In a landscape of large-scale employment websites, EduOpenings offers an easy-to-use app focused specifically on education, designed to allow job seekers to promote their skills through resumes, videos and other media while giving employers direct access to a diverse group of candidates.

Marshaun Warren, director of human resources and director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Belleville Township High School District, across the state line from St. Louis in Illinois, was drawn to EduOpenings because “I recognized an opportunity to execute not only a wider search for candidates, but also a specialized search that focused specifically on school personnel.”

Having used recruiting platforms for nearly two decades, “the inclusive architecture of EduOpenings also supports and encourages the engagement of diverse candidates,” Warren says.

EduOpenings’s origin story isn’t so much about creating a new business, but about two St. Louis education leaders working to solve problems in their own community. Founders Darryl Diggs, director of equity for the Special School District of St. Louis County, and Howard Fields, assistant superintendent of human resources in the St. Louis County School District, met at a leadership academy and discussed their experiences as Black men working in education. That connection led them to start The State of Black Educators Symposium, which provides networking opportunities.

Participants started asking Diggs and Fields to share job referrals with the group. “It was nothing to get 20 to 30 emails a week with this organization just started,” Fields says. 

“When we first started, it was more so a reflective piece of our own upbringings and trying to find a job,” Diggs says. “There are some platforms still around that look the same as they did 20 years ago, if not 40 or 45 years ago. What would it look like to take an old system and put the power and ownness on the job seeker, giving you an amazing first impression through video or audio? We were thinking about our own 314 area code, the St. Louis region. [EduOpenings] has quickly grown and is now across the country in a variety of states and school districts.” 

With the founders’ connections in Black education, the effort began with a focus on diversity, and grew quickly. From St. Louis, the company expanded to serve the five largest school districts in Missouri, including about 90% of the St. Louis area. Then, Black educators in Chicago, Philadelphia and other major cities started joining. 

Funding the year-old platform with no outside investment to date, Fields and Diggs made their first-ever pitch at the 2023 SXSW Edu Launch event. 

“There isn’t a one-stop shop for educators interested in jobs all across the country,” Fields says. “From a vision standpoint, we would like to get there.” 

By focusing solely on education, he says, the posts “live in a space where people find value.” Diggs says it benefits both the job seeker and the employer and adds a focus on pushing jobs out on social media, building advertisements and helping school districts manage inquiries. 

“Imagine if you are able to jump on a site and see all of those who fit qualifications looking for a job all in one swoop,” Diggs says. “You can be a recruiter. You can see everyone on the site and go after them. It is different than any other space.” 

“EduOpenings is unique because the vacancy postings are brief yet informative and attractive to view,” Warren says. “It is ideal for my situation because I do not have to input large amounts of information to utilize the platform. I can contact the team with the vacancy, and they take it from there. This helps tremendously when you work in a large district.” 

The service is attracting large and small districts alike. The larger ones can promote their openings to a greater, more diverse demographic as they try to keep up with a list of vacancies. The smaller districts use the platform to post their jobs to reach a wider audience. Site data allows employers to view how well their post performed and then make changes to gain more interest. For the job seeker, all posts are education-specific. 

“I know when my phone goes off with EduOpenings, it is a job I am interested in,” Fields says. 

The free service — add-ons come with a fee — continues to grow. What started around 100 job postings per month has grown to roughly 300, all without much promotion. Popular with K-12 districts, it also serves private and charter schools and higher education. Diggs and Field hope pitching the business at places such as SXSW will open the door to grants and funding, which could allow them to grow their team and push national.

“We haven’t been paid a dime in terms of the work we have done,” Fields says. “That is not our why. We are trying to build something responsive.”

He’s also a star in Ben Adler’s 8th-grade science unit on gravity and kinetic energy at Oakland, California’s Downtown Charter Academy, a middle school in the city’s East Peralta neighborhood. Students are designing, building and launching rockets on Macbook Air laptops around their classroom — and trying to keep their “Kerbonauts” on track (and intact) for various space missions.

It’s clever, engaging and far more typical in 2023 than it was before the pandemic. Lessons like these mark a genuine shift in American schools. Indeed, though many campuses reopened in part during the pandemic because they concluded that children were not learning enough using digital tools during virtual learning, late pandemic schooling today is positively saturated with these devices. 

Americans have spent huge chunks of the past three years thinking and talking about schools in binary terms — open or closed, in-person or virtual. But with schools all but universally open and back to a normal state (however imperfect), though, these dichotomies have gotten somewhat blurrier. 

Truth is, we didn’t reopen schools back to “normal” in-person learning over the past few years … so much as we brought daily virtual learning into real-world classrooms. 

It’s the new normal in U.S. public education — and it’s complicated. I’ve visited nearly 100 public school classrooms across three states in the past six months. I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room. Lessons reliably include videos from curriculum vendors and/or the internet. On several occasions, I watched early elementary schoolers hold up badges hanging from lanyards around their necks to unlock laptops to play. Written assignments and quizzes — including Adler’s on rocketry — are often conducted on laptops and submitted online. As students type, teachers frequently project online timer videos with animated graphics and sound effects. 

There’s no question that the pandemic shifted schools’ digital infrastructure. The extraordinary pressures of the past three years of crises forced significant new public investments in closing digital divides. Policymakers and schools poured emergency funding into purchasing devices like laptops, tablets, Chromebooks and internet hotspots so that all students would be able to access online lessons — so much so that supply chains couldn’t keep up. This made a real dent in longstanding digital divides, even if it didn’t wholly close them. Indeed, in January 2021, a survey of teachers still found 35% reporting that few of their English-learning students had reliable internet access. 

It’s far from clear what this means for the present and future of U.S. public education. Teachers I’ve spoken with express ambivalence about the degree to which digital technology has permeated campus. Most say that it’s created both exciting skills and pernicious challenges. 

When Downtown Charter Academy closed on March 13, 2020, it sent students home with two weeks of assigned work. As it became clear that the crisis was serious, DCA acquired digital devices and hotspots to ensure that all families could access distance learning. Within a few weeks, the school had moved its pre-pandemic schedule online. “It was 20 hours per day at first,” says Director Claudia Lee. “But it got easier.” 

But closing device and internet access gaps was just a first step. Many DCA students and families lacked the digital literacy to use and manage these new tools. This was also true across the state. A fall 2020 survey of linguistically diverse California families found that nearly one-third of participants did not understand the pandemic learning instructions they received from their children’s schools. Further, fully one-third of participants responded that they did not have email accounts they could use. 

DCA teachers say that the logistics of the transition were relatively smooth. They also confirmed that they faced many of the problems that plagued virtual learning across the country. Student engagement was a struggle, with some students attending only sporadically and others switching off their cameras under the pretense that their connection was too slow to bear the video. “We visited some homes,” says Lee, “and found some situations that were hard. Kids were trying to learn in kitchens, for example, or other places with lots of noise and distractions around. So we brought a small number of kids back to campus to log on virtually — but socially distanced.”

The school reopened for full-time in-person learning in fall 2021, but it was hardly a return to normalcy. By the end of that school year, DCA students’ academic outcomes were significantly stronger than peers in the surrounding school district, but that was only part of the story. In discussions during a daylong professional development session this January, many teachers noted that students were prone to online distractions and — worse yet — had become increasingly adept at using digital tools and resources to avoid doing their classwork themselves. Students brought these virtual learning habits back to their in-person classrooms. 

“We need to help them understand that your choices become your identity,” said one teacher who asked not to be quoted by name. “Like, ‘If you always lie, you’re gonna eventually be known as a liar. If you always cheat, you’re gonna eventually be known as a cheater.’ George Santos is a great example of why you shouldn’t make lying a habit.” 

And yet, these costs have attached benefits. Teachers are wrangling with new digitally infused questions around academic integrity, yes, but that’s also because they have continued to use Google Classroom and other platforms as part of their courses. These streamline student assignments, teacher grading and subsequent data analysis — and offer the potential for more effective and timely communication with students’ families. Indeed, teachers reported that, at this stage of the pandemic, many more of their families have and can use online communication tools like email, school communication apps (for example), and video conferencing to stay linked up to what’s happening on campus. In particular, Zoom parent-teacher conferences are much easier and more equitable than the old in-person-only model. 

As such, teachers spent much of the family engagement part of the January professional development session discussing how to unlock families’ new digital literacy abilities. Members of the 8th-grade team admit to one another that they aren’t meeting their initial goal of reaching out to at least five families each week through the school’s official communication app — and brainstorm ways to reset and hold one another accountable to that expectation. The 7th-grade team agrees that they could do more to engage students’ families, and devises a process for making and sending a two-minute Friday video explaining what 7th graders will learn in the coming week. Almost everyone agrees that the school needs a meeting to help get families familiar with — and logged on to — the school’s different digital platforms. 

As for the little green Kerbals in their spaceships, Adler emails, “Across all three days, no students were caught running any other program or browsing. A notoriously disengaged student became enraptured, and even turned in good marks on the follow-up assessment.” Students scored reasonably well on a subsequent quiz, with — for example — majorities of the 8th graders correctly identifying “apoapsis” as “the highest point in an orbit,” even though the term did not appear in any of the instructional materials other than the Kerbal Space Program missions. 

So: is digital literacy a key skill (or a skill set)? Or are digital tools a crutch for students? Or some murky mixture of both? These are potent questions for this moment, as worsened teenage mental health, public launches of artificial intelligence tools and concerns about the state of the humanities are creating a national discussion about technology and education. 

I truly don’t know. But I think we’re long overdue for a collective rethinking of just what we want from education technology. As we clamber out of three years of pandemic-steeped K–12 education, it presently feels like we’re drifting to a sleepy acquiescence of any and all digital learning tools without regard for their actual purpose. It’s time for educators, policymakers and families to adopt a more intentional, active stance when making education technology choices — with an eye to avoiding unreflective reliance on these tools.

An unexpected Sunday night resignation just two weeks into the 2022-23 school year left rural Newcastle High School, in eastern Wyoming, without a math teacher to handle three classes each of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2. District curriculum director Sonya Tysdal stepped in as a substitute, but after a couple of fruitless weeks searching for a qualified long-term substitute or replacement, Newcastle needed a sustainable option. That’s how Carnegie Learning’s ClearMath Classroom was born. 

Newcastle already used the company’s High School Math Solution curriculum, so Tysdal asked if Carnegie had a way to help. What emerged was an expansion of an established tutoring service into a full-time classroom provider that now serves students in the Weston County School District and beyond.

“We emphasize small-group instruction and small-group software whenever we can,” says Barry Malkin, Carnegie Learning CEO. “The small-group instruction, together with the tutoring work we are doing, really led to the epiphany there is a needed solution in the market to address the teacher shortage problem. We brought all these elements together into ClearMath Classroom.”

Newcastle’s 90 or so algebra students connect with certified teachers employed by Carnegie Learning through an online portal while in class. Each class is divided between two educators, to keep the small-group mindset going. Students work in pairs to promote collaboration and spend 60 minutes with their teacher virtually, referencing textbooks, taking notes and interacting via the portal. The remaining half-hour of class time is devoted to individually paced independent work. 

A full-time paraprofessional serves as manager and facilitator in the classroom, monitoring student behavior and engagement, communicating with the virtual teachers when needed and troubleshooting technology.

As with any new effort, it wasn’t wrinkle-free. There were technical issues to troubleshoot — such as ensuring students stayed connected to the portal and microphones always worked — and communications snags to work out. For example, Newcastle needed to make sure the teachers provided by Carnegie Learning were in tune with each student’s individualized education program and were aware of logistical changes, such as snow days. But because the school already used the company’s math curriculum and students were already using computers in the classroom, the only new component was constructing an approach that mixed small-group instruction and one-on-one assistance. That was done within a few weeks.

“I’m not sure how we would have provided a quality education for our students without it,” Tysdal says. “It has been very beneficial. It has been imperative to do.” 

Carnegie Learning, born out of Carnegie Mellon University 30 years ago, is an independent company but still relies on the university for research and data. Created with a math focus, the company launched a K-5 math program in February and has recently expanded into literacy and world languages. Malkin says the virtual solutions fit the company’s goal of “producing better educational outcomes across the country.” 

With its success at Newcastle, Carnegie Learning has expanded to a few additional districts around the country, providing a stopgap solution that could eventually evolve into a long-term in-classroom alternative. “I do see the current construct as solving a nationwide crisis today, but I see the product evolving to support differentiating in the classroom tomorrow,” Malkin says. “There is a role for virtual support in the classroom to augment long term.” 

Newcastle recently hired a new math teacher for next school year but will finish out the current year with ClearMath Classroom. “It will always be nice to know that there is an option,” Tysdal says. “If we are in a tight pinch again, this would be something we would definitely look into.” 

She adds, “It is good to know this service is there. It has helped us immensely.”

Digital equity has gained much attention over the last three years of the pandemic. But it’s more than setting a device in front of a child or improving access to broadband. Though skilled educators are the key to unlocking the potential of technology in the classroom, 50% of schools say the steep learning curve for teachers regarding the use of technology is a moderate or large challenge, and half of teachers say a lack of training is a huge obstacle.

Truly delivering on the promise of digital equity means equipping teachers with the tools and training to confidently and effectively use technology. Here’s a roadmap to achieving that, based on what we at Digital Promise have learned through our research and close work with school and district leaders.

School staff need support in using available technology effectively. Leaders set the vision for their school, and that includes how technology is used to enhance teaching and learning. Long before the pandemic, there was a need to better integrate technology into education, especially for students in underserved communities; the pandemic only accelerated that shift. Now, principals must be able to set a vision for their school’s use of technology, identify gaps in digital skills among their faculty and work with teachers to close those gaps. 

At Brooks College Prep, my team and I communicated the rationale behind the focus on technology and created a committee to give teachers an opportunity to learn from and with their peers. Once the vision and expectation around technology were set, and teachers successfully deployed technology in their classrooms, student outcomes soared. Not only did we see a 21% increase in students reaching all four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, we were also recognized for having the highest year-to-year growth on the average ACT composite score (21.8 to 23.2) in the city of Chicago. In 2018, the school was given Blue Ribbon distinction by the U.S. Department of Education, the first high school on the South Side to earn such an award.

School and district leaders must provide high-quality professional development. Strategies for designing personalized professional development can include micro credentials — digital badges that teachers can earn to demonstrate their abilities in a particular digital skill, such as creating digitally inclusive and accessible learning experiences. Micro-credentialing allows educators to focus their professional development on the skills they need or want to improve and then validates their growth in that area.

Digital Promise worked with the Kettle Moraine School District in Wisconsin to reframe how professional learning happens in the district. Teachers assessed their own strengths and gaps in their technology proficiency, using the results to set goals and benchmarks for their learning. They then demonstrated their competencies through samples of their own work, student assignments and personal reflection, all evaluated by their peers. This kind of district-level commitment to high-quality professional development can help educators at any level of proficiency feel supported through personalized, meaningful learning.

