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.

5 tips to keep online students motivated

Key points:

  • Educators must support efforts that boost online student motivation
  • Peer mentors, change of scenery, and spending time with students are important for online students

A student’s motivation in school is a key driver of their academic success. Yet, the demanding nature of high school classes, mixed with a teenager’s natural craving for independence and individual identity, can stand in the way of that motivation. COVID-19 took a toll on student motivation, and 80 percent of educators are still feeling the effects. Following the rapid and sudden shift to online learning, parents and educators remain concerned about keeping online students motivated and engaged. 

As we move past the pandemic and rethink the role of online education, it’s vital to education reform that teachers remain focused on fostering student motivation. …Read More

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6 ways AI tools will impact tutoring

Key points:

  • AI tools can greatly personalize and individualize tutoring
  • ChatGPT brings new perspectives to old problems and helps students think outside of the box

As the layers of post-pandemic classrooms are peeled back and learning losses become more evident, schools are searching for effective means to improve student achievement. Tutoring plays a major role in these efforts–and now, advances in AI are taking tutoring to a new level.

As the NAEP results made clear, students lost an alarming amount of progress in reading and mathematics. Already-overburdened teachers are scrambling to play catch-up and fit entire months of lost learning into their instruction.…Read More

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3 ways to ensure kindergarten readiness for all children

Ensuring that children are developmentally ready for school on day one of kindergarten is critical. The better prepared children are for kindergarten, the more successful they are likely to be in their school experience.

Kindergarten readiness involves more than just a child’s age and academic abilities. It also encompasses social-emotional competencies, including whether children can follow directions, regulate their own emotions, and get along well with others.

As a former principal for a large urban school district who has opened an early childhood center with more than 400 children, I have extensive experience in preparing children for kindergarten and working with parents to do the same. Here are three key steps that school systems can take to ensure that all children have the solid foundation they need to start kindergarten ready to learn with their peers.…Read More

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A smarter way to think about college

This month, hundreds of thousands of graduating high school seniors are weighing their college options. For many, it’s an intensely stressful time as they are rejected or waitlisted by schools they aspired to attend and decide where they will spend the next four years of their lives. Unfortunately, most will base those decisions on criteria that don’t actually determine the quality of their education and ignore the criteria that do.

Choosing a college to attend is not like choosing a product to purchase, though students often approach the decision with a consumer’s mindset. There is no Consumer Reports to rely on, leaving students and their parents unduly influenced by a school’s reputation, the glitziness of the admissions materials, the amenities in the student housing, the impressiveness of the recreational facilities, and the quality of the campus tour. None of these bears any relation to the quality of the instruction you will receive as a student.

Even sampling a class or two while visiting a school tells you virtually nothing meaningful.  As any teacher knows, there are good days and bad days in every course.  What you experience is not generalizable to the course as a whole, much less to the entire school.…Read More

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Ransomware attacks on schools are only getting worse

Just a few years ago, ransomware probably didn’t rank very high on a list of things parents regularly talked about. But the odds are getting higher that if you ask a parent about it now, they’ll have plenty to say.

Fourteen percent of parents of school-age children in the U.S. responded to a recent survey saying that they had experienced a ransomware attack on their kids’ school. That number was just 9 percent a year ago. The rate of attacks appears to be growing, with a higher percentage of parents saying it happened last summer or this school year, compared to those who experienced it the year before.

Criminals attacked school districts in Tucson, Arizona, and Nantucket, Massachusetts, in late January, cancelling classes for one district and sending administrators to work from home at the other. The attacks marked the fourth and fifth publicly-disclosed incidents in January alone, although survey data indicates that schools may be getting targeted at a higher rate than that, and some incidents may simply not be getting disclosed.…Read More

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7 ways to make homework easier for students with autism

Homework can be challenging for all children, but for students with autism, it can be challenging. It is common for children with autism to have difficulties with executive functioning abilities, including planning, organization, and prioritization.

In addition, they may have issues with focus, language, and social skills, all of which can make homework time challenging for both the youngster and their parents. For those of you who are raising a neurodivergent child, here are some strategies to implement when assisting them with homework:

Create a Routine…Read More

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The purpose of a K-12 education: Who decides and how do we get there?

In a recent report by Populace (2022), 55 percent of American parents expressed their desire for educators to rethink how today’s K-12 schools are educating our children. The study found that, despite the widespread perception that American society wants K-12 schools to prepare students for college, college is not as important to parents as it used to be. Instead, the study reported, today’s parents would like to see their children develop practical skills “for both life and career” (p. 10), critical thinking skills that allow them “to problem solve and make decisions” (p. 8), and moral character traits such as “honesty, kindness, integrity, [and] ethics” (p. 20).

The Populace study reported that today’s parents want more individualized educational experiences for their children, with greater emphasis on students’ interests and personal/career goals than on a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Parents want their children to have learning opportunities across a variety of modalities, and they want learning to be assessed through demonstration of mastery as opposed to traditional assessments like standardized tests.

According to the Populace study, today’s parents believe that “better” (as in straight As and college bound) should not be the purpose of a K-12 education, but “different” (as in a customized educational experience for every student) should be. It seems that–at least for parents–the purpose of an American K-12 education is changing.…Read More

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What the F? Grading strategies for early career teachers

According to a recent study, grading is one of the least stressful activities early career teachers have to complete. Grading is time consuming, however, and more grading-related questions are popping up in the news these days. For instance, are teachers allowed to reduce grades for late work? Are students allowed to retake tests on which they did not do well? It is essential that teachers have a clear and supportive grading system in place to address the scrutiny of today’s students, parents, and other stakeholders.

Setting up a grading system requires more than a calculator. A philosophical foundation is important to how a teacher grades. Having a philosophical basis for grading helps instructors explain grades, their meaning, and their value to students, who may then see the grade as less arbitrary.Two common approaches to further mitigate this arbitrary nature include normative-based grading and criterion- or standards-based grading. To build a strong, meaningful grading policy, instructors must choose the approach that best fits the course design and student learning outcomes.

Instructors who choose a normative approach will grade based upon relative performance. A teacher’s fallback practice may be to grade on a curve; however, curved grading is philosophically flawed in most course level applications. Effective instructional design models and psychometrics generally anticipate that students can master an end-of-course exam with a 70 to 80 percent score. Exams that do not reflect that criteria may have been poorly designed. Otherwise, instructional challenges or lack of student engagement could be to blame. Some college courses simply provide a curved score for students to lower the failure rate or to stratify student performance. This, however, does not evidence how students understood the content. Curved grades only show how students performed in relation to other students instead of reflecting students’ mastery of the materials.…Read More

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Ransomware attacks show continued rise in K-12 schools

More parents report experiencing ransomware attacks on their children’s schools, according to new data from Kaspersky. This year, 14 percent of American parents experienced ransomware attacks on their children’s K-12 schools while their child was a student, an increase from 9 percent last year.

Among schools that paid a ransom to their attackers, parents reported an average ransom of $887,360. In 2021, the average was just $375,311. The Ransomware Attacks on K-12 Schools report revealed a number of other findings related to parents’ experiences with these incidents.

In October 2022, Kaspersky surveyed 2,000 parents of school-age children in the United States to find out about their experiences with ransomware attacks on schools. The results are compared to a previous report that posed the same questions to a similar group of parents in October 2021, as well as to an earlier report in June 2021 asking parents more generally about cyberattacks on schools.…Read More

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