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District Administration Magazine
With some schools possibly reopening in the fall, K-12 leaders need to ensure their buildings are safe during the coronavirus era. And carefully controlled indoor humidity levels can help reduce the spread and transmission of COVID-19 in schools. Nonhealth buildings, such as school facilities, should keep the relative school humidity levels between 40% and 60% during the pandemic, since moisture can reduce the amount of viruses in the air and on surfaces, according to the ASHRAE, an association that advances the design and construction of HVAC systems.
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THE Journal
Trying to predict where we're headed in education for the fall? According to one long-time educator in Wisconsin, if your thinking is focused on how to catch students up to where they should be, "you are asking the wrong question." Diana Laufenberg serves as the executive director of Inquiry Schools, an organization that works with districts and schools to transform their approach to learning. She's also in the midst of a long-term substitute teaching job.
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EdSurge
As COVID-19 upended schools across the country, leaders and teachers transitioned to a remote learning environment with unprecedented speed and managed an array of tactical issues. Schools raced to distribute laptops, provide free-and-reduced lunch to students in need and offer childcare to essential workers. Professional development around remote learning that typically would have happened over months or years was condensed into a few days.
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District Administration Magazine
The CDC has released a more extensive set of safety precautions schools should take as they reopen and gradually welcome students, teachers and staff to classrooms this summer or fall. The new guidance, which urges schools to make all decisions in consultation with local public health officials, expands on a graphic the agency released. For instance, the CDC recommends teachers and school staff wear face coverings. But the agency recognizes, however, that face coverings may be challenging for students, particularly younger students, to wear all day.
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EdSurge
Across the country — and indeed the world — schools are preparing for a back-to-school season unlike any other in living memory. Governors are signaling tentative support for schools to resume in-person classes in the fall, with careful planning and a few caveats. Colorado's governor, Jared Polis, went so far as to describe his vision as a "hybrid environment," allotting for altered schedules and intermittent returns to remote learning based on the predicted trajectory of COVID-19 over the coming months.
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MiddleWeb (commentary)
This pandemic is affecting everyone. For most of us, it has overturned our entire lives. Families are going through loss of income and jobs, important projects have halted, special occasions go unnoticed, people are going hungry. Many of us have gone months (and counting) without a supportive hug from friends and loved ones. A vaccine could be more than a year away, and we can't predict what "school" will be like in the fall.
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Education Week
The start of the 2020-2021 academic year is shaping up to be as unprecedented as the end of the current school year because of COVID-19. Exactly when the 2020-2021 academic year can begin — typically a decision that's the purview of individual districts — is in limbo because of ongoing challenges around containing the spread of the deadly virus.
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Champions is an opportunity to exceed every parent’s expectations of what before and after school can be. Our programs immerse K–6 students in an inquiry-based, whole-child learning environment that supports academic and social-emotional learning. Support your teachers’ goals outside the school day without costing your district’s budget. Learn more
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The Hechinger Report (commentary)
Our way of life has shifted so radically as we distance ourselves from one another to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, it's even hard to properly mourn the death of loved ones lost to it. The lack of presidential leadership contributes to the vast uncertainty we all face. But we must gather ourselves for more disruption and disquiet as a looming recession threatens to further reduce tax revenues for states, putting services we rely on at risk.
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Education Week
When schools in Owsley County, Ky., closed in early March, James Barrett hopped on his bus each morning to deliver meals to hundreds of students. Then the special education teacher, who is also a bus driver for the rural district, would head home and log in for Zoom meetings with his high school special education students — some of whom have third- and fourth-grade level skills in reading, writing and math.
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Harvard Business Review
Tools allowing for instant communication have given us the ability to work from anywhere. With employees being only an email or Slack message away, organizations are now omnipresent in the lives of employees. And now, with many working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic, managers and coworkers who were once in the office down the hall, are now in your living room, kitchen or bedroom (wherever you can find a quiet place to plug in your laptop).
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Move This World
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Inc. (commentary)
Marcel Schwantes, a contributor for Inc., writes: "No person could have foreseen the challenges that we are experiencing on a global scale stemming from the pandemic. As leaders help navigate through unsteady waters and deal with their own uncertainties, one thing remains unchanged: People rely on them for support and to keep their hearts and minds engaged in their work. For insight on how some of the best are doing it, I reached out to four leaders to uncover the ways they have been able to get the best out of their people amid the pandemic."
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Education Week
Top Democrats for education in Congress told U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that her guidance about federal coronavirus relief is way out of bounds and that she should abandon it. A letter to DeVos by the heads of two House education panels and a top member of the Senate education committee says that through that guidance, DeVos "seeks to repurpose hundreds-of-millions of taxpayer dollars intended for public school students to provide services for private school students, in contravention of both the plain reading of the statute and the intent of Congress."
