Going from rhetoric to reality in the era of outcomes. Elliott Levine is HP’s Director of Education & HP Distinguished Technologist. What are school districts doing right, and what are they doing wrong, when it comes to education technology? School districts want to see change happen and they seem to be willing to put a […]
A Georgia school system partnered with local manufacturers to create German-style apprentice programs that teach skills through project-based learning. A district on Florida’s west coast expanded manufacturing internships with help from small businesses. And in Tennessee, high school students are developing high-tech skills and earning college credit at a Volkswagen automobile factory. School districts are […]
Teachers at Calusa Elementary School in Boca Raton, Florida, are committed to making sure students meet rigorous state standards. Nevertheless, Calusa, which serves about 1,200 students in grades K5, was still struggling to monitor state standards. Just before the start of the 2016-17 school year, 12 Calusa teachers began a pilot program using Standards Tracker […]
When STEM3 Academy built its first innovation lab in 2014, one of the first pieces of equipment installed in the space was a 3D printer. “We saw that it could be a very useful tool to integrate into the curriculum” says Dr. Ellis Crasnow, director of STEM3 Academy. “We began immediately teaching 3D modeling and […]
Marc Prensky, an authority on the connection between learning and technology, coined the phrase “digital native” in 2001. In his new book, Education To Better Their World: Unleashing the Power of 21st-Century Kids (2016, Teachers College Press), Prensky says our current education system is wrong for the future—not because we haven’t added technology and so-called […]
Why is there such an emphasis on personalized learning today for K12? Educators want to work with students the way they learn best, and we know that one-on-one or small-group instruction is effective. But for the sake of efficiency, schools often employ the “factory” model to teach large numbers of students in a classroom, assuming […]
Alaska recently graduated its first class of Russian dual-language students who began the program in kindergarten. That’s just one example of the growing diversity of language-immersion programs in U.S. schools. While Spanish remains a constant, there is an increased demand nationally for dual-language programs in Portuguese, German, French and Mandarin, says Pete Swanson, president of […]
For decades, the J. Sterling Morton High School District in the Chicago suburbs was in bad shape. It had a gang problem. Some students underperformed on state tests and were no longer accepted to their first-choice colleges. And the district faced a deficit of millions of dollars. In 2008, when Michael Kuzniewski became superintendent, he […]
Equity in K12 education doesn’t mean the same thing as equality. In fact, achieving true equity often requires providing lower-income schools and students with more resources than are given others in the same district, says Joel Boyd, superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools in New Mexico. “Fair student funding means some students are funded at […]
Many students at Oxnard Elementary School District in Southern California have a dual challenge in gaining reading proficiency. Not only do they struggle with developing literacy skills, but over 56 percent of Oxnard’s 17,000 pre-k through 8 students are learning English as a second language. To help these students overcome their literacy deficiency, in 2014 […]
