Student Success

Deeper learning doesn’t have to be expensive, says Stephanie Wood-Garnett, vice president of policy to practice at the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national advocacy group for at-risk students. “Deeper learning is not about buying things, but deeper learning done well could allow us to think more effectively or differently on how to enhance the […]

Educators have offered instruction that goes beyond the rote for many years, but the concept of deeper learning has recently grown in scope as higher education and the economy demand a more complex blend of intellectual and social skills. Today’s deeper learning proponents urge schools to focus on six competencies: mastering rigorous academic content; thinking […]

Editor’s note: CIO Hot Topic is produced in collaboration with CoSN. Districts must provide learning materials that are accessible to all students. Digital accessibility—a challenging undertaking—involves making websites, learning platforms, videos, digital textbooks and portals available to students with physical, visual, speech, auditory, neurological or cognitive disabilities. The consequences of failing to do so can […]

The Syracuse City School District serves more than 20,000 students across 34 schools, most of which have been classified by the New York State Education Department as either “priority” or “focus” schools. These schools have the overall lowest student academic performance on state assessments, persistently low graduation rates, and had shown little improvement. As educators, […]

By combining the plumbing of the internet with heavy-duty encryption, a VPN can help keep a district’s secrets. Under the surface, VPNs use a technique known as tunneling to create an encrypted data path from sender to receiver and back. The key is that everything from the web address to the actual data is encoded […]

In southern California’s Brawley Union High School District, students newly arrived from Mexico study math and science using a university-developed curriculum written in Spanish. In the Omaha Public Schools, bilingual picture books created by district staff supplement the education of students who speak the Karen language of Burma. Despite research showing that native-language instruction improves […]