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.

App of the Week: Skaffl

Ed. note: App of the Week picks are now being curated by the editors of Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. Click here to read the full app review.
 skaffl

What’s It Like? Skaffl is a tool for distributing, completing, and grading work on the iPad. Teachers create classes and then share each class’s unique access code with their students, who can then use that code to enroll in the class via their own Skaffl login. Teachers then create three types of activities: an in-app assignment, a student dropbox, or a handout. A handy workflow for these activities appears every time teachers create a new one. Teachers can distribute activities instantly (to some classes, some students, or all at once) or schedule them for a later date.

Price: Free/subscription

Grades: 6-12…Read More

‘Humble heroism’: 8 student-saving teachers

These educators didn’t went beyond reading and arithmetic, and gave their pupils real-life lessons of selfless bravery, The Week reports. To grateful parents and kids, the best, most compassionate teachers are heroes every day. But a few extraordinary ones become heroes in the literal sense. Whether saving a drowning student from an icy river or tackling a deranged gunman on the prowl, these eight teachers from around the globe exhibited “humble heroism” in the face of extraordinary danger: 1. Braving icy waters. Last week a 10-year-old autistic boy ran away from his teacher and onto an icy pond behind a Rochester, N.H., school. As the teacher and the principal, Gwen Rhodes, chased after him, the boy fell through the thin ice. Rhodes sprang into action, diving in and hauling the child to safety. It was a “shinning example” of the kind of “heart” educators have, says Julie Ryan Evans at The Stir. Rhodes said it was all in a day’s work: “What we do every day is what makes people who work in school heroes.”

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‘America’s tutor boom’: By the numbers

Public schools may be suffering, but the private tutoring business—a $5 billion industry—is growing like gangbusters, The Week reports. Times may be tough for many Americans, but, as the quality of public education grows shakier, it still pays to be a tutor—or at least a corporate tutoring firm. While the rest of the economy has sputtered and stagnated, the “supplemental education” sector has grown tenfold over the last decade. Here, a brief guide, by the numbers to “America’s tutor boom”: $5 billion-Estimated size of the “supplemental education” sector…

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