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Education Week
Often pushed into the shadows on the national political scene, education could become a significant election issue this year in a way that was virtually unthinkable at the start of 2020, taking center stage due to the massive disruption of the nation's schools caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. President Donald Trump and others already are arguing forcefully for schools, which play a key role in the economy, to reopen as soon as possible, while Democrats are previewing a strategy of pinning a potentially tumultuous school reopening on the Trump administration.
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EdTech Magazine
The nation's K–12 schools are bracing for budget cuts resulting from the global economic downturn. And while it's always important to work across departments, a district IT leader's relationship with one particular administrator — the school business officer — could make a difference in the current environment. "When it really comes down to it, without the synergy between CTOs and school business officials, none of our funding efforts will be successful," Frankie Jackson, director of strategic initiatives for Texas K–12 CTO Council, said during CoSN2020, the Consortium for School Networking's virtual annual conference.
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EdScoop
Eden Konja didn't start out in educational technology, but when he found it, everything clicked. Konja, an information and academic technology director at Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy in Michigan — and one of EdScoop's 2020 NextGen: Emerging EdTech Leaders — started his professional career in retail management.
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Tech & Learning
In this unprecedented period of extended remote learning, the mental health and well-being of students has been a concern, from students feeling isolated and dealing with depression to handling social-emotional challenges and experiencing long-term trauma.
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School shut down? Looking to expand your teachers' professional learning? IRIS can help. Supported by the U.S. Department of Education, we offer free online PD, covering behavior management, differentiated instruction, accommodations for students with disabilities and more, to increase your teachers' knowledge of evidence-based
practices:
https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/pd-hours/
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The New York Times
Salah-Deen Fouathia, an eighth grader at Voice Charter School in Queens, was struggling in school. It was hard to pay attention. Math was a challenge. His grades in health class weren't great. So when the pandemic closed all schools, reducing his classes to the size of a screen, his parents feared Salah-Deen would struggle even more. To their delight, the opposite has happened. With fewer distractions and the help of his parents and teachers, his schooling has been going better, and his grades reflect that.
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EdTech Magazine
Over the past few months, there's been a surge in people working from home across all industries — including education. The pandemic led schools to shut their doors and pushed many students, teachers and other school staff online. While finding the right remote learning tools to continue teaching and learning online was a priority during that shift, there were a lot of other factors — such as security — that became secondary, said Michael Lane, senior field solution architect for CDW•G, during a session at CoSN2020, the Consortium for School Networking's virtual annual conference.
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The Hechinger Report
A growing body of research shows that children who start kindergarten without a firm grasp of the basics are more vulnerable to poor academic outcomes in later grades. That's often the case in Mississippi, where nearly two-thirds of the state's 5-year-olds were not ready to enter kindergarten this year. Now, early learning advocates are even more worried about the state's youngest learners. Before the pandemic resulted in widespread school closures, nearly half of the state's 4-year-olds likely weren’t attending preschool at all.
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We Are Teachers
"Googling" instead of "thinking" is a symptom of our tech-obsessed society, and its practice has become all too easy in the world of distance learning. How can teachers, delivering education through technology, get students to think without using it? It's time to move students from Googling their answers. Follow these 5 tips to outsmart the Google machine and get the most out of distance learning.
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MiddleWeb (commentary)
Tara C. Dale and Mandi S. White, a contributor for MiddleWeb, writes: "Why is reading comprehension an important part of science? Being able to read and comprehend informational text is a skill all students will need in life. Science classrooms are places where teachers naturally incorporate informational text into daily lessons."
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Education Week (commentary)
Angela Duckworth, a contributor for Education Week, writes: "With my husband and kids at home all day, I find we're getting on each other's nerves. What can we do to be less cranky living in close quarters? Me, too! In my family, being together 24/7 has created more than a few opportunities to irritate each other. The other day, I recognized my younger daughter's handwriting on a large sign hanging from the refrigerator: CLEAN UP YOUR MESS! IT'S NOT THAT HARD!"
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NPR
In the pandemic, families are taking on all kinds of unexpected roles. Here's another one: zookeeper. When the New York City schools closed in March, my son's teacher, Mary Pfeifer, sent an email to parents, asking who would be willing to invite the classroom pets into their homes — for the duration. The response was immediate. "It's a very giving community" says Pfeifer, who teaches pre-K through second grade science at PS 58 in Brooklyn.
