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.

Edtech leaders offer guidance on safe AI classroom integration

Key points:

  • A number of leading education and technology leaders are formulating recommendations around teaching with AI
  • These efforts can help prepare students to work with and within the world of AI and its rapid evolution
  • See related article: The importance of teaching generative AI

Code.org, ETS, ISTE, Khan Academy, and World Economic Forum have formed TeachAI, bringing together education, nonprofit, and technology partners to assist governments and education authorities with integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into primary and secondary curricula worldwide while protecting student safety, respecting privacy rights, and addressing issues of bias and misinformation.

AI’s rapid pace of development in recent months offers exciting applications for the classroom, but the unprecedented technology also demands deliberation as the implications are vast. TeachAI will bring critical voices across education, policy, and technology to develop a practical framework for teaching with AI and teaching about AI. …Read More

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These Education Startups Are All Business

The pandemic forced the greatest beta test in education history—billions of students pushed home and online. And while there were obvious devastating effects with which we are still coming to terms, there were also plenty of innovations that sprung from the experience. Many of those ideas and techniques are reflected in this year’s crop of finalists for the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition (EBPC) according to John Gamba, Penn GSE’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence. 

Catalyst @ Penn GSE—a global center for education innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE)—and the Michael and Lori Milken Family Foundation announced the selections this week. The finalists’ ventures are focused on some of the biggest challenges in education, including college access and persistence, social-emotional learning, literacy, adaptive learning, and more. 

Considered the most prestigious and well-funded competition of its kind, the EBPC attracts innovative education ventures from around the world. To date, the EBPC has awarded over $1.8 million dollars in cash and prizes. Winners and finalists have gone on to secure more than $180 million in funding.…Read More

Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) Names Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready® Assessment a Qualified Dyslexia Screening Tool for Grades K–3

NORTH BILLERICA, Mass.—The GaDOE recently named Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Assessment as a Qualified Dyslexia Screening Tool for Grades K–3. School districts across the state can now use the program’s online Diagnostic and offline literacy assessment tasks to support with the identification and referral of students who exhibit characteristics of dyslexia. Today, the i-Ready program serves more than 11.5 million students and approximately one-third of all Grades K–8 students in the United States, including approximately 485,000 students in Georgia.

“It is so important that teachers have effective tools to identify students who may be at risk for dyslexia,” said Elizabeth Bassford, vice president of content and implementation at Curriculum Associates. “Now teachers across Georgia can use i-Ready’s single assessment along with its offline literacy assessment tasks to complete the screening and identification process, and develop individualized, data-driven instruction to support each student who will benefit from that specificity.”

All programs named to GaDOE’s Qualified Dyslexia Screening Tool list undergo a comprehensive review and demonstrate that they address—and measure—specific components. These components include phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, sound symbol recognition, alphabet knowledge, decoding skills, encoding skills, rapid naming, accuracy of word reading on grade-level text, and sight word reading efficiency skills.…Read More

Career and technical education needs a mental health revolution

Key points:

  • Students often struggle to transition to the workforce, and mental health can be a big factor in that struggle
  • One educator launched a new approach to student mental health to complement an existing emphasis on pre-vocational skill development
  • See related article: How our district engages students in a CTE program

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

As a longtime public school occupational therapist, I know what students look and sound like when they’re ready to transition from the work lab to the workforce.…Read More

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Swing Education Raises $38 Million in Series C Funding

SAN FRANCISCO  – Swing Education, an online marketplace that connects schools and substitute teachers, announced today $38 million in Series C funding. The funding round was led by funds advised by Apax Partners LLP (“Apax”), a leading global private equity advisory firm, and by edtech investment firm Reach Capital. The funding enables Swing Education to invest in its growth and better address the nation-wide substitute teacher shortage.

This financing follows a 2018 Series B funding co-led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Owl Ventures and a seed round from a consortium that included Social Capital, Kapor Capital, Moment Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Red House Education, and Edovate Capital.

