The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered student growth, social development, emotional well-being, future preparedness, and overall behavior. In addition to a slow academic recovery, myriad students are exhibiting behaviors often associated with learning disabilities. The question is whether students’ experiences reflect temporary setbacks or learning needs requiring long-term specialized support.
Educators want assessments to be instructionally useful and provide data they can use to help students learn, but not all assessments do that. So what do instructionally useful assessments look like?
In a recent edWebinar hosted by edWeb, a panel of high school seniors from Livingston High School (NJ), each with different career aspirations, discussed the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education and their future. Ella, Ashley, Oishik, and Parker offered unique insights into how AI has influenced their academic lives and shaped their views on their prospective fields. The panel was moderated by Robert Rolling, Livingston’s PreK-12 Supervisor of Business, Technology, and Engineering and a leader in the district’s AI policy and curriculum development, who gave an overview of the Livingston Schools District’s approach to managing AI.
According to our nation’s students, the value of using technology for learning is clear—when used effectively, it helps them develop the skills they need for future success. Less than one-third of students say they have regular access to interactive technologies such as virtual labs, multimedia tools, augmented reality, coding resources, and AI tools that foster critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving. Students report that their best use of digital resources for learning happens on their own time, outside of school, most often through their smartphones.
As school technology gets more sophisticated, so do cybercriminals, but school leaders can’t sit back and wait for someone to hand them solutions. During the edLeader Panel “Cybersecurity in School District Settings: A District Leadership Approach,” three innovative superintendents discussed strategies to try and stay ahead of cyber issues even when the landscape is constantly evolving.
During the edLeader Panel “The Role of MTSS in District Improvement: Aligning Vision and Action,” three top-notch current and former district leaders discussed change management, focusing on how a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) can provide an organizing framework for accomplishing strategic goals. The panelists shared practical strategies to help anyone from seasoned K-12 superintendents to up-and-coming administrators accomplish their district goals and lead confidently.
If we want students to succeed in college and the workforce, they need to be familiar with STEM and CTE, but that’s easier said than done. As important as building sustainable STEM programs is, it can also be very difficult.
Strategic plans. Student engagement initiatives. Academic success goals. Whatever a plan is called, it usually starts full of hope and promise. But, despite all of the time and resources spent creating them, plans often fail. During the edLeader Panel “Beyond the Plan: Measuring, Adjusting, and Realigning Strategies for Success,” experts from The Center for Model Schools discussed the keys to successful plan implementation.
While the required implementation of the Science of Reading (SOR) appears to be a phenomenon that has swept across state legislatures in recent years, the truth is that it has been a “culmination of decades of research into literacy,” according to Dr. Roland Good, a leading literacy expert who is also Co-founder of Acadience Learning and an original author of the DIBELS early literacy assessment.
Maybe you remember the ELIZA chatbot or when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the chess whiz Garry Kasparov. You were probably around for the arrival of Siri, the virtual assistant designed to answer our most pressing questions. A common element of these remarkable events was artificial intelligence (AI)—once a thing of science fiction, now a reality. It’s been around for a while, scaling in the 2020s across fields, including education, where it has transformative potential.