School and district leaders can share with teacher preparation programs what they need from graduates. Here’s an ideal scenario: A teacher enters the classroom on Day 1 having already experienced how technology can be used effectively for learning. The teacher has prepared a clear plan for implementing those practices with students and can hit the ground running. Educator prep programs can make that a reality for their graduates. This matters particularly for schools that struggle to attract and retain teachers, such as those with high numbers of children of color and students living in poverty, and schools in rural districts. 

School and district leaders can advocate for educator prep programs to redesign their curriculum to meet the needs of students and districts in the digital age and to consider adopting teacher educator technology competencies. The University of Michigan, for example, now uses a competency-based curriculum that reflects the International Society for Technology in Education’s standards for teachers. To receive the certification, teachers must demonstrate mastery of digital skills through projects such as planning and executing a 30-minute webinar for parents and students. The university’s graduates have skills and practice in engaging students and school communities using technology even before they enter the classroom. 

Prepare students to be the workforce of the future. When students are taught effectively using technology and their teachers model how to leverage it in meaningful and impactful ways, they are better prepared to deploy it themselves. This matters because there is a strong correlation between digital skills and earnings. The National Skills Coalition reports that only 10% of workers with limited to no digital skills are in the top 20% of earnings. Future job opportunities, economic mobility and, perhaps most importantly, personal fulfillment are on the line here when it comes to helping students become digitally proficient.Teachers are key to getting them there. As I learned when I was a principal, an investment in teachers’ powerful use of technology is just as much of an investment in student learning as providing them with the latest technology. From prep programs to the classroom to the district office, there are opportunities at multiple points in teachers’ careers where they can gain the training and professional development needed to equip them with the knowledge, ability, and confidence to create technology-supported, personalized learning for all their students.

OMAHA — On his first trip to Nebraska, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona held a turtle named Oogway in an urban agricultural lab. He rapped a bit in Spanish with teenagers in a construction-focused academy.

And he left Wednesday’s tour of Omaha Bryan High School saying that its career-connected technical academies, which prepare students for college or direct entry into a job, represented what the Biden administration wants to see more of across the country.

“We chose this school today, the day after the State of the Union, because I want to lift up what we’re seeing here,” Cardona said.

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High-paying jobs

What he said he saw in Bryan students — and programs featuring Urban Agriculture; Design & Construction; and Transportation, Distribution and Logistics — are examples of how the country can better meet future demand for “high-skilled, high-paying” jobs expected through the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Locally, there’s a movement to pave the way for some of those jobs in Nebraska. A bill before the Nebraska Legislature would authorize a state match for any federal funds a manufacturer locating in the state would obtain under the CHIPS Act, which the president signed into law in August. The act allocates $54 billion to help rebuild an industry that had fled overseas.

Cardona was escorted through Bryan’s 1,800-student “Bear” territory by students who led him to the urban ag academy’s greenhouse (that’s where he met Oogway the turtle), the logistics warehouse and the hall where students work on framing small houses and other construction projects.

Along his route to different classrooms, he chatted with kids in the hallways, and on a few instances, the former teacher with Puerto Rican heritage threw out some Spanish phrases. Though located in Bellevue, Bryan is part of Omaha Public Schools and prides itself on cultural diversity, as students from more than 30 countries who speak 33 languages are represented in its classrooms.

‘Raise the Bar’

The education secretary has underscored the benefit of speaking more than one language. In his recently announced “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” initiative, he said that learning multiple languages should be expected of U.S. students. And he spoke of administration goals for 2023 that included the need for “reimagining college and career pathways” and to challenge the view that “it’s four-year college or bust.”

Dual enrollment courses for local colleges, Cardona has said, should start at 11th grade and allow ambitious high schoolers to graduate with an associate’s degree or a credential “without paying a penny.”

He has said that the U.S. Education Department will expand opportunities for technical assistance and use of federal funding, and that if the department’s recommended pathways are forged, students could compete better on a global stage.

Highlighting Cardona’s visit to Bryan was a roundtable conversation with about a dozen students who spoke to him about their academic journeys and related job internships — Bryan pairs its students with up to 90 employers that offer job experience.

Making sure he heard from each teen, Cardona said he measured success in part by how the young people viewed the programs. After hearing from the students, he said he was impressed with the “options” the career-connected academies seemed to offer the budding workforce.

“You’re getting valuable skills that are transferable,” Cardona said.

Connection to outside world

For example, Leslie Lopez is in the transportation and logistics academy, where, as part of the curriculum, students pack up boxes filled with food for a pantry. Lopez plans to go into the medical field but said she gained appreciation in the academy for service and “helping people” that she expects to carry over to her future as a doctor.

Also at the roundtable was Bryan Benitez, a senior who already has racked up 38 college credits while in high school. He saw his time in the Advanced Academics academy as a “starting point” for his dream career: neurosurgery.

Cardona said he was impressed with the internship partnership Bryan has with employers, saying internships could lead to a lifelong job. “It gives us that connection to the outside world,” he  said.

Senior Arian Gomez said he chose the transportation and logistics pathway because it aligned with the trade his dad works in. As part of the program, he has an internship with a car dealership.

When he graduates, he hopes to get an associate’s degree to work as an automotive technician and get a commercial driver’s license to drive a truck. Ultimately, he intends to work on a bachelor’s degree so he can move up into the management side of a business.

“You could take your father’s business to another level,” Cardona said. “That’s exciting.”

‘We see you, we see you’

Of Cardona’s visit, Gomez and Benitez said they were proud to be able to showcase their school and teachers.

Dr. Rony Ortega, Bryan’s principal, said that while the technical academies were available in the past at Bryan, this was the first year for “wall-to-wall” academies, meaning that all students must participate in one. Among other officials at the secretary’s visit were OPS superintendent Cheryl Logan. Ortega said he appreciated the Nebraska stop, which marked Cardona’s 38th state he’s visited.

Said Ortega: “Having the education secretary come to Bryan tells our kids, ‘We see you, we see you.’”

For Gomez, the visit by the Latino cabinet member — who told the students he used to earn money by fixing cars — was particularly meaningful because of the auto connection.

“We got to express ourselves with someone recognizable in this country,” said Gomez. “It felt really good.”

After Bryan, Cardona went to La Vista’s Educational Service Unit #3, where he participated in another roundtable conversation — that time with principals, superintendents and therapists to discuss the mental health services provided to students.

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

ChatGPT has been in the headlines for months.  At the University of Texas at El Paso, professors and students are not sure if it is a tool or a threat – or both.

Since its launch in November, the artificial intelligence program has generated concerns over its ability to produce essays, research papers and other written material that appear natural sounding based on someone’s prompts and how it could affect higher education. Instructors appreciate ChatGPT’s abilities, but are leery of how students could misuse the program’s work and submit it as their own.

Those who have tried the free instrument praise its ability to prepare straight-forward responses that are error free in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation. However, they also noted that the writings often lack higher order thinking and sometimes provided factually incorrect information.

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Greg Beam, associate professor of practice in the Department of Communication, said he plans to use it in his introduction to the Art of the Motion Picture course this spring. He called ChatGPT’s responses to his prompts “mechanically immaculate,” but bland in word choice, and lacking context and insights.

A UTEP instructor for more than five years, Beam characterized the program as an academic tool that could be abused so he and other educators will need to explain and demonstrate its proper use. He plans to let students use it to augment course instruction and brainstorm ideas. Additionally, he may assign the program’s writings to students as a critiquing exercise.

“Rather than allowing it to be this forbidden fruit that’s hanging out there that they’re told not to take a bite of, I’m going to say here’s how to use it responsibly because I think it could actually be a very useful resource,” Beam said.

Andrew Fleck, associate professor of English and president of the university’s Faculty Senate, is more cautious. He does not plan to use ChatGPT in his spring classes. Instead, he has asked the Faculty Senate’s academic policy committee to review the university’s statement of academic integrity, which should be in every course syllabus, to determine if it needs to be updated regarding students’ reliance on artificial intelligence to produce their work.

UTEP officials did not respond to a request for comment on any steps the university planned to take regarding ChatGPT.

Fleck, a higher education faculty member for 30 years, recalled how colleagues raised similar concerns as internet search engines became popular in the 1990s. He said some students used technology to cheat, while faculty used it to catch offenders. Since ChatGPT started, other programs have popped up with claims that they can detect AI-generated writings.

“I’ll be curious how it kind of plays itself out in the next year or so,” Fleck said. “It certainly does pose certain kinds of risks, but I guess the question is how effective will ChatGPT be eventually in replicating human thought and human communication.”

UTEP Provost John Wiebe said advances in the accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) have triggered faculty conversations at higher education institutions around the world to include UTEP. He said that after consultations with Faculty Senate leaders about the opportunities and challenges that faculty and students face because of ChatGPT, several faculty committees will work on the topic.

“AI is a tool that can be used to enhance learning, but can also be used in ways that violate UTEP’s Academic Dishonesty policy,” Wiebe said. “We will work to help faculty understand the issues and how their colleagues in other places are responding.”

Deki Peltshog, a sophomore computer science major, said she learned about the new artificial intelligence program through friends and social media, and used it during the winter break. ChatGPT amazed and amused her with its ability to respond to her requests for a song about cats and a poem about eating pizza at night.

The Bhutan native also tested the program’s grasp of languages. ChatGPT has a multilingual vocabulary of more than a billion words. She asked it to translate a simple question into her native language of Dzongkha. She said ChatGPT apologized after she informed it that it gave the wrong answer.

Peltshog, whose spring courses are in math, coding and engineering, said she does not plan to use ChatGPT this semester because she does not trust its grasp of facts. However, she sees its potential as a more direct search engine after it becomes more reliable and updates its content beyond 2021.

“It could become a personalized tutor,” she said. “It would make studying more efficient.”

While some educators see the new program as a threat to academic honesty, others point out that it is just the latest method in a line that includes ghostwriters, research paper mills, exam banks and professional test takers. Critics also point out that such programs could limit a student’s growth as a critical thinker and problem solver.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that developed ChatGPT, seemed to concur in a Dec. 10, 2022, tweet. He said that the company’s new program is “good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview in progress.”

José de Piérola, professor of creative writing at UTEP and director of the department’s graduate studies program, said that colleagues might be giving ChatGPT too much credit.

De Piérola, a computer programmer and consultant for 20 years before he started on a literary path, said there are 20 to 25 artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT. While the new program is superior, it mostly produces generic information about the subject. His point was that you cannot replace human skills when creativity is needed.

The human element was key to Jess Stahl, vice president of data science and analytics at the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in Redmond, Washington. She participated in a Dec. 19 Zoom conversation about ChatGPT that attracted more than 250 participants from around the world.

Stahl, whose research focuses on initiatives that will enable academic institutions to benefit from innovations in technology, data science and artificial intelligence, said instructors should humanize their relationships with students and not try to compete with AI in terms of content. She also advised institutions to build their social and professional networks, and other resources that students could not access elsewhere.

Stahl said that faculty must rethink what they do professionally in and out of the classroom and decide what they can do better than the most advanced technology.

“It won’t be imparting facts, and it won’t be presenting curriculum, and it won’t be evaluating learning, and it won’t be preventing cheating, and all those things,” Stahl said. “What it is going to be is how human and important and valuable can you make your relationships with the learners so that you are doing that skill better than an advanced technology like ChatGPT that can mimic a very fake relationship.”

As a personal aside, de Piérola encouraged students who will see ChatGPT as an academic shortcut to not lose sight of the true goal of a college education and that is to become the best version of yourself.

“That’s why you go to a university,” he said. “If you do that right, then you will get good grades, and a degree, but if you don’t do those things, the rest really doesn’t matter. You’ll just be the same person you were before you went to the university and that would be sad in most cases.”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

ChatGPT is a natural language chatbot powered by a new type of artificial intelligence. It has been trained on billions of words of text, from books, articles and the Internet, and uses this information to generate human-like responses to user queries. But unlike humans, its writing is lightning-fast and grammatically flawless — and is improving at an order of magnitude per year. With a quick Google search, anyone can access ChatGPT. 

As founder at Kaleidoscope, an organization developing modern liberal arts courses for high schools, I’m deep in thought about how ChatGPT will change the education landscape. In the history unit of our Social Sciences for Social Problems class, for example, students write a review of Erika Lee’s book America for Americans. It’s a complex assignment that requires distilling core concepts, coming to a judgment and making a persuasive argument. Here’s what ChatGPT returns, almost instantaneously:

While no one would confuse this with a New York Times book review, it would earn an ‘A’ in many classrooms. And in a nation where just 29% of eighth graders scored proficient on the National Assessment of Education Progress in reading this year, ChatGPT’s output far exceeds the writing of many high schoolers. 

The book review is only a glimpse of what ChatGPT can create. It can transform a poorly worded text message into a professional-grade email and adjust that email’s tone to be warmer or more formal. It can expand a list of bullet points into an essay or contract an essay into a bulleted list. It can generate dialogue between Socrates and Donald Trump as he considers running for president in 2024; it can compose a song about cows in Spanish set to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle”; and it can write a pitch for a Hallmark Christmas movie where you are the star of the meet cute.

For educators, ChatGPT can help generate curriculum, lecture notes, test questions and classroom rubrics — and use those rubrics to grade student work.

With capabilities like these, workers are already embracing ChatGPT. An Ivy League-educated friend tells me that with the tool’s help, “I’m finally able to express myself in prose. I’ve always had a strong perspective, but I struggle to articulate it in writing. Now I can give a list of bullets to ChatGPT, and it says what I mean better than I can. It’s a 100% improvement in my writing.” 

The obvious fear of many educators is that ChatGPT will lead to a raft of plagiarism, especially since the tool is currently free, the output is unique — asking the same question twice yields two different replies — and it does not record previous answers in any searchable way. Already, a high school English teacher tweeted to me that when he took ChatGPT to his department chair, she immediately set out to get the website blocked. 

But banning ChatGPT is a bit like mandating abstinence-only sex education: It may be well-intentioned, but it’s not going to be effective, and it’s certainly not going to prepare students for the real world. 

Educators face a choice: They can dig in their heels, attempting to lock down assignments and assessments, or use this opportunity to imagine what comes next. 

ChatGPT will change the relative value of human skills, and therefore what students should know and be able to do. Now that anyone can easily generate a five-paragraph essay that hews to standards, student perspective and voice — not often emphasized in schools — will matter more. And in a world where written words are cheap, verbal communication — again, often not emphasized in schools — will become a more salient signal of competence. It will also become even more important to develop students’ capacity to discern what’s true from what’s merely polished and authoritative-sounding, as more and more ChatGPT-generated text appears online, often without factual vetting. 

Revising classwork to include ChatGPT could involve students collaborating with the chatbot throughout. In the book review assignment, for example, they could critique ChatGPT’s output and write a reflection on how and why they used the tool and where its capabilities worked and fell short. The key is that the students, rather than ChatGPT, are still in control of the assignment.

