From streamlining lesson plans to brainstorming creative classroom activities, teachers and students are embracing generative AI—and they say it's a game changer.
Education advocacy groups have pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to modernize E-rate funding to better support districts as financially driven cybercriminals continue to target K12 schools.
The school district revealed that thousands of student records, including some of current students, were posted to the dark web as the result of a recent cyber attack. The information included driver’s license and social security numbers.
Cybercriminals are hungry for students' personal identity information and their blank credit history, and their tactics to retrieve such information are becoming increasingly stealthy.
A recent survey indicates that the profession is significantly less likely to receive job cuts during economic uncertainty compared to other industries.
The U.S. joined Australia, India and Japan in the Quad Cyber Challenge, a resource-sharing initiative to raise attention around cyber threats against education and government institutions. Education is a key focus of the initiative, as it is now the single-most targeted industry for cyberattacks.
"The secret is out: K12s are a target-rich and resource-poor sector," says TJ Sayers, cyber threat intelligence manager at the Center for Internet Security (CIS). "Maintaining complete, secured, and offline backups is the single-most effective way to recover from most attacks, including ransomware."
"We're actually calling 2024-25 'the bloodletting,'" said Dr. Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. "Public education has not seen a right-sizing, fiscal cliff, whatever you want to call it, of this magnitude at any time in the past, including the last recession. I think it's going to be quite shocking."
