Features Education

On a Wednesday morning in mid-September, a car carrying four high-school students pulls into the parking lot of a mall in Chesterfield, Missouri. Within a few minutes, three more cars arrive. There are 10 students in total, mostly juniors and seniors, all eager for the day ahead. Once inside the mall, they thread through the […]

In Florida, end-of-year grades can be just as nerve-wracking for schools as they are for the students. Each spring, districts throughout the state are given an accountability report, complete with letter grades for every school. Available to the public, these reports can make or break a system’s reputation—and future funding. So when Joe Amato arrived […]

Once a week beginning around 6 a.m., scales, chord progressions and simple ditties emanate from one of the music rooms at White Oak High School in Jacksonville, North Carolina. As Onslow County School District has a robust music program, this is to be expected. What isn’t expected, though, is that local students aren’t creating that […]

By any ethnic or socio-economic standard, California State University East Bay is among the most diverse campuses anywhere. The most in the Golden State, at least in 2015, according to The Chronicles of Higher Education’s Almanac. That’s as much a source of pride as it is a challenge, reminds Chief Information Officer Jake Hornsby, who […]

Budgets permitting, adopting a 1:1 policy seems like a no-brainer. Not only do such measures improve classroom engagement; they can have a democratizing effect by assuring that students from disparate socioeconomic backgrounds have the same personal devices as their classmates. There are caveats, of course. Laptops get lost. They break. Some might even be stolen. […]

A chemistry teacher doesn’t begin teaching safe chemistry at the end of the semester. That lesson starts before the first Bunsen burner is placed under a test tube. The same principle applies for introducing children to the internet, states Jeremy Davis, who has served the 49,000-student Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County, California, since […]

When you think of a typical college classroom, a very particular image comes to mind: the professor standing at the front, with rows of students sitting attentively. For all the ways in which technology has transformed learning, this dynamic remains the default setting at most universities. As chief information officer of Denver’s Regis University, Jagan […]

Standing four stories high and with countless light-inviting windows studding the requisite brick, New England Institute of Technology’s (NEIT) recently completed residence hall isn’t merely the biggest or best student dorm in the school’s history; it’s the first and only. But it’s inside the 123,000-square-foot building where the university—founded in 1940 in East Greenwich, Rhode […]

Forty years ago, if you needed Jack Byrd to repair something—a flickering overhead projector, a crackly PA system—you’d call his office in the technology department of Fort Wayne Community Schools (FWCS). Rest assured, he’d be there to fix it, before moving on to the next school, the next minor malfunction. It was rewarding work, as […]

Ten years ago, most IT departments were small, cash-strapped and concretely vertical in their management; seats at the big table, few and far between. Julie Myers and Samantha Singhal understand how far their industry has come, although both admit there’s still room for improvement. As co-deputy CIOs for the University of Rochester, Myers and Singhal […]