ChatGPT has the potential to unlock powerful new learning capabilities. While before, a student could only read other people’s writing, draw conclusions about their techniques and try to apply them to her own work, she can now watch her own thoughts be transformed into prose. This direct translation has the potential to teach students to be better writers. 

ChatGPT can summarize complex passages for struggling readers, giving them enough of a toehold to read the original text; rephrase difficult concepts in ways that can help students relate them to their own experiences; and provide a second opinion to students on their written work. With capabilities like these, ChatGPT has the potential to be a tool that finally enables robust personalized learning at scale.

Given the changes ChatGPT will bring and its potential to aid student learning, our team at Kaleidoscope will be revising our materials, including updating our assessments to either withstand ChatGPT or to include it as part of the process. 

If schools ban ChatGPT and the tools that will follow it, they’ll be tightening the screws on old ideas about what education should be. If, instead, they find ways to harness its capabilities, they’ll be preparing students to navigate a world in which artificial intelligence is the warp and human ingenuity the weft of a bold new tapestry of human achievement.

This year’s list, publishing amid new calls for mask mandates and yet another spike in hospitalizations, powerfully frames our surreal new normal: mounting concerns about historic test score declines; intensifying political divides that would challenge school systems even if there weren’t simultaneous health, staffing and learning crises to manage; broader economic stresses that are making it harder to manage school systems; and a sustained push by many educators and families to embrace innovations and out-of-the-box thinking to help kids accelerate their learning by any means necessary.

Now, 2½ years into one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American education, these were our 22 most discussed articles of 2022: 

The COVID School Years: 700 Days Since Lockdown 

Learning Loss: 700 days. As we reported Feb. 14, that’s how long it had been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era. On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents, teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance. 

With spring approaching, there were reasons to be hopeful. More children had been vaccinated. Mask mandates were ending. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities that have long been baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. And teachers are burning out. To mark a third spring of educational disruption, Linda Jacobson interviewed educators, parents, students and researchers who spoke movingly, often unsparingly, about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” Read her full report. 

Related:

• A 700-Day Parental Awakening: Marguerite Roza, of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab, reflects on the past years
  
• 700 Days of Missed Opportunities — and Lingering Inequities: Robin Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, looks back (and forwards)
  
• 700 Days of Balancing Student Safety Against Keeping Classrooms Open: Superintendent Pedro Martinez reflects
  
• 700 Days in Pictures: 24 months inside one resilient school district
  
• The COVID School Years: See our special report, looking back on 700 days of the pandemic

Threatened & Trolled, School Board Members Quit in Record Numbers

School Leadership: By the time we published this report in May, the chaos and violence at big city school board meetings had dominated headlines for months, as protesters, spurred by ideological interest groups and social media campaigns, railed about race, gender and a host of other hot-button issues. But what does it look like when the boardroom is located in a small community, where the elected officials under fire often have lifelong ties to the people doing the shouting? Over the last 18 months, Minnesota K-12 districts have seen a record number of board members resign before the end of their term. As one said in a tearful explanation to her constituents, “The hate is just too much.” Beth Hawkins takes a look at the possible ramifications.  

Related:

• Million-Dollar Records Request: From COVID and critical race theory to teachers’ names & schools, districts flooded with freedom of information document demands

Nation’s Report Card Shows Largest Drops Ever Recorded in 4th and 8th Grade Math

Student Achievement: In a moment the education world had anxiously awaited, the latest round of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in October — and the news was harsh. Math scores saw the largest drops in the history of the exam, while reading performance also fell in a majority of states. National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr said the “decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.” Even as some state-level data has shown evidence of a rebound this year, federal officials warned COVID-19’s lost learning won’t be easily restored. The 74’s Kevin Mahnken breaks down the results.

Related:

• Lost Decades: ‘Nation’s Report Card’ shows 20 years of growth wiped out by two years of pandemic
  
• Economic Toll: Damage from NAEP math losses could total nearly $1 trillion
  
• COVID Recovery: Can districts rise to the challenge of new NAEP results? Outlook’s not so good 

Virtual Nightmare: One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic

Mental Health: As the debate over the lingering effects of school closures continues, the term “pandemic recovery” can often lose its meaning. For Jason Finuliar, a California teen whose Bay Area school district was among those shuttered the longest, the journey has been painful and slow. Once a happy, high-achieving student, he descended into academic failure and a depression so severe that he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility. “I felt so worthless,” he said. It’s taking compassionate counselors, professional help and parents determined to save their son for Jason to regain hope for the future. Linda Jacobson reports. 

16 Under 16: Meet The 74’s 2022 Class of STEM Achievers

This spring, we asked for the country’s help identifying some of the most impressive students, age 16 or younger, who have shown extraordinary achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. After an extensive and comprehensive selection process, we’re thrilled to introduce this year’s class of 16 Under 16 in STEM. The honorees range in age from 12 to 16, specialize in fields from medicine to agriculture to invention and represent the country from coast to coast. We hope these incredible youngsters can inspire others — and offer reassurance that our future can be in pretty good hands. Emmeline Zhao offers a closeup of the 2022 class of 16 Under 16 in STEM — click here to read and watch more about them.

A ‘National Teacher Shortage’? New Research Reveals Vastly Different Realities Between States & Regions

School Staffing: Adding to efforts to understand America’s teacher shortages, a new report and website maps the K-12 teaching vacancy data. Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with shortages currently localized in nine states. “There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states. … It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said author Tuan Nguyen. Marianna McMurdock reports on America’s uneven crisis. 

Meet the Gatekeepers of Students’ Private Lives

School Surveillance: Megan Waskiewicz used to sit at the top of the bleachers and hide her face behind the glow of a laptop monitor. While watching one of her five children play basketball on the court below, the Pittsburgh mother didn’t want other parents in the crowd to know she was also looking at child porn. Waskiewicz worked on contract as a content moderator for Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors the online behaviors of some 5 million students across the U.S. on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts in an effort to prevent youth violence and self-harm. As a result, kids’ deepest secrets — like nude selfies and suicide notes — regularly flashed onto Waskiewicz’s screen. Waskiewicz and other former moderators at Gaggle believe the company helped protect kids, but they also surfaced significant questions about its efficacy, employment practices and effect on students’ civil rights. Eight former moderators shared their experiences at Gaggle with The 74, describing insufficient safeguards to protect students’ sensitive data, a work culture that prioritized speed over quality, scheduling issues that sent them scrambling to get hours and frequent exposure to explicit content that left some traumatized. Read the latest investigation by The 74’s Mark Keierleber. 

Students Continue to Flee Urban Districts as Boom Towns, Virtual Schools Thrive

Exclusive Data: A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, data shows many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared with 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%, according to data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends. Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. While many urban districts were already losing students before the pandemic, COVID “accelerated” movement into outlying areas and to states with stronger job markets. Experts say that means many districts will have to make some tough decisions in the coming years. Linda Jacobson reports. 

‘Hybrid’ Homeschooling Making Inroads as Families Seek New Models

School Choice: As public school enrollments dip to historic lows, researchers are beginning to track families to hybrid homeschooling arrangements that meet in person a few days per week and send students home for the rest of the time. More formal than learning pods or microschools, many still rely on parents for varying levels of instruction and grading. About 60% to 70% are private, according to a new research center on hybrid schools based at Kennesaw State University, northwest of Atlanta. Greg Toppo reports.

Educators’ ‘Careless’ Child Abuse Reports Devastate Thousands of NYC Families

Student Safety: Thousands of times every year, New York City school staff report what they fear may be child abuse or neglect to a state hotline. But the vast majority of the resulting investigations yield no evidence of maltreatment while plunging the families, most of them Black, Hispanic and low income, into fear and lasting trauma. Teachers are at the heart of the problem: From August 2019 to January 2022, two-thirds of their allegations were false alarms, data obtained by The 74 show. “Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ … It also could be 10 million other things,” one Bronx teacher said. Read Asher Lehrer-Small’s report. 

The Contagion Effect: From Buffalo to Uvalde, 16 Mass Shootings in Just 10 Days

Gun Violence: May’s mass school shooting in Texas — the deadliest campus attack in about a decade — has refocused attention on the frequency of such devastating carnage on American victims. The tragedy unfolded just 10 days after a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. In fact, The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings with at least four victims in just 10 days. Read Mark Keierleber’s report. 

Teachers Leaving Jobs During Pandemic Find ‘Fertile’ Ground in New School Models

Microschools: Feeling that she could no longer effectively meet children’s needs in a traditional school, former counselor Heather Long is among those who left district jobs this year to teach in an alternative model — a microschool based in her New Hampshire home. “For the first time in their lives, they have options,” Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, an investment firm supporting online programs and ed tech ventures, told reporter Linda Jacobson. Some experts wonder if microschools are sustainable, but others say the ground is “fertile.” Read our full report. 

Facing Pandemic Learning Crisis, Districts Spend Relief Funds at a Snail’s Pace

School Funding: Schools that were closed the longest due to COVID have spent just a fraction of the billions in federal relief funds targeted to students who suffered the most academically, according to an analysis by The 74. The delay is significant, experts say, because research points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning. Of the 25 largest districts, the 12 that were in remote learning for at least half the 2020-21 school year have spent on average roughly 15% of their American Rescue Plan funds — and districts are increasing pressure on the Education Department for more time. Linda Jacobson reports.

Slave Money Paved the Streets. Now, This Posh Rhode Island City Strives to Teach Its Past 

Teaching History: Every year, millions of tourists marvel at Newport, Rhode Island’s colonial architecture, savor lobster rolls on the wharf and gaze at waters that — many don’t realize — launched more slave trading voyages than anywhere else in North America. But after years of invisibility, that obscured chapter is becoming better known, partly because the Ocean State passed a law in 2021 requiring schools to teach Rhode Island’s “African Heritage History.” Amid recent headlines that the state’s capital city is now moving forward with a $10 million reparations program, read Asher Lehrer-Small’s examination of how Newport is looking to empower schools to confront the city’s difficult past. 

Harvard Economist Thomas Kane on Learning Loss, and Why Many Schools Aren’t Prepared to Combat It 

74 Interview: This spring, Harvard economist Thomas Kane co-authored one of the biggest — and most pessimistic — studies yet of COVID learning loss, revealing that school closures massively set back achievement for low-income students. The effects appear so large that, by his estimates, many schools will need to spend 100% of their COVID relief to counteract them. Perversely, though, many in the education world don’t realize that yet. “Once that sinks in,” he said, “I think people will realize that more aggressive action is necessary.” Read Kevin Mahnken’s full interview. 

In White, Wealthy Douglas County, Colorado, a Conservative School Board Majority Fires the Superintendent, and Fierce Backlash Ensues

Politics: The 2021 election of four conservative members to Colorado’s Douglas County school board led to the firing in February of schools Superintendent Corey Wise, who had served the district in various capacities for 26 years. The decision, which came at a meeting where public comment was barred, swiftly mobilized teachers, students and community members in opposition. Wise’s ouster came one day after a 1,500-employee sickout forced the shutdown of the state’s third-largest school district . A few days later, students walked out of school en masse, followed by litigation and talk of a school board recall effort. The battle mirrors those being fought in numerous districts throughout the country, with conservative parents, newly organized during the pandemic, championing one agenda and more moderate and liberal parent groups beginning to rise up to counter those views. Jo Napolitano reports.

Weaving Stronger School Communities: Nebraska’s Teacher of the Year Challenges Her Rural Community to Wrestle With the World 

Inspiring: Residents of tiny Taylor, Nebraska, call Megan Helberg a “returner” — one of the few kids to grow up in the town of 190 residents, leave to attend college in the big city and then return as an adult to rejoin this rural community in the Sandhills. Honored as the state’s 2020 Teacher of the Year, Helberg says she sees her role as going well beyond classroom lessons and academics. She teaches her students to value their deep roots in this close-knit circle. She advocates on behalf of her school — the same school she attended as a child — which is always threatened with closure due to small class sizes. She has also launched travel clubs through her schools, which Helberg says has strengthened her community by breaking students, parents and other community members out of their comfort zone and helping them gain a better view of the world outside Nebraska while also seeing their friends and neighbors in a whole new light. This past winter, as part of a broader two-month series on educators weaving community, a team from The 74 made multiple visits to Taylor to meet Helberg and see her in action with her students. Watch the full documentary by Jim Fields, and read our full story about Helberg’s background and inspiration by Laura Fay. 

Other profiles from this year’s Weaver series: 

• Texas’s Alejandro Salazar: The band teacher who kept his school community connected through COVID’s chaos
  
• Hawaii’s Heidi Maxie: How an island teacher builds community bridges through her Hawaii school
  
• Georgia’s Allie Reeser: Living and learning among refugees in the ‘Ellis Island of the South’
  
• See the full series: Meet 12 educators strengthening school communities amid the pandemic

Research: Babies Born During COVID Talk Less with Caregivers, Slower to Develop Critical Language Skills

Big Picture: Independent studies by Brown University and a national nonprofit focused on early language development found infants born during the pandemic produced significantly fewer vocalizations and had less verbal back-and-forth with their caretakers compared with those born before COVID. Both used the nonprofit LENA’s “talk pedometer” technology, which delivers detailed information on what children hear throughout the day, including the number of words spoken near the child and the child’s own language-related vocalizations. It also counts child-adult interactions, called “conversational turns,” which are critical to language acquisition. The joint finding is the latest troubling evidence of developmental delays discovered when comparing babies born before and after COVID. “I’m worried about how we set things up going forward such that our early childhood teachers and early childhood interventionalists are prepared for what is potentially a set of children who maybe aren’t performing as we expect them to,” Brown’s Sean Deoni tells The 74’s Jo Napolitano. Read our full report. 

Minneapolis Teacher Strike Lasted 3 Weeks. The Fallout Will Be Felt for Years

Two days after Minneapolis teachers ended their first strike in 50 years this past May, Superintendent Ed Graff walked out of a school board meeting, ostensibly because a student protester had used profanity. The next morning, he resigned. The swearing might have been the last straw, but the kit-bag of problems left unresolved by the district’s agreement with the striking unions is backbreaking indeed. Four-fifths of the district’s federal pandemic aid is now committed to staving off layoffs and giving classroom assistants and teachers bonuses and raises, leaving little for academic recovery at a moment when the percentage of disadvantaged students performing at grade level has dipped into the single digits. From potential school closures and misinformation about how much money the district actually has to layoffs of Black teachers, a lack of diversity in the workforce and how to make up for lost instructional time, Beth Hawkins reports on the aftermath. 

After Steering Mississippi’s Unlikely Learning Miracle, Carey Wright Steps Down

Profile: Mississippi, one of America’s poorest and least educated states, emerged in 2019 as a fast-rising exemplar in math and reading growth. The transformation of the state’s long-derided school system came about through intense work — in the classroom and the statehouse — to raise learning standards, overhaul reading instruction and reinvent professional development. And with longtime State Superintendent Carey Wright retiring at the end of June, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken looked at what comes next.