Swing believes that every classroom deserves a teacher, and every student deserves to learn without disruption. Since its founding in 2015, Swing has worked to improve the experience of being a substitute teacher and made it easier for K-12 schools to grow and manage their substitute teacher pools. Swing currently works with over 2,800 school partners and in the 2022-23 school year has supported these schools in filling over one million instructional hours with substitute teachers. …Read More

Is AI the future of education?

Key points:

  • AI can optimize the learning experience, the classroom is a delicate ecosystem and changes can have unintended effects
  • AI is the future of work, and students must be prepared for it–and be familiar with it
  • See related article: It’s important to teach generative AI–here’s why

Sometime late last year, AI reached an inflection point. Experts have been making grand predictions on its behalf for decades, but the moment OpenAI opened ChatGPT up to the public, the actual potential of this technology became clear on a mass level. Almost instantly, hundreds of articles began to appear on the transformative potential of AI for fields as diverse as medicine, law, and entertainment.

Of course, some fields are more amenable to technological revolutions than others. You can see why lawyers, for instance, might appreciate instantly generated summaries of past case law—but the implications of AI in the classroom might be trickier. Teachers are understandably wary; they’re interested in anything that might optimize the learning experience, but they also know that the classroom is a delicate ecosystem, and that any change can have unintended knock-on effects.…Read More

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3 new school grant opportunities

Key points:

Each day, teachers are tasked with doing more and more with increasingly fewer resources. And despite federal emergency funding to help schools provide staff and resources as the pandemic abates, school leaders still grapple with funding challenges.

School grants are often one-time funding opportunities, and while they are not permanent policy changes, grants often help students earn much-needed scholarship money, gain valuable experiences, and they also connect teachers with classroom resources or professional development.…Read More

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5 to thrive: SEL resources to help students grow

Key points:

  • SEL teaches students to think and behave like healthy, mature adults
  • SEL helps students become better learners and take ownership of that learning

Every educator hopes to equip their students with the knowledge they need to thrive as a healthy adult. It’s a daunting task, especially considering there is so much to teach in such a small amount of time.

We want students to fall in love with reading while building up skills in language and grammar. We try to show them that math and science can be outlets of wonder and imagination, while also grounding them in foundations of history and social studies. And yet, out of all the knowledge at our disposal, fostering healthy social-emotional learning (SEL) may be the most important lesson that we impart to our students.   …Read More

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How AI enhances personalization in education

Key points:

  • AI can provide new opportunities and allow us to see things differently
  • AI tools can help create learner profiles to give educators a more accurate impression of students

Learning now is so much more than making notes from a textbook and critiquing other people’s ideas. It is cultivating your own vision of the future and how things can be improved to better our lives and advance the next generation. AI technology is a key driver in this change and will enable students to have a deeper understanding of global events and how they can make an impact. Personalization in education is just one pillar of AI that I want to explore.

In many ways, AI is an extension of ourselves. It can help offload the typically boring tasks we have to put up with and realise our potential by accessing new information and learning at our own speed.…Read More

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AeroFarms Celebrates World Environment Day with Bronx School PS 85

Newark, New Jersey (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AeroFarms®, a Certified B Corporation and leader in indoor vertical farming, will celebrate World Environment Day this coming Monday, June 5, at PS 85 The Great Expectations School with the official launch of its AeroFarms Community Farms program. This program promotes hands-on environmental education and year-round access to fresh and nutritious leafy greens through the proprietary AeroFarms unit and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) curriculum. The launch and celebration will help create life-long nutrition learners and will cultivate students and parents’ interest in incorporating more healthy leafy greens into their daily diets.  

“Our PS 85 community is extremely excited to celebrate World Environment Day together and partner with the AeroFarms Community Farms program to bring hands-on, STEAM learning to life in such a unique way for our students to experience growing and tasting their own food from seed to plate,” said Sara Medina, Principal at PS 85. 

World Environment Day is a time to reflect on how our society can encourage worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment, an important component to both the PS 85 community and AeroFarms. Being built with circular solutions in mind and creating opportunities for environmental protection is vital to AeroFarms product line and mission, which is to grow the best plants possible for the betterment of humanity.   …Read More