Can educational technology really improve learning and teach critical 21st century skills? It can, but only when it is integrated into the learning environment to make teaching and learning more efficient, effective, and engaging.

Here’s how to get started on redesigning your classroom for 21st century learning:

In an age where we communicate online more than ever before, it’s important to be aware of the footprint you’ve left behind on the web. Social media has the power to be a positive social and professional outlet, but only with responsible use. As important as it is for everyone to be mindful of their online footprint, it’s especially important to teach the next generation how to carefully curate their online presence.

After-school programs are a wonderful thing for students of all ages—they can be fun, engaging, and inspiring. Students can meet new friends and learn even more than in their daily classes. Schools often host these programs, but the big issue they face is how to increase student enrollment. 

The key to this is in reaching the parents the right way. With a good marketing strategy consisting of content marketing, digital marketing, and visual marketing, you can attract parents. For one, focusing on content to communicate with parents is a good idea when combined with visual aspects. But in order to do that, you need to have a good content strategy.

Trauma Responsive: Best Practices for All Students 

In the first part of our trauma-informed series, we defined the term and discussed best practices for working with students in trauma. For many educators, after we read the research supporting trauma-informed practices, we are quickly convinced that we need to act. The data strongly supports intervening early for students and with a therapeutic approach (instead of a punitive one). 

With the variety of options available today, education technology is increasingly becoming the solution to everyday classroom issues that teachers have struggled with for years. However, the wide range of EdTech solutions available can make it difficult to choose what will work best for your students—and experimentation with different products isn’t always possible with your school’s budget.

To help you make the best decision for your classroom, we’ve compiled a list of six tried-and-true tech solutions that other educators recommend to solve your everyday classroom problems:

Teaching and learning is the core of what we do in education. As teachers, we know that day in and day out, that is our main charge: student learning. All too often, our day-to-day goals are sidetracked for whatever reason. Some of these reasons are unavoidable, but some come from the driving vision of the district. The support for student learning that flows from the district vision, and is supported by the district-level administrators, helps to keep distractions to a minimum. The people at the top must keep “the main thing the main thing” to keep the focus on learning.

In the world of education, the term “trauma informed” has caught on over the past few years. It is a term used by many to define an approach to students—particularly in how we discipline them. If you have heard the term but don’t feel as though you completely understand it, this information may be helpful to you.

Professional learning communities (PLCs) are at the forefront in education today. This initiative was brought forth after much research was done on the highest-performing schools in the lowest socioeconomic areas. The big takeaway is when school leaders and teachers implement best practice teaching for each child, overall school achievement improves. By all appearances, PLCs look like a group of grade-level teachers (or department teachers) who plan, organize, and implement a curriculum. However, effective PLCs are quite different.         

Saying that parenting is hard is a complete understatement. It is tiring, draining, challenging—and did I mention tiring? It’s also the most rewarding thing that I have ever done, and is worth all the late nights, smelly messes, and stressful car rides. 

I am very blessed when it comes to parenting. My wife and I work well together when it comes to our kids. As we were growing up, we both had great examples of what good parenting looks like. We have enough resources to take care of the needs of our kids, and sometimes we can even provide them with an extra experience in life that we didn’t have when we were kids ourselves.

But even with all of those advantages, parenting is still really stressful and hard for us at times. Removing any of those other supports—two parents in the home, good upbringing ourselves, or a lack of resources—would result in making it even harder.

In the years that have followed the No Child Left Behind era, schools, teachers, and administrators have learned that a hyperfocus on reading and math doesn’t produce the best outcomes for students. We all knew that our students were so much more than a test, and now that we don’t have our entire system centered around these scores, we can refocus on what truly matters.

Many schools are discovering that students with strong social-emotional skills, especially in early childhood, have better outcomes and healthier lives over peers who do not. This probably doesn’t surprise most of us. Being able to cooperate, compromise, empathize, and negotiate are skills that help all of us be successful—much more so than a score on a test.