As Schools Push for More Tutoring, New Research Points to Its Effectiveness — and the Challenge of Scaling it to Combat Learning Loss

Learning Acceleration: In the two years that COVID-19 has upended schooling for millions of families, experts and education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means for coping with learning loss: personalized tutors. In February, just days after the secretary of education declared that every struggling student should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week, a newly released study offers more evidence of the strategy’s potential — and perhaps its limitations. An online tutoring pilot launched last spring did yield modest, if positive, learning benefits for the hundreds of middle schoolers who participated. But those gains were considerably smaller than the impressive results from some previous studies, perhaps because of the project’s design: It relied on lightly trained volunteers, rather than professional educators, and held its sessions online instead of in person. “There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable,” the study’s co-author, Matthew Kraft, told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time.” Read our full report. 

Florida Teen Invents World’s First Sustainable Electric Vehicle Motor

STEM: Robert Sansone was born to invent. His STEM creations range from springy leg extensions for sprinting to a go-kart that can reach speeds of 70 mph. But his latest project aims to solve a global problem: the unsustainability of electric car motors that use rare earth materials that are nonrenewable, expensive and pollute the environment during the mining and refining process. In Video Director James Field’s video profile, the Florida high schooler talks about his creation, inspiration and what he plans to do with his $75,000 prize from the 2022 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Learn more right here, and watch our full portrait below: 

At the Silicon Schools Fund, a nonprofit foundation supporting transformative K-12 schools, we have seen educators working on creative solutions to this problem, and the innovations they have come up with are worth paying attention to. 

For example, the National Summer School Initiative, a fund grantee, built a partnership where teachers from across the country work virtually with expert mentor educators to deliver high-quality summer school courses. Teachers meet with their mentors and colleagues via videoconference to discuss lesson plans and the best ways to deliver instruction to their students. The initiative served over 30,000 students this summer, from New York City to Texas, showing a unique way to expand the reach and impact of some truly excellent teachers. Similar approaches could be used during the regular academic year, particularly in hard-to-staff areas like science, math and foreign languages, and in rural settings where specialized teachers are hard to come by, or to broaden the electives a school can offer. Stepmojo is working on such an approach to remotely deliver high-quality classes with pilots in Tulsa, Cleveland and Denver. This allows great teachers to reach more kids and students to have access to more opportunities.

A clear finding has emerged from education research that high-dosage tutoring from a consistent tutor with a proven curriculum offers some of the best results of any intervention studied so far. There is also consensus around the science of reading and how to best teach literacy to young students. Ignite! Reading (also a fund grantee), BookNook and On Your Mark have brought these two practices together by training a cadre of remote tutors to deliver literacy curriculum based on the science of reading to students via Zoom. In Oakland, California, KIPP Bridge Rising Academy used remote reading tutors from Ignite! to help struggling readers get back on track.  The result? Students gained 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week they were in the program.

I’ve seen firsthand the relationships tutors develop with kids and the progress on reading that students can make in just 15 minutes per day of one-on-one instruction. This is a strategy that should be greatly expanded. Doing so gives students access to caring tutors using high-quality curriculum, and creates a pathway for remote tutors to enter into the teaching profession.  

In addition, ed tech products have shown they can truly improve classrooms by increasing student learning and lightening the load on teachers. Math software like ST Math and Zearn, science software like Amplify and language arts software like ReadWorks (to name a few) have demonstrated real impact — allowing students to focus their time each day by working on exactly what they need, exactly when they need it. Such blended learning models allow teachers to, in effect, lower their class sizes by having some students working online while others meet in small groups with the teacher. I know that many parents, like me, are reluctant to add more screen time to their children’s lives. But thoughtful use of technology in classrooms can free teachers from lecturing at the front of the room, create new opportunities for one-on-one instruction and increase collaboration and discussion as students spend more time working with their teacher individually or with their classmates.

All these examples demonstrate solutions that make the teacher’s job more sustainable, expand the number of students great educators can reach and enable students to drive their own learning. In the 75 high-performing schools that our foundation has helped launch over the last 10 years, we are consistently struck by how the combination of excellent teachers plus increased student voice and choice in learning creates the building blocks for a great school culture and positive student outcomes.

After three school years disrupted by the pandemic, making classrooms great is both harder and more important than ever. If we, as a country, don’t help our schools thrive, we will cement the inequality of outcomes in our schools for generations to come. The school staffing dilemma cannot be solved by just spending more money or trying to hire more teachers when there already are not enough high-quality applicants. Instead, this is the time to adopt innovative programs, focus more attention on each student, expand the impact of the best educators and reshape the role of the teacher. Doing so helps both teachers and students, which is the only kind of solution that has a chance to succeed.

So, it follows that Scratch’s approach to summer learning loss is a multi-week online camp in July and August that invites all students to build interaction, with both coding and one another. 

Created 15 years ago as part of a MIT project to introduce less clunky software for kids to learn coding, Scratch has over 42 million active users across 200 countries, with an average age of 12. The original program, designed for kids 8 to 16, was intended for use outside of school, but the software — which teaches coding but has plenty of academic skills built in — has been heavily adopted by schools and educators. For ages 5 to 7, Scratch Junior can be used even by children who may not be able to read. With simple-to-use block-style coding, users — dubbed Scratchers — can create their own projects, whether digital stories, games or animations, and share that within the community. 

“Kids just enjoy it, it is fun,” says Shawna Young, the Scratch Foundation’s executive director. “They are able to create these projects. It is based on this idea of yes, you are learning, developing computational skills, but at the heart of the work you are really having fun and creating something you care about.” 

The nonprofit foundation operates the online platform with the goal of opening coding opportunities to a more diverse demographic. 

“We want kids to have this learning experience that is highly accessible and engaging and not limited to certain socioeconomic backgrounds,” says Young. “If you want to address inequity, start by not having barriers that are financial.” 

Scratch is free, supported by funders including the LEGO Foundation, AT&T and Google. The nonprofit also partners with community organizations around the world in the Scratch Education Collaborative, to make learning available to students in traditionally underrepresented communities. From 40 organizations the first year, there are now 91, with representation from over 20 countries. Scratch also did a recent outreach to kids with an American Sign Language tutorial to expand creative opportunities in coding for children who are deaf or hard of hearing. 

“We recognize how children learn is important, and it is not equitable,” Young says, noting that teachers tend to focus on the “what” — the reading, writing and arithmetic — rather than on how that impacts children’s enthusiasm, interest areas and potential career paths. By creating a free tool and partnering with organizations that can incorporate it into their own education-focused programs, Scratch aims to create excitement and bolster when it comes to critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration.

Christan Balch, the foundation’s community engagement manager, helps operate the online summer Scratch Camp. Open to anyone on the platform, the camp is free. “At the heart of the camp, you will find it is a shared journey toward project creation,” Balch says. “It is an open invitation for Scratchers to create around a theme they might not have thought about otherwise and do so in a kind, caring and collaborative community with others from around the world.” 

This summer’s theme is “fantastical fantasies,” with each week offering a new theme and project prompts (the Aug. 15 week theme is “mythical worlds”). Scratchers can get as involved as they like — some come and go weekly, while others dive in daily — and Balch says she enjoys seeing children take on leadership roles and get tapped as camp counselors. “I love that part,” she says. “Counselors are Scratchers in the online community who are helpful, kind and encouraging. We are seeing leaders forming in the online community and acting as resources and mentors for others.” 

The goal of the camp is to “keep kids (academically) engaged while teaching them skills,” Balch says. But they also get to explore concepts they are truly interested in, and that opens doors for all sorts of projects. Balch says she recently logged into a camp day and saw an animated piece of artwork of a unicorn-dragon-cat that a young person had invented, a story about discovering a trail of glitter and a game that placed the world’s slowest tree in a race. 

“I see these wide range of things and get excited,” she says. “Scratchers are the most creative, funny, kind, most expressive kids I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and Scratch camp is an example of that.” 

Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping with homework and providing real-world examples of hard-to-grasp concepts. 

“Our ambition is to create a private tutor equivalent for every child,” says Miral Shah, chief technology officer for the Palo Alto, California company. “The majority of students could never afford a private tutor, so we wanted to build a private tutor that mimics all the qualities of a tutor. We can help personalize the attention and assess a student’s knowledge continually.”

Flexi can start simple, with a student asking a basic science question within CK-12’s online system, such as: “Does photosynthesis happen at night?” or “Define photosynthesis.” Flexi answers the question and backs it up with content, such as video simulations or real-world examples, Shah says. 

“Ask any question to the Flexi chatbot and it will help answer the question in a way a private tutor will,” Shah says. 

Beyond just doling out answers, Shah says Flexi, which launched in May 2020, assesses a student’s understanding of a concept and suggests next steps, whether a next lesson or flashcards to review. 

Tutoring has emerged as a key strategy for helping students rebound from COVID learning loss, but tutoring resources remain in short supply. President Joe Biden used his recent State of the Union address to urge his fellow citizens to volunteer as tutors. Providing a digital solution to that problem has become a potential growth point for education tech companies. But while CK-12 and others, such as Amira Learning, offer AI-driven tutoring, the concept of online tutoring itself remains relatively new and lacks research to prove its effectiveness. That hasn’t stopped the experimenting. 

Cheryl Hullihen, a special education science teacher at Absegami High School in Galloway, New Jersey, says Flexi has helped her students become more independent in finding answers to questions, while also teaching them how to formulate questions to find both general and specific information about a topic or concept. 

“I think that this is an important life skill for students,” she says. “I always explain to students that I don’t expect them to memorize definitions and equations, but that I want them to be able to find the information that they need to answer a question or investigate a problem. Students are able to see how the way that they ask a question, and the wording of their question, can produce different results.” 

Shah says Flexi’s goal is to support students. That’s why AI is needed. “If a student is struggling, we give them multiple hints,” he says. “If they are still struggling, we show them some flashcards because they are probably getting deterred by vocabulary items. Sometimes they just forget about a concept. The whole idea is to give personalized help to each student. Each student gets different and personalized support.” 

If a student still doesn’t get it, Flexi will alert their teacher.

CK-12 is a nonprofit formed in 2007 with a focus on digitizing education in a way that wasn’t just about turning analog education into accessible online content, but about using the full power of digital, such as with artificial intelligence. CK-12 says 218 million people have used its free learning tools worldwide, including FlexBooks digital textbooks. 

Starting with math and science because of its universal language, CK-12 content mixes text, multimedia videos, interactive simulations and adaptive quizzes. “That is how we started challenging ourselves in terms of what can digitization do for education,” Shah says. The content remains flexible so teachers can customize it to fit their needs.

The AI-powered student tutor Flexi takes FlexBooks a step further, providing more interaction for the students and additional insight for educators. 

Hullihen says students in her classes use Flexi when working on an assignment in FlexBooks, but they also turn to it for activities outside of that. For example, students were working on a lab investigating potential energy and used Flexi as a resource to find equations and answer the analysis and conclusion questions. Shah says the goal is to provide enough support to get students to the correct answer, but there is no roadblock if a student wants to jump straight to the finished product.   

A byproduct of the constant interaction between the student and the system is feedback for the teachers, a tool that’s become a mainstay of modern ed tech and personalized learning. FlexBooks was designed to allow educators to add it to their curriculum, allowing assignments via FlexBooks through popular online content learning systems such as Canvas. The Teacher Assistant product, designed for educators to work with FlexBooks, tracks student understanding of assignments and delivers data to the teacher on their progress. 

For example, if a bulk of students miss a particular question on an assignment, CK-12 flags that for the teacher, letting them know students didn’t understand the concept. This can help teachers see a deficiency in student comprehension, while potentially helping educators rework curriculum so the same issue doesn’t happen in the future.

“Teachers are excited about the insight piece, getting a chance to see how students are doing in a lesson,” says Kaite Harmon, CK-12’s senior program manager.  

Shah says as students continue to learn digitally, he wants to make the process more relevant. “We have this unique opportunity that nobody has ever had before,” he says. “As a community, I hope we can all pitch into this to get the learning outcomes students deserve.”

Ignite! Reading trains its instructors — mainly college students working toward a teaching degree — using materials from the National Council on Teacher Quality. They are then paired with young students across the country to run daily 15-minute tutoring sessions via Zoom. 

Murphy says the program provides not only reading support, but a personal connection that helps children stay engaged — each session starts with a simple “how are you?” and “tell me about your day?” And unlike artificial intelligence and similar apps that require teachers’ involvement, Ignite! Reading puts no demands on their time or attention. 

“We wouldn’t want to add something for teachers to do,” Murphy says, noting that adaptive responsive computer programs still require regular teacher involvement. “The self-reliance of the [Ignite! Reading] program is important. It operates itself and we are looking for the tutors to respond. Our job is making sure the students are in attendance and online.” 

Jessica Sliwerski, CEO of the nonprofit Open Up Resource, says the pandemic exacerbated the nation’s literacy problem and that the key to proficiency is having young students, ideally in first grade, “crack the code” of the English language. To help, she pitched the Ignite! Reading concept to Zoom, and the tech company funded a pilot program for summer 2021. During that period, while working with low-income, multilingual and special education students, “we found we were able to outpace the reading instruction they would get in a regular classroom setting,” Sliwerski says. The nine-week program showed improvement 2½ that of a regular classroom. This success led to the first school partnership in fall 2021 with KIPP Bridge Academy in Oakland, California, helping Ignite! Reading learn to work directly with schools, build a trained tutoring corps and expand.

“Teachers talk about how it has enabled students who would otherwise not get intensive one-on-one instruction they need,” Sliwerski says. While students improve their literacy comprehension, she says, they also feel socially and emotionally supported and can better understand what the teacher is teaching in other subjects. “Imagine being a third grader who can’t read the word ‘mug’ and go from not reading a word to reading paragraphs of text and how that fundamentally shifts their ideas of learning and feelings about themselves,” she says. 

In January, the nonprofit Ignite! Reading extended to 325 students in six schools in three states. April marked the next phase of expansion, adding another seven schools, now with 13 schools serving 630 students across California, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, North Carolina and Indiana. This fall, it will expand to approximately 20 schools, focused on young learners, especially first grade. 

Ignite! Reading currently has 90 tutors and this spring partnered with Eastern Oregon University to further extend its reach. Tutors all receive one week of up-front training, followed by a nine-week certification process that mixes additional instruction, coaching and their first live tutoring sessions with students, which are recorded and reviewed. Once certified, tutors can start taking on as much work as they want. “Tutors are paid, this is a job and there is an expectation they implement feedback in real time,” Sliwerski says. “We are finding our tutors get really good at teaching reading really fast.” 

In the model, supported by Open Up Resources, schools pay for the tutors’ time, while the nonprofit, through grants and philanthropy, funds administrative, training and other costs. Sliwerski says it is important for schools to invest in the process to treat literacy with the urgency it needs. 

Circle City Prep connected to Ignite! Reading through a referral from a colleague of Murphy’s and secured grant money to try it out. “What was compelling about the program,” Murphy says, “is you put it into place in the school year, jump in and not disrupt the flow of the day because it was only 15 minutes, is virtual and one-on-one. It is pretty easy to get off the ground and identify which kids you need to pull.”

