At Banneker High School in College Park, Georgia, dedicating a wing of six classrooms, an office and a conference room to just 139 ninth graders and their six teachers is an exercise in innovation. The wing is the foundation of a Junior Achievement (JA) pilot program called JA Magnet Business Academy, JA-MBA. Junior Achievement is […]
No matter how cutting-edge the technology or advanced the curriculum, students have a hard time mastering essays and equations if they're hungry, traumatized or feeling marginalized by a textbook's inaccurate portrayal of their ethnic group. "If you came to work and hadn't eaten for a day or two, you wouldn't be prepared to work" says […]
Winfred Roberson Jr. was unanimously voted new superintendent of economically and culturally diverse Glendale USD in California, where he will oversee 33 schools and more than 25,000 students. Roberson had been superintendent of Davis Joint USD for the past six years, a district where 69 percent of the students who took the English portion of […]
The push toward digital learning in Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut started about six years ago with a simple premise: Learning doesn't stop when school ends. Superintendent Mark D. Benigni understood that advancing off-campus education would require a strong and engaging digital reading program. Soon he knew he had a winner with myON, which provides […]
Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) is in the middle of a multiyear transformation known as S.T.A.T. (Students and Teachers Accessing Tomorrow). Initiated in 2013, the goal of S.T.A.T. is ambitious: To cultivate a 21st century technology learning environment for its 111,000 students that prepares globally competitive graduates. Previously, the district's approach to education was similar […]
More than 50 percent of curriculum directors anticipate a significant conversion from print to digital materials within the next three years. And it appears this shift is about to get a big boost from the Every Student Succeeds Act. K12 education is making strides in the digital shift. According to MDR's 2015 EdNET Insight survey, […]
The internet delivers assessments, videos and instructional content to schools, so why not phone service, too? Adding voice to the bandwidth communications stream makes sense to an increasing number of district leaders who are swapping traditional landlines for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP runs on broadband and Wi-Fi connections so people can make calls […]
Every spring, students in Michael Nocella's chemistry class at Niles West High School in Illinois design a hot air balloon. But they set goals beyond carrying the most passengers or flying the farthest. Students work in groups to create a balloon that meets a societal or environmental need, such as fuel efficiency. Weaving this kind […]
With the ever-increasing reach of technology and the corresponding growth of STEAM-related curricula, it is challenging to find the right tools to help bring such concepts into the classroom in engaging, student-friendly ways. STEAM-focused classroom products also must easily integrate into existing lesson plans. "Coherence is certainly part of the equation," says Shelley Pasnik, director […]
A convergence of market maturity, increased availability of high-capacity bandwidth and a track record of security has more K12 districts trusting their mission-critical administrative software to the cloud. In the cloud computing model, districts contract with a provider for on-demand access to a shared pool of resources like networks, servers, storage, applications and services. Districts […]
