million learners from over one thousand institutions. Through the National Readiness Report, institutions can compare the performance of their students to those of other students nationally. This year’s report reviews multiple comparisons of readiness levels within several demographic categories, a four-year comparison to determine the impact of the pandemic on learner readiness, and specifically how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted learner readiness over the quarantine period.…Read More