Circle City Prep started with 10 students, all in second or third grade, who had the greatest need to develop foundational literacy skills. While still too early for data from Circle City’s on potential literacy improvement, Murphy says that not only have the logistics of adding the program been smooth, but teachers have seen an increase in confidence in their students. She expects data to show that the program has improved the children’s reading ability. 

“We are excited to see how this impacts students and have enjoyed working with them,” Murphy says. “I think the idea is strong, and we are excited to see the impact.”

The Kansas City-based nonprofit connects companies and schools so innovative ed tech products can be measured and evaluated in real-life classrooms, and those insights can be reflected in the formulation of the finished piece. Leanlab awards a Codesign Product Certification to signify that participating companies partnered with a school and implemented that feedback. 

“We want to give teachers and school administrators a quick way to understand if an ed tech product reflects the insights of educators, students and parents — the true end users in education — and was built for the realities of classroom environments,” Adorno says. 

Four companies have been awarded the certification, and Leanlab has six more nearing the end stage of the process.

Adorno initially founded Leanlab to offer a place for people to create fresh ideas that were directly connected to teachers — what she called a “community-driven innovation lab.” But the model quickly turned toward hosting design-thinking workshops and then an incubator program that worked directly with tech companies. 

“We realized we needed to get even closer to the school community voice and get those insights directly into innovation,” Adorno says. “We needed to place ed tech product into our network to improve the product directly. At the same time, we are measuring and evaluating the extent the product works for the classroom.”

Adorno says that by joining with 20 school district partners, mainly across Kansas and Missouri but now with a national reach as far as California and New York, companies can remove their own biases during testing by using an impartial classroom environment for assessment. 

Brandon Burns, technology director at Clinton County R-3 School in Plattsburg, Missouri, says participating with Leanlab has multiple benefits. “Obviously, having a product at the end that better meets your needs is a huge advantage to participating in the process from early stages,” he says. “It also increases buy-in from a teacher perspective because it makes the entire use of the product immediately relevant to the user.”

The mix of schools working with Leanlab represents the “greater American population,” Adorno says, but more than 60% are Title I — and Leanlab has a particular interest in schools serving Black and Latino students. Adorno says Leanlab looks to partner with companies searching to finalize proof of concept on a viable product, but that are still open to incorporating feedback from classrooms. 

So far, the nonprofit has worked with companies focused on intervention tools for core instruction subjects, such as math, or social-emotional learning. The first to earn the certification are Boddle Learning, Classcraft, Levered Learning and Sown to Grow.

“Our approach to product design has always been fueled by feedback from real-world users, but working with Leanlab allowed us to speed up the cycle,” says Mitch Slater, CEO of Levered Learning, a personalized math enrichment program. “During the pandemic, being responsive and adaptive was more critical than ever, and that mattered most to teachers and students.”

Edna Matinson, Boddle Learning CEO and co-founder, says the way Leanlab prioritizes feedback from the end users, both students and teachers, offered a high level of value for the game-based learning platform.

Leanlab wants to make research more accessible for companies while allowing schools — each with its own focus — an opportunity to test products that may fit specific needs. Backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Leanlab offers grants to teachers and schools participating in studies.

Burns says the financial incentive to the district makes the commitment possible, but teachers also get to have a say in the early stages of product revisions. “Teachers know going in that they are going to be asked to provide feedback on understanding and usage, and being active in that process really raises the level of participation and overall understating of the product,” he says.  

Triumfia Fulks, CEO and co-founder of CodeAlgo Academy, an in-class computer science program, part of the next wave of companies seeking certification, says the process has proven invaluable. “The overwhelming responses and interactions from the teachers and students are something we had not planned for,” Fulks says, “and we are greatly appreciative, as we believe their thoughts and feedback will truly impact our success.”

Adorno says another dozen companies are getting prepped for in-school testing for the fall, and Leanlab’s goal is to have 50 codesign studies by 2025. “This is a new way to develop more impactful products,” Adorno says. “That is the signal we are trying to send, that we can develop future-facing tools in partnership with schools.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Leanlab and The 74.

Social distancing, masks and confining students to their classrooms caused an “explosive amount of mental health needs,” from lack of focus to outright aggression, said Heather Long, a former counselor in the Orange East Supervisory Union district.

“I started to watch as more and more restrictions were being placed on kids,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t reach the needs.”

That feeling of helplessness is one reason Long left her job in December — joining others who’ve stepped away from traditional schools and transitioned to alternative education models during the pandemic. Now she’s running a microschool out of her New Hampshire home as part of Prenda, a network of tuition-free, small-group programs in six states. Teachers making the leap into such programs are finding parents willing to join them. 

“For the first time in their lives, they have options,” said Jennifer Carolan, a former teacher in the Chicago area and now a partner with Reach Capital. The investment firm supports online programs and ed tech ventures, such as Outschool, with thousands of online classes, and Paper, a tutoring platform that states and districts have adopted using federal relief funds.

Traditional schools, Carolan said, haven’t kept pace with what teachers want in the workplace, particularly flexible schedules. And after a “hellish two years,” some are gravitating toward positions that personalize learning for students while offering a better work-life balance.

Prior to the pandemic, schools lost about 16% of their teachers each year, according to federal data. This year, multiple surveys point to scores of burned-out teachers who say they are planning to leave the field and anecdotal reports of mid-year departures. Rand Corp. data from last year showed that long hours, child care responsibilities and COVID-related health concerns were the main factors.

Traditionally, about two-thirds of teachers leaving the classroom have moved into other jobs in K-12. Staying at home to care for a child or other family member is the second most common reason. But since the pandemic, many are also finding private sector positions — often related to education.

With no hard national data yet available on teacher departures this year, experts say there’s no evidence of a mass exodus.

But there are signs in some states and districts that predictions of increased turnover are well-grounded. In Massachusetts, for example, turnover rates were 17% higher in the fall of 2021 than in 2020, and in the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, “separation announcements” of teachers and other licensed staff are well above pre-pandemic levels. 

The question is whether microschools and similar models will continue to be a viable alternative for those leaving district schools. Chad Alderman, a policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University who follows trends in the teacher workforce, is skeptical they are sustainable. 

“If even a few kids age out or move or just opt for a different placement, that would put the microschool at risk,” he said. “Absent some sort of consistent funding stream, they would face economic pressure to either grow into a more traditional school or else cease operations.” 

Data last year from Tyton Partners, a consulting organization, showed that many families who left districts for pods and microschools were sticking with the model. At the start of the pandemic, some experts warned that pods and microschools would only worsen inequalities, drawing well-off families who could afford the cost. States such as Arizona and New Hampshire have since provided public funding to increase equity. And some networks focus on diversity, such as SchoolHouse — a platform that matches families with microschool teachers and attracted $8 million from investors last year.

‘A second shot’

Some teachers searching for new options have applied for jobs with Sora Schools, a private, online program now in its third year and serving 150 students, mostly on the East Coast. The school’s founders plan to expand in the fall of 2023 and eventually add in-person sites.

“The ground is fertile,” said Garrett Smiley, the company’s co-founder. 

Several of the school’s teachers — called “experts” — joined the program during the pandemic and he gets a few hundred applications for each open position. The application of Angela Anskis, who learned about Sora on LinkedIn last summer, stood out. 

She was teaching in a Philadelphia charter school, Boys Latin, when she began weighing a move. The school — and other public schools where she worked — didn’t offer students the choice to study what interested them, she said. After the school reopened, she found herself writing the same lesson plans for history, civics and geography that she always had.

“Once you’re teaching the same thing over and over and over again it’s hard to be passionate,” she said. “I would dread going into school. I thought that was part of being an adult.”

Anskis always wanted to be a teacher. As a kindergartner, she drew pictures of her future classroom. But returning to school after remote learning, she felt boxed in and considered leaving education completely. Sora, she said, gave her a “second shot.”

Sora educators are allowed to either focus full time on curriculum design or work directly with students — one difference that attracts teachers tired of spending nights and weekends on lesson plans, Smiley said. Experts teach six-week “expeditions” — deep dives into topics in multiple subject areas. 

A humanities expert, Anskis has taught a unit on fashion history and blended English and current events into an expedition on banned books. Class discussions focused on “And Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins raising a chick, and “Maus,” a graphic novel on the Holocast that was recently removed from classrooms in a Tennessee district. Students researched why some groups might be opposed to the books and read the banned titles with their parents’ permission. 

Class sizes are small — 10 to 12 students — and Anskis said she can take a walk when she wants. 

“I have so much more control over my life,” she said.

But not every teacher who has left the classroom during the pandemic set out to pursue new opportunities. Some felt pushed out.

Shatera Weaver was the dean of culture at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a New York City public school in Queens, where worked as an adviser for middle and high school students.

Originally granted an exemption from the city’s vaccine mandate because she has sickle cell anemia, Weaver learned in October that her accommodation would not be renewed. She was among the 1,400 New York City employees put on leave without pay because they were unvaccinated. 

Now she’s designing curriculum for EL Education, a nonprofit that provides English language arts materials and teacher training. She also teaches yoga for a nonprofit, and strangely finds herself leading movement classes for young children in a public school. 

“I have been quite unhappy. I miss my purpose-fulfilling job, and feel guilt for leaving — though it was out of my control,” she said. “I do not enjoy working from home. I miss the in-person connection and collaboration.”

Weaver hopes to join those who have launched new schools and wants to design either a public or private program for Black students — “much like an HBCU, but the grade school version.”

Teachers in alternative models said they appreciate the freedom to bring their own interests and personality to instruction. Long, in New Hampshire, took her six students — including her own two children — on a ski trip during the winter. Her program includes outdoor excursions for science and nature writing.

“I feel passionate about the ability to try new things and not be shot down,” she said. 

This fall, she’s joining a former middle school science teacher to expand the program to 15 children. And she refers other teachers to informational sessions on Prenda, which the state supports through grants to school districts. 

“I don’t want to turn families away,” she said, “and I don’t want to be the Prenda monopoly in town.”

Join The 74 and VELA Education Fund for a virtual conversation about why teachers leave the classroom to launch nontraditional education programs Wednesday, June 15, at 1 p.m. ET. Sign up here.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides funding to the 74 and the VELA Education Fund, which has supported Prenda.

Our Worlds launched to highlight Native American history via modern-day technology, putting what founder and CEO Kilma Lattin calls “code to culture” and pushing Native American civilization forward. Lattin says Our Worlds offers a full suite of technology — virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence — to capture all the components that make a culture. 

Our Worlds created proprietary XR360 technology using 360-degree video overlaid with content. Both written and spoken Native language is superimposed over everyday objects or landscapes; artifacts are inserted into real-time environments; modern landscapes merge with historical images so users can see what a place looked like at certain points in time.

“The tool we have created,” says Catherine Eng, Our Worlds co-founder and chief technology officer, “can provide a view of a different reality for a different place.” 

The app itself has multiple avenues for exploration. One option depicts Native artifacts virtually, allowing exploration through a hologram-like function, while another lets users explore the items, such as the tule boat, in their historic locations. Users can open the app when on the beach, for example, and use the camera mode to pan across the sand. These boats then pop up along the shore in an augmented reality state. Kumeyaay professor Stanley Rodriguez provides a narration that explains the boats’ history and how to harvest the reed-like tule plant and use it to build a canoe. 

Geolocation settings personalize Native history to the user’s location and offer primary-source accounts, such as a Choctaw Code Talkers lessons that features a four-minute video reconstructing messages used on the World War I battlefield. It’s a vivid demonstration of how the Choctaw language helped change the course of the war.

“What we are able to do is geolocate cultural content wherever it is relevant,” Lattin says. “If there are stories in Austin, Texas, relevant to that place, we can build a story and geolocate it there.” In the less than two years Our Worlds has existed — and only the few months that the beta version has been available — the app has grown to include content in San Diego, Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., and even France. “We are bringing a lot more meaning to place,” he says. 

Augmented reality, Lattin says, gives a window into life the way it was centuries ago. “If you find yourself in Times Square and want to know what was there before the buildings and pizza and lights,” he says, “use our software to scrub back and erase the buildings and connect with primary sources who know about the land from before, giving more meaning to the places we live, work and travel.” 

Eng says the potential for K-12 curriculum means Our Worlds could become a powerful teaching tool. “We have a lot of ideas about cool stories that could complement what is being taught in the classroom,” she says. “We are very interested in finding ways to serve that as best we can.” 

The big picture of Our Worlds, Lattin says, enables education to unfold around you where you go. As Our Worlds builds out a larger library of primary source content, from digitizing maps to show how a place once was, dropping artifacts onto sandy beaches or telling historical stories, Lattin says this is about more than Native American culture. It is about all culture.

Since winning the SXSW Launch competition, Lattin — who started with his own Native American background — has been talking with other cultural groups to help tell their stories. “We want to take a communal approach to world building where there is no shortage of communities we can serve, no shortage of cultural stories we can tell,” Lattin says. “We want to make this relevant for everybody, take a different approach to building digital futures with immersive realities.” 

K-12 students use the Chromebook to manage nearly every aspect of school, from completing assignments to taking notes to conducting research. But kids often struggle to write on the screen with their finger, and many stylus products — pen-shaped devices, often with a rubber tip for writing on a touchscreen — simply aren’t durable enough. 

Logitech, an independent consumer electronics company, saw a need to create a sturdier, more easy-to-use stylus. And in designing its new Logitech Pen, the company incorporated feedback from actual students — on size, comfort and especially the shape.

The most input came from about 100 K-12 kids at the rural Panama Central School in western New York. Fifth-grade math teacher Pamela Warner had met a Logitech education researcher at a conference and was soon at the forefront of beta testing the new stylus.

“This is something that was new for me,” Warner says. “I have never been part of research and development and prototyping and things you read about. It was exciting for me and exciting for my kids. If this is something that can benefit my students, it is worth my time and energy, so let’s go. It was a really fun experience.” 

Not only did Warner’s students participate in the testing, but she brought various types of 3D-printed prototypes to classes across multiple grades, giving the pens trial runs and taking the opportunity to deliver lessons about private-sector business. “We always talk about how we can bring real-world experiences to our kids,” she says. Serving as the largest test group for Logitech did just that. 

Finding a product that worked “really allowed students to easily transition from paper and pencil to digital,” she says. “Their work was much clearer, they felt more confident in their work.” 

An eighth-grader named Brooke says she uses a stylus whenever she’s writing or drawing. “Before I had a stylus to use, I was writing with my finger,” she says. “That was very difficult for me, and my writing was not very clear. The stylus made doing my digital work much easier for me. My math work was very clear, and drawing in my free time was so much fun.”

“It was fun to test out,” says a sixth-grader named Alex. “It was fun to try the different prototypes that were given and to provide feedback for the final design.” 

