How can schools improve technology procurement? A recent report suggests that school districts improve their education-technology procurement by making the process transparent, communicating more with ed-tech entrepreneurs, so they know what technology is needed and undertaking a "bottom up" approach to planning. The report from the nonprofit Digital Promise and the design firm IDEO finds that such an approach could help bring more innovative and useful technology into schools. Education Week/Marketplace K-12 blog (5/31)
 | With AVI-SPL and Cisco, the Rialto Unified School District improved their ability to share information and provide immersive distance learning. With Cisco T3 TelePresence, AVI-SPL and Cisco allowed students to take virtual field trips and interact with teachers from remote locations across the globe. Learn More | | Middle-school teacher seeks return of Google application that helps with writing The discontinuation of Google Search Story Video Creator is a great disappointment to middle-school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron, who writes in this blog post about her displeasure with Google for shutting down the application she used to combine factual research with narrative writing. She writes an open letter to Google in which she asks the company to return the valuable teaching tool and shares that the favorite project of her students this year was the Google Search Story. Edutopia.org/Heather Wolpert-Gawron's blog (5/31) How student blogs can serve as digital portfolios In this blog post, first-grade teacher Kathy Cassidy writes about how she uses blogs in the classroom, noting that student-created blogs can serve as digital portfolios, where students can post text, videos and audio recordings of their learning. "The beauty of digital portfolios is that as the children and I are constantly assessing their learning in a formative and summative way, the students are also demonstrating their growing knowledge for a wide audience and learning about digital citizenship and appropriate online behavior," Cassidy writes. Powerful Learning Practice (5/30) Other News | Concerns over school safety drive demand for surveillance cameras Motivated by threats to school safety -- at the forefront since a December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. -- many school districts are working to install surveillance cameras in schools. However, the growing demand for the technology also has come with criticism from those who say the cameras go too far. "Constant surveillance, from the time children enter school to the time they leave, teaches the wrong thing about the relationship between the citizen and the government in a democratic society," said Jay C. Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. Education Week (premium article access compliments of EdWeek.org) (6/3) | Mo. district takes a risk with one-to-one program Educators in a Missouri school district say they are taking a risk by spending $900,000 annually for four years to lease enough Macbook Air laptops to equip every high-school student with his or her own device. Officials say the cost, coupled with the lack of hard evidence that one-to-one programs lead to academic improvement, make it a risky venture -- but one that more districts are undertaking. The Kansas City Star (Mo.) (6/2) Other News |  | I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time." -- Charles Dickens, British writer | | Please contact one of our specialists for advertising opportunities, editorial inquiries, job placements, or any other questions. | | Publisher, Education Group: Joe Riddle P: 202.407.7857 ext. 228 | | | | |
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