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 […]

It’s early June, and in hundreds of high-school classrooms throughout Georgia’s Bibb County School District (BCSD), students are rapidly tapping and scrolling on their laptops. An air of focus fills the room, so quiet you can practically hear the hands of the clock. To an observer, the attendant task seems like a standard class assignment—a […]

It’s the last week in July, and at Pickens Elementary in Pickens, South Carolina, dozens of students are filing off the bus and into the modest brick school. Over the next four hours, instructors will conduct a series of reading lessons via newly issued iPads. Once the day’s learning is done, the buses will return […]

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 […]

As her teacher conducts the day’s lesson, a student sits in rapt attention, brand new tablet in hand. Hearing a question she knows the answer to, the student’s hand darts up, eliciting the teacher’s go-ahead. When the hour runs out, it’s on to the next class. Only, she won’t be walking down the high school […]

EBay, Equifax, JPMorgan Chase: all have suffered massive data breaches, resulting in millions of stolen records—and identities. Among such giants, health care and finance companies have become particularly vulnerable, with data and dollars being compromised by evermore sophisticated hackers. For the typical school district technology leaders, such ills might feel a world away. After all, […]

Admittedly, Tom DeChiaro leapt into a favorable situation in early 2016, becoming chief information officer and vice president at Drexel University and its then dotted line College of Medicine relationship, after distinguishing himself in two prior roles in academia and the private sector. Entrusted with the continuous fine-tuning of Drexel’s infotech—a vital component in the […]

In most school districts, in order for any new technology plan to achieve true success, the student experience—what they learn in the classroom and how they’re taught to engage with the world beyond—must be paramount. At its core, the initiative being undertaken at North Carolina’s Alamance-Burlington School System (ABSS) is really no different. The approach, […]

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 […]

In and of themselves, report cards can be complicated to decipher—antics of the likes of Bart Simpson aside—but imagine the added challenge as parents try to make sense of them in a foreign or a second language. Now imagine those parents receiving their child’s report card accompanied by a link to a personalized video; in […]