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Tech & Learning
Given the unprecedented disruptions to the school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many parents, educators and even students are especially concerned about the erosion of skills and knowledge over the summer, commonly known as the "summer slide." To help prevent the summer slide, the Space Foundation and Lockheed Martin are providing on-demand STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) content online starting May 18.
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MiddleWeb (commentary)
Mary Tarashuk, a contributor for MiddleWeb, writes: "We are a few weeks away from the end of the school year in New Jersey. The last ten weeks have been, to say the least, a strange experience. On March 13 I was doing what I do…getting our school day started as my crew filed in for another day of exploration in Room 4T. Now, those same little faces are looking at me through tiny rectangles on a computer screen. 4T has been transported from our stoic brick school building to an oversized ottoman in the center of my living room."
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Language Magazine
If the current crisis has taught us anything, it is that people and organizations are more adaptable and innovative than it was previously imagined. In fact, processes that it was thought would take years, such as normalizing home-based working and learning, are being completed in a matter of days. Our need for connection has not been overridden by this crisis, and neither has our instinct for progress. We sat down with Jane O'Hagan, who is the academic manager at a successful language school in Dublin, to hear how students, teachers and businesses involved in English language learning are coping with the changes.
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Edutopia (commentary)
Aaron Tombrella, a contributor for Edutopia, writes: "Like many teachers around the nation, I recently went from face-to-face teaching to online teaching with little time to prep. I first tried to emulate my normal daily procedures virtually — I thought the consistency and familiarity would be beneficial. I was wrong: Although I was doing what I thought was my best for students, there was an overall lack of engagement, even with these familiar procedures in place."
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Vox
It isn't easy setting up a virtual classroom on the fly. As the coronavirus pandemic grinds the nation's education system to a halt, teachers have navigated computer shortages, spotty internet access and chaotic Zoom calls in order to offer their students a valuable lesson plan in a time when nobody can leave their homes. But for special education teachers, there are many other variables to consider — and teacher Taylor Elise, 24, says many aren't getting the guidance they need.
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MindShift
Bryan Shaw does not teach history the way he was taught. The wars, the presidencies, the social movements — memorizing those details is not the end goal. Instead, learning about historical people and events is a pathway for students to develop historical thinking skills, such as looking for commonalities, identifying causes and consequences, and distinguishing progress and decline over time. When his school closed because of COVID-19, Shaw wanted to continue that work. He also knew that standard history content would feel even more distant to teenagers facing a global pandemic.
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Education Week
Getting students to talk about their thinking process in math can give teachers insight into where they need help. But it's also a potentially powerful equity strategy, experts say. And as teachers learn how to move instruction online because of the coronavirus, they're all too aware of the equity issues involved: Some students have computers and good internet connections, and others don't.
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Education DIVE
Parents are more concerned about their children missing social interactions at school and with peers than they are someone in their family getting sick with the coronavirus, according to a new survey. 59% of the more than 3,600 parents and guardians responding to the nonprofit Learning Heroes' survey said their children's lack of in-person connections was currently their top pandemic-related concern, with 57% saying they are worried about COVID-19 affecting a family member.
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Chalkbeat
Hundreds of thousands of child maltreatment allegations are going unreported — and thus uninvestigated — while school buildings are closed, a new study estimates. It's the latest evidence of the toll that COVID-19-induced school closures are taking on children. The numbers highlight "a hidden cost of school shutdowns," write researchers Jason Baron, Ezra Goldstein, and Cullen Wallace. "When schools are not in session, whether for regularly scheduled breaks or in response to catastrophes, cases of child maltreatment are more likely to go unnoticed and unreported."
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The Seattle Times
Had it gone another way, children in Bellingham would be in school year round. June, July, August. Each month would be tacked onto the school calendar. If he could have made the decision alone, that's what the district's superintendent, Greg Baker, would have done. But when Baker floated the concept three years ago, he didn't get enough community support. So he dropped it.
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NAESP
Every school and district leader is challenged to develop immediate and longer term strategic solutions to serve children in these remarkable times. Our goal is to support you in determining what is working, what the next set of effective practices may be and to connect you with colleagues from across the country. NAESP and AASA are here to help! Please join us each Tuesday, with moderators Eric Cardwell and Dr. Gail Pletnick, along with representatives from NAESP and AASA when we go Live at 5 ET to help get your questions answered.
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NAESP
Today's school leaders are no strangers to change. Over the past decade alone, principals have navigated tremendous shifts in school turnaround strategies and policies for teacher and principal evaluation, initiatives such as Common Core State Standards, and calls to integrate 21st century skills and deeper learning, to name a few. At every turn, principals have been at the forefront of execution, ensuring that teachers and staff are well-prepared and that the students in their care benefit.
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