Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

5 ways to keep schools safer with innovative visitor management

Key points:

One crucial aspect of school safety is monitoring who comes on and off campus, including visitors. Visitor management can be tricky, because school campuses tend to have various points of access. In recent years, schools have put in the effort to advance all safety measures within schools, including visitor management. In fact, recent research by Pew Research Center found that 98 percent of schools require visitors to check in and wear a badge. 

Schools can emphasize their protection of students and staff by requiring visitors to wear a visitor-specific safety badge that can monitor their location while on campus. Opposed to staff safety badges, which only provide location information once an alert is initiated to maintain staff privacy, the visitor badge will monitor the visitor’s location in real-time while on school grounds.…Read More

Gen Z students want STEM careers

Many high school and college students chose STEM as their No. 1 preferred career path, according to a survey of 11,495 Gen Z students conducted by the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS).

The 2022 Career Interest Survey gives insights into what motivates an adventurous, civic-minded, concerned, vocal, tech-savvy, emerging workforce.

NSHSS is an academic honor society that recognizes and serves high-achieving student scholars in more than 26,000 high schools across 170 countries.…Read More

How to find language learning opportunities for students

There has been a steady decline in language learning in schools. According to the Pew Research Center, only one in five K-12 students in the United States now learns another language, and just 10 states and the District of Columbia make world language learning a requirement for graduating from high school.

New Jersey has the most students studying a world language (51 percent), followed by the District of Columbia (47 percent) and Wisconsin (36 percent). However, the vast majority of states have fewer than 25 percent of students learning another language — and just 9 percent of students in Arizona, Arkansas, and New Mexico. Compare that to Europe, where 92 percent of students learn a foreign language, Pew observes.

The decline in language learning carries over into college: According to the Modern Language Association, university and college enrollment in language courses dropped by nearly 10 percent from 2013 to 2016. During that same period, higher education institutions cut 651 foreign language programs nationwide.…Read More

New: 20 facts about teens, Facebook, and Twitter

By now, educators and parents are aware that teens use Facebook and Twitter extensively, but a new study delves deeper into the specifics of how teens are using social media and what the experience means to them.

Conducted by the PEW Internet and American Life Project, the snapshot of teen social media use aggregates data from over 800 surveys of teens in a nationally representative group.

And though it’s common knowledge that issues such as privacy and safety are large concerns for teens when using the internet, some of the statistics from the PEW report, especially when discussing different races and genders, may surprise you.…Read More

Use multiple news channels to reach ‘on-the-go’ consumers

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40 percent of 'on-the-go' news consumers are parents of young children.

School officials need to share information via a variety of media platforms in order to reach today’s “on-the-go” news consumers, a new study suggests.

According to the study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, while 99 percent of American adults access news daily, only 7 percent use just one media platform to do so. The majority—six in ten Americans—use a combination of online and offline sources.…Read More