To give students experience flying larger drones, educators at Duval High School near Washington, D.C., got creative. Federal Aviation Administration security restrictions limit unmanned aeronautic flights over sensitive locations. "We are building an addition to the school that will allow us to fly drones inside" says Christina Howland, coordinator of the four-year Aerospace Engineering and […]
As a math teacher at Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx, Sheldon Vleck didn't give much thought to the master schedule. "I never saw it. The only thing I'd see were kids sitting in front of me" he says. "You'd take a look at a kid and say, 'Well, this kid is really […]
What does the routing process look like at First Student? We provide transportation services to more than 1,000 school districts in the U.S. and Canada. We pride ourselves on having a customized approach to a district's unique transportation needs. At its core, successful routing is still the process of getting all students to school and […]
In his new book What School Could Be, innovation expert Ted Dintersmith profiles schools that focus on innovation and "real" learning, rather than endlessly drilling on formulas and definitions that don't matter in today's world. Our archaic model of education trains kids for a world that no longer exists, and accelerating advances in technology are eliminating millions of […]
When it comes to balancing school budgets, the arts—and particularly music—often suffer most from spending cuts. It's part of a cycle that began in the 1970s, when, in the hope of averting a fiscal crisis, schools laid off thousands of arts teachers. Limited grants and community-based efforts have helped to rebuild programs over the years, […]
Personalized learning for students has long been a priority in K12 education, but for some reason, some districts haven't applied this same approach to teachers. For years, PD has been completely one-dimensional. Teachers sit in district- and state-mandated PowerPoint-driven seminars that fail to encourage collaboration or authentic engagement in the material. Often, teachers leave feeling […]
Districts are cultivating college and career readiness programs by allocating more resources to guide students, by building new partnerships and by focusing efforts beyond high school. Tennessee recently expanded and rebranded its statewide career and college readiness initiative as Tennessee Pathways, which now focuses on K8 in addition to high school. Part of that effort […]
Every spring, Graham Local Schools fourth- and fifth-graders hatch and release trout during a unit that covers aquaponics, hydroponics and conservation. Older students raise corn and soybeans on a sustainable farm operated by the rural district in southwest Ohio. Teachers in the Jim Thorpe Area School District in Pennsylvania have incorporated software such as GarageBand […]
Robert Sexton has worked with school-based tech for more than 15 years, so there's not much he hasn't seen. "Kids are pretty ingenious; keeping up with them is a challenge" says Sexton, currently the director of technology for Olentangy Local School District, just north of Columbus, Ohio. That challenge is mitigated by the district's secret […]
Ware County School District in Georgia has downsized its inventory of assistive technology. Thanks to a slew of technological advances, many of the specialized tools their special education students had used to communicate and learn are now redundant. "We don't need portable keyboards or word processors anymore" says Barbara Sonnier, the district's assistive technology coordinator. […]
