Report: Schools Should Focus More on Soft Skills

By Joshua Bolkan, THE Journal

A new study from Wainhouse Research finds that a large minority, 39 percent, of education stakeholders say their schools should be doing a better job of preparing students for the workforce. Among more than 1,000 administrators, teachers, students and parents surveyed from North America and the United Kingdom, “many” said they “believe that schools are doing a decent job focusing on the 3 R’s: reading, writing and mathematics, but are not doing as good a job focusing on other aspects of education essential to preparing learners for entering the workforce,” according to the report. Sixty percent of those surveyed said too little emphasis is placed on collaborations with other learners outside the classroom, while 46 and 40 percent, respectively, said there should be more emphasis on group achievement and working in teams.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/04/09/report-schools-should-focus-more-on-soft-skills.aspx

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3 ways technology can support positive behavior in schools

By Karen Gifford, eSchool News

How technology can help you apply Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) in your schools. In Arizona, I’ve helped create an event called the Behavior, Education, Technology Conference (BET-C), which explores how technology can help with PBIS. We just held the fourth annual BET-C in early March. Based on the sessions from this year’s conference, here are three ways technology can support the implementation of PBIS in schools.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/04/10/technology-behavior-054/

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East Pennsboro Area Middle School to receive $400K blended learning grant

by the Sentinel

Michael Sim, EPAMS principal, said being selected for this grant represents a validation of the work the school’s planning team has done for the last nine months. “Our team has dedicated many hours to researching, discussing, and thinking to craft our innovative, new design for our students,” he said. East Pennsboro’s design is based on leveraging technology and innovative instruction strategies to create individually-tailored learning in order to prepare students for college- and career-readiness, the release states. The components of the personalized learning model will guarantee student access to multiple instructional modes each school day.

http://cumberlink.com/news/local/education/east-pennsboro-area-middle-school-to-receive-k-blended-learning/article_751d5bd3-11e3-5188-bc9c-4d49fc1e8f4d.html

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How collaboration is just a modern LMS away

By Michael Lafreniere, eCampus News

Today, the software is a web-based application commonly known as an LMS. With an appropriate LMS, video delivery, conferencing integration, and white board integration with digital inking capabilities, a teacher can collaborate with colleagues and students through the broadcast of synchronous instruction and learning activities online and in-class. The teacher can facilitate collaborative, shareable, personalized note-taking spaces, as well as track student engagement across multiple sections—class and student level insights that assist the teacher much like intentional formative assessment. At the end of the course, the same data collection can be used in the creation of student portfolios of learning outcomes, which are ideal for course and program improvement, as well as, accreditation.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/collaboration-lms-math-377/

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Watch out Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine Learning

By Liam Tung, ZDNet

AWS developers who want to extract meaning and forecasts out of their data now no longer need other hosted machine learning platforms. Public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday unveiled its first product for machine learning – simply called Amazon Machine Learning – to make it easier for AWS developers to extract value from the troves of transactional and operational data their hosted systems collect. The move by Amazon follows IBM’s recent launch of hosted Watson Analytics and Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning, with all three now looking for ways to help developers embed machine learning intelligence into their apps. Google’s own machine learning offering, Prediction API, was launched in 2012.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/watch-out-watson-here-comes-aws-machine-learning/

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Hands on with Office Online and Dropbox: A surprisingly smooth combo

by Ed Bott, ZDNet

Microsoft has been expanding the reach of its Office franchise over the past year, releasing apps for iOS and Android, occasionally even at the expense of its Windows division. But the latest Office expansion comes inside the browser, where anyone with an Office.com account, free or paid, can now link Dropbox accounts for seamless creation, viewing, editing, and sharing of online Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/office-online-and-dropbox-together/

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5 Key Ways To Stretch Your Tech Budget

By Chet Bembenek, THE Journal

The Columbus School District in Wisconsin serves a small community south of Madison, with only three schools and 1,300 total students — about 30 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In other words, we’re just a typical small school district trying to make the most of our limited ed-tech budget. Despite our modest means, we have a fairly robust technology infrastructure. A 10-gigabit fiber backbone connects our three school buildings, all of which have wireless access. We have 100 Mbps of bandwidth out to the public Internet, and we’re bumping that up to 300 Mbps soon. We’re also on our way to having one device for every student in grades 1 through 12 next year. We’ve built out our IT infrastructure with the help of a few simple strategies. Here are five recommendations based on our experience.

http://thejournal.com/articles/2015/04/09/5-key-ways-to-stretch-your-tech-budget.aspx

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