During the testing, Warner gave the students exercises in drawing shapes and writing, then had them answer questions and give feedback on which of the three prototypes they liked best. In all, roughly 100 students ranging in age from 7 to 18 participated — about one-fifth of the school population.

Warner says the students took their roles seriously. “There was no goofing around,” she says. “There was really just this level of engagement and excitement.”

The final Logitech Pen, which debuted Jan. 18 for shipping in April, features a triangle-like form favored by the students. There are no buttons to push to turn the stylus on, and it automatically connects to USI-enabled Chromebooks with no pairing required, enabling student collaboration or Pen sharing. The water-resistant Pen comes with a three-year warranty and has a damage-resistant plastic tip that can be removed with pliers for replacement. The battery lasts for 15 days of regular school use on one charge and can be recharged with the same cord students use for their Chromebooks. Every aspect — including 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, enabling students to create lines or characters more clearly than with a finger or rubber-tip stylus — was designed for the school environment. And it comes in yellow, like a traditional pencil.

The triangle shape was steered not just by ergonomic experts, but by the kids. “Talking with representatives from Logitech, they said it really was the students’ feedback that helped determine the shape,” Warner says. “The younger elementary students said it was more beneficial to them and allowed them to hold it easier. It fit in their hands better, they weren’t slipping with it and it felt more natural. Looking at the data, a good majority of my students picked the triangle.” 

“We worked with students early on around form, shape and size to understand what the different needs were from a student perspective and an educator perspective,” says Gaurav Bradoo, Logitech for Education head of portfolio. “That led us to, ‘How do we make this the most comfortable stylus possible?'” Feedback from students also made clear how the Pen would fit in their hands, leading the designers to incorporate a silicone, no-slip grip that extended farther than originally planned to accommodate the different ways students held the device. 

“It was a super-fun experience for me as an adult to really bring a real-world experience to students,” Warner says. “We are just this small, rural school in western New York — people in Buffalo don’t even know where we are — and we are helping make decisions that will affect students and teachers worldwide.”

“People seem to be waking up to the reality that ed tech is no longer a separate category and that nearly everything students do has a technology component,” says Bart Epstein, CEO of the EdTech Evidence Exchange. “Accordingly, educators are demanding more information about which students are engaging with various tools — how frequently and successfully.” 

Ryan Baker, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, says that during the pandemic, school districts adopted pretty much anything they could. There were great platforms that contributed to a better learning experience for students while providing quality data for teachers, and poor platforms that Baker says were basically a waste of time, made for an unpleasant experience and provided no benefits for learning. 

Because of this mass adoption, teachers had an opportunity to see a wealth of options and try some things they wouldn’t have before. And that means a big shift coming in 2022, as successful platforms will continue to see growth — even if not at the rate seen at the height of the pandemic  — while others will be cast aside. “A lot of the teachers who adopted something really quickly” during the pandemic “are de-adopting it really quickly,” Baker says. “The vendors who have high-quality offerings, their numbers aren’t dropping below where they were pre-pandemic.” 

What does this mean for 2022? 

Epstein says that while some districts are still spending stimulus money just to spend it instead of taking the time to research and evaluate their options, most have a better understanding of technology than they did before COVID-19 struck and are demanding information about the tools students use. Dan Carroll, former teacher and founder of Clever, a company that helps school districts integrate ed tech solutions, says that more than half the teachers he’s surveyed expect to continue using most of the new technology they’ve adopted. But the pandemic still left a giant learning loss hole across the country — and that’s where ed tech may focus. 

“The next big thing is going to be tutoring and quasi-learning center experiences for students who have fallen behind,” Epstein says, even though, he notes, the transition will endure a “giant mess” that wastes money in the process as people figure out the best way to implement the technology. 

With districts not set up to hire local, outside tutors and then run a completely new program that integrates their work with classroom teachers’ lessons, Epstein believes tutoring represents a market that technology companies should fill. “Some students need ongoing tutoring support for a few classes,” Epstein says. “Others were socially promoted last year and are so far behind that what they need is someone to teach them an entire year of math. We’re starting to see more real-time tutoring embedded into various programs, and I expect that trend to continue.” 

The ability to provide tutoring virtually offers an opportunity, he says. 

Baker agrees. He says virtual tutoring will expand in the coming years, led by an effort to link both computer-based and human tutoring in one application for improved efficiency and effectiveness. “We will see a lot more of that over the next couple of years,” he says. 

Baker also hopes to see a greater push into simulation technology, applications that make it easy for teachers to integrate tech directly into the classroom while students experience a new skill or learn a new concept through a hands-on virtual experience. 

Through it all, Baker and Carroll say, the best companies will not only provide a quality experience for the students in a given classroom, but collect useful information for the teacher. 

“I don’t think teachers or administrators want another big thing right now, so, with that in mind, I think the next big thing in ed tech will be about sustainability, improving experiences for end users, finding ways to collect information about what’s working and what needs improvement and making sure that the massive investments that have been made in ed tech over the past 18 months show value,” Carroll says.

He expects popular tools will make teachers’ lives easier by streamlining operations and saving time, as will technologies that can help students master a missing skill or get tutoring support without putting more of a burden on the classroom teacher. Those, he says, “will be in high demand.”

More than 56 percent of respondents said these students’ formal education was significantly disrupted, but they were not the only children to have suffered: Most did not believe they were disproportionately affected as compared to their English-speaking peers, despite evidence to the contrary.

The answers were gleaned from a survey conducted in October by Off2Class, a company that provides curriculum, assessments and professional development tools to ESL teachers. The seven-year-old for-profit is headquartered in Canada but serves more than 90,000 students in 120 countries.

Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents were teachers: The others were tutors. Roughly half live in the United States though many are Americans living and working in other countries. 

Several of the questions were answered on a sliding scale though teachers were able to write their responses to open-ended queries. The results reveal their concerns about the long-term consequences of lower expectations for English language learners — and about their backsliding, especially in the area of grammar.

Some respondents were concerned about students’ mental health and the return of behavioral problems usually seen in elementary school — getting out of their seat at inappropriate times and name-calling — while others wondered whether students’ enthusiasm for school would return.

“Most of them just logged in on Zoom, left the computer and pretended not to care,” one educator wrote. “My main concern is that it has made them less interested in studying/engaging in future classes.”

Still others focused on the difficulty of learning a new language without close interaction with school staff.

“I think ESL learning is extremely difficult over the internet when it comes to pronunciation,” another educator said. “Students benefit from being able to mimic mouth movement and that can get lost on video chat.”

More than 44 percent of survey-takers said their schools supplied them with sufficient technology to weather the shutdowns. But more than a quarter disagreed.

It’s not surprising, then, that more than 62 percent of respondents paid out of pocket for some of the tools they needed to serve their students during the pandemic: They spent hundreds — or, in some cases, even thousands of dollars — on additional materials, including books, computers, routers, printers, webcams, headsets and memberships to online educational resources.

But no matter what they purchased, problems persisted. Motivation was a significant hurdle for students learning at home. Not only did they face a massive disruption in their lives because of school closures, but they also wrestled with a faltering economy and in many cases, lost wages for themselves or their families.

Educators said they, too, felt the strain: While many respondents reported an even greater passion for their work — one said the pandemic, “has only increased my desire to improve myself so I can be of further use to my students” — some were clearly overburdened.

Not all teachers received the help they needed from their schools. While more than 48 percent said they were supported by their employers during the crisis, nearly 20 percent strongly disagreed with the statement. More than 58 percent of respondents said their stress levels rose sharply during the crisis.

“The way we are treated, the amount of work versus pay, the disrespect and disregard of teacher’s mental health,” one teacher began, “I feel like quitting for good every single day.”

Despite the burnout, there were bright spots: Nearly half the respondents — 46 percent — said their confidence in online teaching skyrocketed during the pandemic. Kris Jagasia, CEO and co-founder of Off2Class, was glad to see teachers build their skills in this area.

“Looking forward, now that ed tech is here to stay, it’s really important that technology be considered very purposefully to make sure the right investments are being made for ELLs,” he said. 

Some respondents were reached through a Facebook group founded by Off2Class while others were contacted by email through the company’s customer database. Most use its software and were incentivized to participate through T-shirt giveaways and/or a $25 credit toward the purchase of the company’s goods.

The 74 contributed several questions to the survey, including those on student retention.

The results, collected between Oct. 22-29, were telling: While some educators might have wished for English language learners to have repeated a grade, only 22 percent recommended this for their own students.

Tim Boals is the founder and director of WIDA, an organization that provides language development standards, assessments, and resources to those who support multilingual learners. Based out of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, WIDA has 41 member states and territories which use their language standards and follow their guidelines for teaching these children. 

Boals is well aware of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on traditionally underserved populations, including multilingual learners, but does not believe retention is the answer: He said schools should remember language acquisition takes time.

The real problem, he said, is some educators’ lack of faith in these children: If teachers label them unsuccessful, the children themselves will believe they are destined to fail.

“If we see kids as ‘behind their peers,’ the danger is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that denies them the future opportunities they need,” he said. “There are plenty of anecdotal examples of people going through most of their school careers at the bottom and then something happens that shows them their potential greatness and they turn it around.”

Success depends on a schoolwide buy-in, with every adult on campus working to create a welcoming and engaging environment for newcomer children and committing themselves to helping them learn English while they master content subjects. All this, Boals said, while respecting and building upon their students’ own languages and cultures.

“It’s a big job, but there are plenty of examples of schools that are succeeding,” he said. “We need to share those examples and ensure that educators have the resources and understanding to create and sustain those learning spaces for multilingual learners.”

In 1971, a trio of Minneapolis educators, using a hulking teletype machine connected to a mainframe miles away, designed the legendary game of westward expansion (and dysentery) that would help revolutionize personal computing. Despite more than 65 million copies sold, they never saw a dime.

Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?

A long, long time ago in Minneapolis, this question loomed over a small group of eighth-graders.

Appearing on a teletype machine — basically a primitive computer keyboard connected to a printer — at Jordan Junior High School, the strange question broke open the world of The Oregon Trail. Decades later, the title remains perhaps the most influential educational video game ever created, one that endures today as its influence is still being felt across the gaming industry.

Here’s the thing: If you thought the first kids to play this game were millennials in the 1990s, or even Gen Xers back in the 1980s, think again. The first students to experience The Oregon Trail were Baby Boomers, born in the late 1950s and now old enough to be grandparents. 

The date: Dec. 3, 1971.

The Oregon Trail is that rarest of artifacts, a computer game that predates the rise of the personal computer by about five years — even the first rudimentary video arcade and TV computer games were still a year off. Built by an unlikely trio of undergraduate teaching candidates, its first young players encountered it on a paper roll fed into a hulking teletype, connected by a phone line to a mainframe computer miles away. There were no pictures or graphics, only lines of type and the occasional ringing bell. 

It was mesmerizing.

Don Rawitsch, then 21 and a student-teacher at Jordan, had developed it originally as a dice-and-card game, laid out on a long butcher paper map. He’d been assigned to teach an eighth-grade history unit on westward expansion, and he wanted to do something new and interactive. Then, one evening just before Thanksgiving, one of his roommates came home, saw what Rawitsch was doing, and envisioned something completely different. 

“I saw this map on the floor and I said, ‘Oh, this looks interesting,’” said Bill Heinemann, then teaching math across town. The pair, along with three other roommates, were all just months away from graduation at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., about 40 minutes south. Heinemann had taken a few programming classes and played some basic simulation games — Civil War logistics and lunar landers among them.

“There wasn’t much out there that was very fun,” he recalled. 

Then he saw Rawitsch’s map, telling him, “Oh, this would be a perfect application for a computer.” He showed the map to another roommate, Paul Dillenberger, who was also teaching math. Dillenberger liked the idea and signed on as Heinemann’s debugger.

Rawitsch was delighted. He told them he needed it in 10 days.  

Thus began a mad dash to code the game in BASIC at a teletype at Bryant Junior High, where Heinemann and Dillenberger taught. The unit sat in an anteroom to the janitor’s closet, where there was space for just the teletype and one extra chair.

Over a week and a half, the trio laid out a basic narrative in which players loaded up a covered wagon with food and supplies and lit out from Independence, Mo., in April 1848, for Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Day by day, unforeseen difficulties arose such as illness, bandits, and bad weather, and players tried their hands at a selection of mini-games asking them to hunt and ford rivers. Players won by making it all the way to western Oregon with at least a few members of their party still alive. 

The trio also programmed a few surprises to keep players on their toes.

“I wanted to make it so that it was fun, and I wanted to make it so that it was worth playing again,” Heinemann recalled. So he had the game generate “enough random things” along the trail such that playing even a dozen times brought something new and unexpected.

He programmed the game to randomly hand players an assortment of snake bites, wild animal attacks and broken wagon wheels. They’d occasionally get lost in the fog. And, of course, they’d sometimes succumb to disease — over the decades, “You have died of dysentery,” added in a subsequent version, became the game’s defining meme.

On Dec. 3, Rawitsch dialed the number to the district’s mainframe, snuggled a telephone receiver into place, and began moving groups of students through the game’s paces.

It was an instant hit. Students came to Rawitsch, asking if they could play before or after class. Lines would form down the hall each morning as students waited for a chance to try again. For many, it was the first time they’d sat down in front of anything even resembling a computer. 

Because Rawitsch was able to reserve the teletype for just a week, he had to think creatively. So instead of letting students play individually, he had to combine them into groups of four or five. That turned out to make the game more compelling.

“They’d use this as an opportunity to do some group problem-solving,” he said, recalling arguments about who exactly did what in the game. “After a while, when they figured out that their time in class was going to run out if they kept wasting time arguing over decisions, somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t we vote on it?’ So they kind of created democracy on the fly.”

Each democracy also functioned as a meritocracy — the hunting mini-games required players to type words like BANG or BLAM as quickly and accurately as possible. Kids recruited the best typist in the group.

At the end of the week, Rawitsch had to relinquish the teletype, rolling it into a colleague’s classroom. The experiment came to an end, and the trio prepared to wrap up their work in the two schools. But before they did, they printed out a few copies of the 800 or so lines of code, tore off the three-foot scrolls and took them home.

‘Trailheads’

The five-day stretch of play at Jordan Junior High that December might have been the end of The Oregon Trail. But in 1974, Rawitsch took a job at a new nonprofit called the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), which sought to bring access to educational software to schools statewide. 

By the early 1970s, Minnesota was a proto-Silicon Valley, with four of the U.S.’s biggest computing companies — UNIVAC, Control Data, Honeywell and IBM Rochester — setting up shop there in the years before the California-born personal computer took over in the popular imagination. And while most schools at the time looked upon computers simply as tools to, well, teach about programming more computers, MECC’s founders took a broader view, creating a library of instructional software on a variety of topics that any school statewide could use for free. When his bosses put out a call for innovative products, Rawitsch volunteered to find the paper roll and type out the code, and soon the game was available to anyone with a link to the state consortium’s mainframe. 

Teachers began taking notice. The game quickly became MECC’s most popular title. As desktop computers began to sprout in classrooms, MECC spun off a for-profit company that sold millions of copies of The Oregon Trail and other early titles nationwide. 

A new generation of coders added graphics, sounds, and music to create the versions of The Oregon Trail that most kids have played since. By then, Rawitsch had moved on, but in 1995, a decade after the game first appeared on Apple II computers, MECC President Dale LaFrenz told an interviewer that The Oregon Trail accounted for about one-third of MECC’s $30 million in annual revenue. One estimate has put the total number of copies sold at more than 65 million.

Because they gave the game to the consortium in 1974 without any expectation of being repaid, the original creators never saw a dime. Actually, they weren’t even widely recognized as its creators until 1994, when MECC brought them together for a celebration of the game at the Mall of America. After MECC handed each of them “Trailheads” jackets — a play on Deadheads — Dillenberger joked to a reporter, “I got a jean jacket and a copy of the game instead of owning an island somewhere.”

In interviews, none of the three — by now all hovering around retirement from careers in teaching and tech — expresses any bitterness about the way things turned out. If not for MECC, Rawitsch said, the original game would have had no home at all, with no way to convert it a few years later from mainframe to PCs. The consortium’s subscription system also made it possible for the game to find fans among students and teachers nationwide in the 1980s and 1990s.

“I feel pretty proud of what we accomplished and how many people we reached,” said Dillenberger. Since MECC feted them at the mall, “We’ve been on TV, we’ve been in articles and podcasts. It’s kind of constant,” Dillenberger said. “I’ve got two other people trying to get a hold of me right now.” Loyal fans have created a reproduction of an early Macintosh-compatible version that’s playable today.

Eventually the state sold MECC to an investment group that was bought by a larger group. The intellectual property of MECC — by now no longer a consortium but a corporation — soon became part of a failed acquisition involving the toy company Mattel. Had it been successful, we might have actually seen Barbie traversing the Oregon Trail. The move was so ill-conceived that it earned a chapter in a 2005 business book on mergers and acquisitions titled Deals from Hell. 

Not the first edu-game

The Oregon Trail didn’t actually represent the first known use of a computer simulation in school. That honor goes to a group of IBM programmers and teachers in Westchester County, N.Y., who in the mid-1960s developed The Sumerian Game, a sort of Dungeons and Dragons in the Fertile Crescent, said Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. 

But The Oregon Trail stands out for being sensitive to its players — many of Rawitsch’s students were Native American, and the designers were aware of that. “One of the things that the game doesn’t do, for instance, is have the pioneers fighting Indians,” Dyson said. “It would’ve been very highly likely that a game in the ’70s would have that. But in fact, the interactions with Indians and Native Americans in there, it’s generally about providing food or that sort of thing.” 

The latest version, developed for mobile devices by the firm Gameloft, goes further, promising “respectful representation” of Native characters, with playable stories “celebrating the history and cultures of the peoples who first lived on this land and still live here today.”

At its heart, Dyson said, The Oregon Trail stands out for a simpler reason: “It’s a good game.”

It mixes resource management with an engaging “hero’s journey” narrative. “The game is very well balanced,” he said. That has helped it endure for so long — players can download the latest version in one of 14 languages. 

For these reasons, it’s in the Strong’s World Video Game Hall of Fame, one of only 32 games so honored and one of just two education-related games.  

‘You often died, which is kind of fun’ 

In some ways, The Oregon Trail had perfect timing, appearing on personal computers just as they were beginning to colonize suburban desktops and classrooms.

Gary Goldberger, president and co-founder of FableVision Studios, a Boston-based learning games company, remembered growing up in the suburbs of Rockland County, north of New York City, as computers began appearing. The Oregon Trail may have been a one-player game, but he and his friends “just played it as a collective …. We would always do group decision-making, which is kind of the model that I like in general. It’s something we put into our games: How do we get people to talk outside of the game? And how do we have collaboration?” 

He and his friends never actually thought of The Oregon Trail as an educational game. “We just thought of it as a game that we were playing, which is like the best of what we always try to achieve,” he said.

Starting with the BANG-generated hunting, the game basically invented the mini-game, a quick challenge within the larger one that’s still used in the biggest-budget commercial video titles, such as Assassin’s Creed, which tasks players with becoming a locksmith, among other things. At a more basic level, Goldberger said, the game put players in charge of their own fate — and wasn’t afraid to kill them to show that the frontier was unforgiving. “You often died, which is kind of fun also.”

From spectator to subject 

At its most basic, the game helps teachers confront one of the biggest challenges in teaching history, said Paul Darvasi, a longtime Toronto high school teacher: Students “have a very difficult time embodying the past,” he said. But a good game like The Oregon Trail makes that happen immediately by dropping players into situations where their decisions matter. 

“What’s really interesting is that obviously when you are making decisions, you are deviating from historical realities, because history is set and done,” he said. But in making that leap, players immediately begin to understand why historical figures made the decisions they made. “It actually helps cultivate a historical mindset,” he said, because players are wondering about subjects’ motives: “Why did they want to go out west? Why would they want to suffer? Why did they make these decisions? Why did they cross the river and not take a bridge?”

Darvasi has become well-known for using immersive simulations — he used to teach One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by dressing up as a fearsome nurse and turning his classroom into a mental ward for a month. He said a game like The Oregon Trail can similarly “micro-target” students with content that sticks. “It’s a counterpoint to these massive historical surveys that we do: The History of the Roman Empire, 700 Years in Three Classes,” Darvasi said.

Fifty years later, starstruck fans feel the need to tell Rawitsch, Heinemann and Dillenberger how much the game meant to them as kids. Dillenberger, its original debugger, said autograph seekers still find him and say, “‘You really saved my life in middle school because of this program.’ It’s just incredible how many people we touched.”

Lead Image: Screenshot from “The Oregon Trail” (Meghan Gallagher for The 74)

Before COVID-19 shuttered the schools, it was not uncommon to hear teachers say they just don’t do technology. In Alexandria City Public Schools, where we help teachers incorporate ed tech into their classrooms, that mindset is as out of style as the rotary telephone. How do we know? Instead of asking how to log into an app or share their screens, educators are soliciting advice on the best tool for an upcoming lesson. The ed tech conversation has switched from “How do I do this?” to “What’s best for my students?” — from troubleshooting to how to teach.

As students return to in-person learning, the trick will be building on that momentum. It would be a tragedy if teachers slipped comfortably back into the familiar routines of the pre-COVID instructional era. 

Educators who are champions for ed tech — including the two of us — have a tremendous opportunity to reset norms and expectations for using these tools inside the physical classroom. Here are four ways district leaders and instructional technology teams can motivate teachers to continue using ed tech:

Bring teachers into the district’s technology decisions

There are many good reasons to take a districtwide approach to selecting ed tech — cost, ease of implementation, privacy and safety, alignment with broad instructional goals. But districts must acknowledge each school’s unique needs; what works in some schools may not best serve students or teachers in others. District leaders can make better decisions when they consider teachers’ input and give teachers an inside look at the educational strategies behind them.

As the pandemic extended remote instruction in our schools well beyond what anyone imagined, we worked hard to keep ed tech use aligned with the district’s overall mission. We also held focus groups so teachers could provide input into the tools we selected. After hearing from colleagues at other schools — including those who taught the same grade to a vastly different group of students — many teachers told us they left with a new appreciation for how and why the district selects its ed tech tools.  

Make ed tech work for, not against, teachers

Teachers work hard to plan meaningful lessons for their students. But they often spend too much classroom time trying to help students remember passwords or sign into multiple applications. Technology can provide an easy solution. For example, like most schools in the U.S., we use a platform called Clever, which creates a one-stop place for students to access the online tools they need. All teachers and students need to do is sign on once to get all their learning apps and activities. 

​​When we started the 2020-21 school year virtually, we used Clever as the go-to place not only to log into class, but to access all information critical to a student’s learning. When there are student surveys or assessments, for example, students access them there. This provides consistency for students and families across schools and grade levels when there is information to distribute, while taking some of the burden off teachers. 

Continue offering professional development on digital instruction — with flexibility

Students are not the only ones who became accustomed to virtual instruction during the pandemic. Teachers are hungry for more professional development on how to make the most of videoconferencing, speech-recognition programs and game-based apps. Many educators have also found that online platforms allow them the flexibility to do professional development in a quiet environment, at a slower pace or during nights and weekends, rather than in a room with colleagues. Schools should create online tutorials or self-paced courses to accommodate those learning styles. 

Let teachers choose — and customize — the tools they actually use.

As former classroom teachers, we understand our colleagues’ desire to own the learning environment. Every educator has a unique teaching style, a favorite way to discuss expectations and a preferred system for organizing and delivering lessons. For teachers unaccustomed to digital learning tools, ed tech can sometimes seem prescriptive, imposing a structure on their tried-and-true methods for delivering instruction to students. That’s why teacher input throughout ed tech selection is so important. But districts should not stop there; they should make a wide variety of tools available to educators, giving them choice in what they use daily. For example, in our district, teachers have their pick of digital tools like BrainPOP, Discovery Education, Nearpod and Flocabulary that span K-12 content areas. This diversity of tools allows educators to select features that align with their own pedagogy — videos, written passages, interactive activities, student projects or collaboration.

It is up to people at the district level to make sure teachers can select the tools that work best for them, and learn to customize those they use most often. This involves more than simply showing educators how to change the color of their digital wallpaper. For teachers who encourage classroom collaboration, it may mean directing them to resources that can help students share, edit and present projects to their peers. For math teachers, it could involve demonstrating the time-saving benefits of self-grading quizzes. 

It is the person behind the ed tech who will make or break the learning experience, not the ed tech itself.

Emily Dillard is director of instructional technology and Elizabeth Hoover is chief technology officer for Alexandria City Public Schools, a district of more than 15,000 students in northern Virginia.

After a pilot program with hundreds of teachers last school year, this summer’s launch of the free service invites teachers to send multimedia conversation-starting questions to middle- and high-schoolers via school email and have the students respond directly back, with video, audio or text.

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“It is so great that you connect with your students weekly,” says Dr. Stacy Perez, principal of Classical Academies in Escondido, California, who participated in the pilot. “Building that trust is so important in that world right now.”

Samia Zaidi, director of educator success at Gradient Learning, which created Along in partnership with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, says the tool is straightforward to use. Educators log in and select from a series of reflection questions, or create their own with the assistance of the program. The question can be about anything, such as asking what students value and why, or having them share a positive moment they recently experienced. The educator records a short video asking the question and answering it, to help open the dialogue. The video is then emailed to whomever the educator chooses, inviting a response and opening the door for further interaction.

“It has been fascinating to see the different ways people have used this,” Zaidi says. The most common practice during the pilot was for educators to ask a small group of students one question a week and to request a response back within a couple of days.

“I didn’t really know what to expect at first,” says Perez, who used the tool in the pilot with nine students. “Within the first two reflections, I started getting positive feedback from the students and their parents. They loved the weekly check-in and just couldn’t wait for 8:00 on Friday,” when Perez sent her email. “They were looking forward to my videos and questions. It was one minute of my time that was coming back tenfold.”

Sandra Liu Huang, head of education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, says that with so much recent disruption for both teachers and students, CZI started to focus on tools that offered practical solutions to help educators in the moment. “Teachers are losing the in-person connection with students,” she says. “Even in normal times, teachers could use support and tools to really unlock a deeper relationship with more of their students. That was the genesis of Along.”

CZI had partnered with Gradient Learning on the Summit Learning platform, and engaged the nonprofit again to tap its educational knowledge, technical expertise and research depth to build Along.

“I think the core goal of Along is to help teachers help their students feel more seen and heard,” Liu Huang says. “What we understand from teachers is that feeling seen and heard is foundational for relationships and that relationships help unlock better learning for students. Our goal is to equip teachers for this and see students have more access to relationships.”

At the same time, “Teachers don’t have tons of extra time in the day,” Liu Huang says. “Along is a place that lets them create that one-on-one feeling with directed videos and gives students the space to respond as they have time and comfort. We are making it easier for teachers and students even though teachers’ time is limited.”

Perez says she’s planning for all her school’s 44 staffers to use the Along tool this year. “When we saw the effectiveness of it, I will hands-down continue to use it,” she says, “and encourage others to use it.”

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to The 74.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame’s Camp Invention program has gotten pretty, well, inventive with the way it delivers content during the pandemic. And that includes offering both in-person and virtual camps, connecting not only to K-8 students, but to entire families through the Camp Invention at Home program.

The hall of fame began in 1973 with a Virginia museum and has a strong emphasis on STEM-focused youth education, leveraging the insights of its annual honorees to create curriculum for in-classroom courses, after-school programs and summer camps in all 50 states. When the pandemic hit in spring 2020, the hall wanted to create online options for its 30-year-old Camp Invention, encouraging students to collaborate with other virtual campers or work with their own families.

“I think sometimes, with our parents with virtual school scenarios, it can be kind of stressful and intimidating when you’re trying to support your child with various subjects and homework and expectations,” says Jayme Cellitioci, creativity and innovation strategist for the hall of fame. “I think these out-of-school-time STEM experiences, like Camp Invention, give you more of the positive side of the experience where you can take more risks and engage with your child in a more playful way where everyone is learning and building their confidence.”

Over 132,000 students have participated in Camp Invention this summer, with the majority selecting an in-person camp and others opting for a $235 week-long virtual experience. At-home students, grouped by region and age, receive kits with all necessary materials for building a series of inventions. Daily activities include a live kickoff with an instructor leading the day’s module and collaboration with other students as they socialize and experiment with their inventions, such as a device to explore trajectory and velocity; a vehicle that can “submerge, soar or sprint”; or a solar-powered robotic cricket. If families can’t make the live feed, they can watch step-by-step instructional videos. Staff also designed an unplugged version that doesn’t require a computer.

Nayana Mallikarjuna, a Dallas parent whose son Rohan attended Camp Invention at Home, says there weren’t a lot of online options that could engage her son for more than four hours. “In a virtual setting, it was nice to see kids have an opportunity to interact with each other and share what they’ve built,” she says. “It was a great way to help him socialize virtually while learning and being engaged virtually.”

The hall creates camps completely new each year, using inductees both as inspiration and part of the curriculum. For example, a recent program called Open Mic, run both in person and virtually, includes a Zoom lesson with Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone. In the Open Mic program, kids use materials in the provided kit to explore the inside of a microphone, then create their own hands-on invention and end up with a wireless microphone with a recorded message from West. “Not only are we taking some of their inspiration and insight,” Cellitioci says of the inductees, “sometimes we are drilling into the details of programs with them.”

Another popular at-home offering is a line-tracing robot, allowing students to turn their entire home into a robot laboratory with an Optibot that uses sensors to travel on lines that the kids draw on paper.

The hall wanted the At Home version to feel like an immersive camp-like environment, so the kit that participants receive includes a maker mat, a blanket-like work surface; a toolbelt with equipment, from markers to screwdrivers, for creating their inventions; a pegboard for hanging extra parts and materials; and inventor logs, a workbook and journal where kids can track their ideas and progress.

With the hands-on aspect of activities such a critical part of a camp experience, Cellitioci says, the hall of fame needed to rethink the way the camps were packaged to keep the focus on real-life inventing, with the computer used only as a communication tool.

The goal was to give kids a successful camp experience without parental involvement, but also welcome families. “We saw this as a really nice chance to hold our parents’ hands in empowering them to join the learning process as they are able to and potentially build some of their own STEM confidence,” Cellitioci says. “We have gotten really wonderful feedback from our families and we have seen that parents have loved getting a behind-the-scenes look at this. It encourages them to feel more confident regardless of their knowledge and experience of STEM so they can become facilitators of these learning experiences.”

Jessica Stephenson, a parent in Wadsworth, Ohio, says Camp Invention At Home provided a collaborative, high-energy opportunity for her children, Lauren and Zander, to immerse themselves in a STEM experience when fun was otherwise canceled.

“Both of my kids have extra needs that would normally be a challenge during an in-person camp,” she says. “Being able to log in from the comfort of our home allowed us to have a little more control of different sensory issues that might pop up during an in-person program.” The setting gave her kids confidence to interact with other students and the instructor while sharing their inventions.

“Lauren and Zander loved hands-on activities that stretched their thinking far beyond their normal limits,” she says. “Lauren … was so proud that she created inventions, and Zander loved that he was able to use his hands — and items from his toolbelt — to build projects to help the environment.”

Mallikarjuna says her son had been to the in-person Camp Invention in the past, so the virtual option helped him “unleash his imagination and creativity” while experiencing a sense of achievement. “Being a working mom, I wanted my son to be engaged and, at the same time, enjoy learning and interacting with other kids, virtually,” she says. “It was fun and innovative.”

The at-home program continues through August, with week-long virtual camps still open the weeks of Aug. 9, 16 and 23. Parents can search for in-person camps or connect with their kids for a virtual experience, as seats are still open those final three weeks of the schedule.

Going forward, virtual experiences “will in some fashion likely stay as part of our mix,” Cellitioci says. “I would say it has forever expanded our capacity and opened our eyes to new opportunities.”

The state was fortunate to receive an offer of help from a partner early on. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert and I had existing relationships with Renaissance’s myON, an online literacy platform, from previous positions we’d held. In April 2020, we were still trying to decide how to move forward for our students when Renaissance reached how they could help. With relief funding having not yet made it to schools, the company committed to temporarily providing myON at no cost; by June 2020, students and educators throughout Nevada had access to thousands of online books and news articles.

Part of the reason this happened so fast is that the governor issued an executive order streamlining the adoption process. Instead of going through several layers of review, we were able to flag the rollout as an emergency response to the pandemic, drastically shortening the process from several weeks to just days.

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Part of the challenge the state faced, even with a generous partner, was that we knew the federal government was likely to provide emergency funds, but we didn’t know how much, when or what restrictions there would be on spending the money. In short, we knew we could launch the program, but we weren’t sure how we could sustain it beyond that. So we looked for partners to bring on board to expand this initiative beyond the Department of Education.

We began by reaching out to the Nevada State Library and Archives because it was already providing support and services to students and families throughout the state, from putting together packages of books and offering various mobile technologies so families could access the internet. It was a natural fit, so we asked them to start sharing information about myON along with their other offerings.

Next, we began working with our regional professional development program. We needed teachers to understand that myON was more than just a reading tool or online books, and to consider how they could leverage it for teaching and learning, given that the shift to remote classes was so abrupt and totally new to most of our teachers.

Finally, to inspire more excitement, we encouraged each school district and student to read as many minutes as possible through the READ Nevada partnership. To date, students have accessed more than 6 million digital books and read more than 58 million minutes. Meanwhile, my team and I began to address another statewide challenge: internet access.

Before the pandemic, about three of every four students in the state had a mobile device and access to home internet. But many were sharing a single device among multiple siblings or with parents. And entire communities didn’t have broadband internet at all.

A first step in improving access was to have districts identify the technology they already had that could be distributed to students. We knew that federal funding was coming through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund that would allow us to buy the additional devices we needed. However, 49 other states were also looking to provide devices and connectivity for their students, and placing orders that wouldn’t arrive until the fall wasn’t going to help students who needed to learn now.

Fortunately, Gov. Steve Sisolak allowed Ebert to reorient the Nevada COVID-19 Response, Relief & Recovery Task Force to include Connecting Kids, an initiative to solve the issue of providing students with devices and access. The head of the task force, Jim Murren, and Elaine Wynn, former CEO of MGM Resorts and former president of the State Board of Education, really stepped up for our kids. They went so far as to use their private planes to transport devices from countries where they were manufactured to Nevada to skip the fraying supply lines and get devices into students’ hands.

Some students still lacked access to the internet, though. My department partnered with the Governor’s Office of Science Innovation and Technology to help districts distribute hotspots throughout the state, but there were still some students and communities we weren’t able to reach. Fortunately, people and organizations from all over the state stepped up to offer community access at schools, at local businesses or via school buses with wireless access. Only four months after the launch of Connecting Kids, 100 percent of Nevada students who were learning remotely had connectivity and access to a device.

The circumstances around our transformation from 75 percent to 100 percent connectivity were extraordinary, but the process is applicable beyond any crisis.

Begin with an inventory of what you already have and, crucially, what you need. Find partners with a genuine concern for kids and start a conversation about what you need and how they’re prepared to help. Partnerships with philanthropic organizations and businesses are important not just for what they can give students and teachers, but for how they can help leverage resources or provide access to powerful people or systems. Then, think about how to communicate with your stakeholders in a way that will get them invested, such as a contest to generate excitement. Next, measure the effectiveness of your implementation.

Finally, make sure to celebrate, because this is difficult work. It takes time, and celebrating those who’ve contributed as you reach milestones or achieve your ultimate goal will keep them engaged for the next push.

Dr. Jonathan Moore is deputy superintendent of student achievement at the Nevada Department of Education. He can be reached at jpmoore@doe.nv.gov.

Summer is a time for students to explore personal interests, and for an expected 100,000 students, free STEM bootcamps will provide a chance to expand their understanding of everything from calculus to chemistry, biology to algebra.

For the second straight summer, Numerade is offering free summer bootcamp courses as a way to combat pandemic learning loss. The eight-week video-based online classes are geared toward middle and high school students, using a web-based virtual learning platform. There are 20 courses, offering access to some of the company’s more than 1 million short-form educational videos — created with input from over 1,000 educators — covering STEM courses as well as SAT and ACT test prep.

When students sign up for the free courses, they are placed into cohorts with other students. “They key to the learning process,” co-founder Nhon Ma says, “is the content created through educators and a sense of community with the students.” Students can interact with others in the same bootcamp via the online Discord server, ideally helping one another answer questions and discuss the content. Each week, students get a sequence of videos aligned to the curriculum, designed to be watched at their own time and pace. At the end of the week, quizzes track students’ understanding, and at the end of eight weeks, participants can earn a certificate of accomplishment for completing the course.

The rolling course offerings start every week, and Ma says students are encouraged to take multiple classes through the summer. Last summer, 30,000 students participated, and he’s expecting around 100,000 this year.

“We give encouragement and support and the resources students need for their grades and confidence to improve greatly,” Ma says. “There is a positive benefit that happens for the students and their community.”

The free summer program also serves as an introduction to Numerade and the $9.99-per-month subscription fee to access its entire library of content.

Founders Ma and Alex Lee, both from south central Los Angeles, started working together eight years ago, after scholarship opportunities allowed Ma to attend and graduate from Columbia University. He then worked in finance and served as a product lead for programmatic ad design at Google. It was there that Ma decided he wanted to instead focus on closing gaps in educational opportunities.

After first creating an online tutoring platform, the pair learned that students were routinely going back into recorded tutoring sessions to replay them multiple times. “What is foundational for the learning process, especially for STEM, is repetition,” Ma says. “Students need to get the reps in as much as they can, and in a safe space where they are not judged.” That insight led to Numerade, which launched in 2019, allowing students 24-7 access to the short-form video resources.

The free summer bootcamps started in 2020, and, “with learning loss accumulated, we felt a huge responsibility to help students close any learning gap as much as possible and get ahead,” Ma says.

The desire to build an interest in STEM led the company to focus videos on children as young as middle school. “If students don’t get the reinforcement and support they need in middle school, often they drop out of STEM entirely,” Ma says. “What we want is to make sure students have the confidence to continue on their journey.”

For the summer bootcamps, courses cover physics, math, chemistry and biology. Chemistry 101 offers an introduction to reactions, aqueous solutions, thermochemistry, electronic structure, the Periodic Table, chemical bonding and gases. Chemistry 102 covers liquids, solids, solutions, kinetics, chemical equilibrium, acids and bases, aqueous equilibria, thermodynamics, electrochemistry and nuclear chemistry.

The biology summer camp features understanding of cellular respiration and fermentation, the cell cycle and cellular reproduction, photosynthesis, cell signaling, gene expression and viruses.

The Physics 101 Mechanics course studies motion, energy, forces and momentum while Physics 102 Electricity and Magnetism creates a virtual lab to understand temperature, heat, electricity and magnetism. A Physics 103 course puts a focus on differing waves, whether mechanical, sound or light, and quantum mechanics.

Math courses range from algebra to precalculus and geometry to calculus, the most popular. The summer programs also include test prep for both the SAT and ACT.

Hollis Irvin learned to read last year. She’s a good reader, her mother, Tiffany Burks, says. Last year, when the pandemic forced schools to close temporarily and during the early days of remote learning that followed, Burks started to worry about her Grier Elementary second grader.

Hollis was starting to read words just to say them out loud — not trying to understand what the words and passages meant. Reading felt like a chore to Hollis, Burks said.

Then they found the Reading Checkup, a mobile application that families can use to work on literacy skills at home. The app takes kids through a quiz and, based on the results, suggests activities and games for them to do on their own or work on with their parents.

“She’s making the connection when it comes to the questions [about what she read], so she’s not just reading to read,” Burks said. “If I had a question regarding one of the passages she read, she can answer the question back. There’s been a lot of growth that I’ve seen.”

The Reading Checkup is available for free in Mecklenburg County as Read Charlotte, a community-wide reading initiative, is leading a free pilot of the app for its maker, Learning Ovations. While Read Charlotte is using it to help parents work with their children, the algorithm it uses was designed to help teachers in the classroom.

Munro Richardson, executive director of Read Charlotte, believes the app can help kids address unfinished learning and combat summer slide.

“When we think about what’s happening in this COVID environment and post-COVID, our kids are going to be all over the place,” Richardson said. “So the need to have this sort of precision medicine for literacy is greater than ever.”

Richardson was learning more about the platform when the pandemic began. When he learned the Department of Education had asked Learning Ovations to investigate use of the platform at home for kids and parents to use, his ears perked up.

Richardson convinced Learning Ovations to choose Mecklenburg County. His team worked on changes to make the platform more compatible for the community. The first thing they did was change the name, which used to be Home Literacy Coach.

Next, they worked on making the interface more user-friendly. A 15-minute assessment became two short quizzes. Also, many of the activities suggested for kids required school resources, so Read Charlotte worked with nonprofit partners and came up with new activities that are easier to do at home.

Read Charlotte also partnered with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which provided six teachers to record more than 100 videos explaining how caregivers can conduct adult-led activities.

To get the word out, Read Charlotte partnered with more than 80 organizations. One of them, BCDI-Charlotte, got the app into hundreds of homes. They also came up with the idea of creating literacy kits to pass out that contained resources for the app’s suggested activities.

“We’ve been excited about it and we’ve kind of picked it up and been able to run with it,” BCDI-Charlotte President Devonya Govan-Hunt said. “Because it puts such an emphasis on where we believe the majority, a lot of the power actually, lies, which is in the home and in the hands of parents.”

About 3,300 pre-K to third grade students have used the Reading Checkup at home since last summer, accessing it on smartphones, tablets, or computers. One of them was Hollis.

“We use this as a supplement,” Burks said. “And she doesn’t feel like she’s in school when she’s doing it. She feels like she’s playing a game. So it’s been really helpful to me.”

Govan-Hunt says this app allows parents to actively engage in their child’s ability to read. When parents are involved, she believes the impact on reading scores will be substantial.

“So with this Reading Checkup, we have made it a point to really lift family engagement, because we actually believe that family engagement is the cornerstone in everything that we do,” she said. “We believe that family engagement, especially with literacy, is a high-impact strategy for improving schools and increasing literacy achievement, period.

“And that’s what this Reading Checkup allows us to do. Put the control in the parents’ hands.”

The feedback Richardson has received suggests the BCDI message is resonating with the community.

“So in a time when everything was really up in the air, and people are losing jobs and there was all sorts of uncertainty, the way they frame this with parents was to talk about control,” Richardson said. “Although there’s a lot of things in your life that could be out of your control, helping your child with reading … using the Reading Checkup is one area where you can control. And they found a lot of parents really warmed to that message.”

Govan-Hunt said this is a particularly important message for Black and Brown communities. In the communities she serves, she said there is a feeling that many schools don’t do enough to engage with Black parents. She noted assumptions about family stress levels during the pandemic or bias against Black and Brown parents’ willingness and ability to get involved in their children’s schooling.

“We believe that we have a responsibility to respond to this reality that we’re existing in by transforming the approach that many people take around family engagement, moving away from a so-called random act of family engagement to one that actually has a lift by the community, or by the village,” she said.

Tiffany Burks was one of those parents. She visited the Melanated Exchange Market in Charlotte last year to buy Hollis some books. In part, she wanted to motivate her child to read during that period when reading felt like a chore.

As Burks walked through a parking lot to the market, a hub for Black-owned small businesses, her daughter veered off toward a table filled with books. She stopped and stared at one book, in particular. The cover showed a Black girl with naturally curly hair, just like Hollis’.

Burks smiled at her daughter’s reaction. She hardly noticed Govan-Hunt walk up beside her.

“She just tears up,” Govan-Hunt recalled of Burks.

Burks finally turned to Govan-Hunt and asked how she could help Hollis stay on track with reading. That’s when Govan-Hunt told her about Reading Checkup. They talked about the power of parents in helping their children read, the importance of finding rich and culturally diverse texts, and how the app could help bolster Hollis’ reading skills and love for reading.

“And she says, ‘Thank you. I’ve never had the opportunity to have this conversation with anybody before,’” Govan-Hunt said. “It was out of fear that her thoughts and her fears were irrelevant, and that people really didn’t have these conversations in the society that we live in today.”

Hollis left the market with three free books from BCDI, and she’s used the app ever since.

“I became afraid that because she was learning from home, she’d be disengaged, and she wouldn’t be as excited about learning,” Burks said. “And that’s where I feel like the app fills in that gap because it’s like, OK, if you didn’t receive this lesson in school, I know you’re receiving it on the app and you like doing the app. So it’s not like I have to force you to do it.”

This article originally appeared at EdNC.org.