Education Foundations Archives - The Tech Edvocate https://www.thetechedvocate.org/category/education-foundations/ Authoritative EdTech News and Commentary Tue, 31 May 2022 17:37:34 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cropped-TELogoWhiteWaves3-32x32.jpg Education Foundations Archives - The Tech Edvocate https://www.thetechedvocate.org/category/education-foundations/ 32 32 Identifying Great Leaders Within Your School District https://www.thetechedvocate.org/identifying-great-leaders-within-your-school-district/ Fri, 28 Oct 2022 04:01:52 +0000 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/?p=48556 Education leaders are only as good as the leadership team around them. But how can you identify prospective education leaders within your organization? We have some ideas on the topic. Let’s look at the traits of employees who have the potential to become great education leaders. People’s Trust in Them Building a culture of trust is the key to becoming an effective educational leader. This means you want your leadership team’s members to be trustworthy. You need to find people who have the trust of people both below and above them in the leadership hierarchy. For instance, a teacher who […]

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Education leaders are only as good as the leadership team around them. But how can you identify prospective education leaders within your organization? We have some ideas on the topic. Let’s look at the traits of employees who have the potential to become great education leaders.

People’s Trust in Them

Building a culture of trust is the key to becoming an effective educational leader. This means you want your leadership team’s members to be trustworthy. You need to find people who have the trust of people both below and above them in the leadership hierarchy. For instance, a teacher who steers clear of gossip, keeps his word, and values the rules of confidentiality has the qualities to become a good educational leader. 

Emotional Intelligence

As a leader, you need someone who is emotionally balanced and can control their emotions during an emergency or demanding situation. They should be aligned to their own feelings and that of others, which is crucial to building good work relationships. Thus, emotional intelligence and agility are prerequisites for school leadership posts.

Possess a Unique Skill-Set

You should seek individuals with unique skills that either you or the rest of your leadership team’s members lack. For instance, if your school is situated in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, or New York, getting a multilingual speaker on your team would mean having an unmatched asset to leverage.

Mentor Colleagues

When employees act as mentors to their colleagues just because they want them to succeed, it indicates the makings of a prospective leader. One of the main tasks of a leader is to mentor subordinates, who can become effective parts of their leadership team. Thus, it’s important for a leader to be able to motivate and empower others, which is sure to have a positive impact.

Make Their Bosses Shine

Prospective leaders try to protect the company’s status and reputation by working in its best interest. Their efficiency and informal leadership help make their bosses look good. In case they think their boss is on the verge of making a colossal mistake, they speak their mind openly and offer a superior way.

Prospective leaders provide informal leadership during troubled times and lead from the front. You should look for people who can create a positive impact during emergencies and adverse situations. These people don’t complain. Instead, they leverage their expertise and influence to help their bosses turn the ship in the right direction. 

Proactive Nature

The informal leaders you want to induct into your leadership team need to be proactive. When sensing a potential problem, they work to craft solutions on their own without being told to do so as it all comes naturally to them.

Did we miss out on anything? If yes, what do you think are some additional ways to recognize prospective education leaders within your school district?

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Is Education a Basic Human Right? https://www.thetechedvocate.org/is-education-a-basic-human-right/ Mon, 19 Sep 2022 04:01:16 +0000 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/?p=50257 Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and personal security. We have distinct and inalienable rights as humans that safeguard our freedom as people in a variety of ways. According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, these criteria apply to everyone on the planet, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or any other factor. Understanding your basic human rights is critical to ensuring that you are treated fairly in all situations. Unfortunately, these inherent advantages may be deficient in critical areas. Education is one significant component of the bill of the thirty basic human rights that lacks the necessary elements. Why […]

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Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and personal security. We have distinct and inalienable rights as humans that safeguard our freedom as people in a variety of ways. According to the United Nations Human Rights Office, these criteria apply to everyone on the planet, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or any other factor.

Understanding your basic human rights is critical to ensuring that you are treated fairly in all situations. Unfortunately, these inherent advantages may be deficient in critical areas. Education is one significant component of the bill of the thirty basic human rights that lacks the necessary elements.

Why don’t we think about education as a fundamental human right, like the right to live, the freedom to express oneself, or the right to vote?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created to serve as the world’s basis for liberty, justice, and peace. These essential principles serve as the foundation for society as a whole, regardless of location. Is there anything more important than education in promoting those values?

In reality, the right to education is acknowledged in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The problem is that it does not fully explain or detail the subject of what constitutes “elementary education.” Many countries have yet to implement what would be considered a basic education for all citizens.

Girls are more probable than boys to be denied these fundamentals, yet both genders frequently forego school in favor of less desirable hobbies. They may be made to drop out of school to help their families financially. They may even be compelled to serve as child soldiers in defense of their country from a young age.

With little safeguards in place to protect the sanctity of education, many children wander away or are pushed to engage in more “useful” activities.

These essential ideas are often pushed to the sidelines in many countries that have yet to adopt more rigorous educational frameworks. They are violated when people lack understanding of their inalienable rights and the best means to defend them. When a generation is raised without an education, they may not be able to fully enjoy all of their human rights.

Individuals who lack education are more vulnerable to poverty and oppression than those who have developed the ability to think critically and comprehend the fundamentals of economic progress. When we deny kids this essential human right, we are not providing them with the skills they need for success, either socially or economically.

Too frequently, we wonder how the world arrived at this condition of affairs. Many people believe that a basic education might lead to more significant progress in battling global poverty and oppression. According to the Global Partnership for Education, 61 million children are denied this fundamental right, a figure that is far too high.

If those 61 million children had access to the resources they required to acquire the foundations of reading, writing, and math, there would be more voices suggesting answers to our world’s major crises. The most acclaimed leaders frequently emerge from within suffering communities. These individuals can more properly judge where the current system falls short and implement innovative tactics to improve their lives as well as the community’s infrastructure.

Education is essential for empowering a new generation to bring their communities out of poverty and defend their basic human rights. According to the Right to Education Project, a firm foundation with education is both a tool for empowerment and a vital component for individual personality development.

Even while education has the potential to be a critical component in resolving many of the world’s economic challenges, many gray areas hinder it from attaining its full potential. These should be improved in the next years to enforce this fundamental human right and help it attain its full potential for future generations.

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What’s Next? Lessons From the Lockdown on Traditional Education https://www.thetechedvocate.org/whats-next-lessons-from-the-lockdown-on-traditional-education/ Wed, 14 Jul 2021 08:38:00 +0000 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/?p=33251 Schools for children from preschool through late teens, and even into the early twenties, has become such a norm that there is even a genre of literature called “school stories.” Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody, John Dewey, and many more are names that are well known to students of educational history. They were highly instrumental in founding the system of education that began to take form in the late 1800s, and that continued to function with a few groans, bumps, and perhaps an occasional flat tire or two along the road toward giving every child an opportunity to read, write, calculate, […]

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Schools for children from preschool through late teens, and even into the early twenties, has become such a norm that there is even a genre of literature called “school stories.” Horace Mann, Elizabeth Peabody, John Dewey, and many more are names that are well known to students of educational history. They were highly instrumental in founding the system of education that began to take form in the late 1800s, and that continued to function with a few groans, bumps, and perhaps an occasional flat tire or two along the road toward giving every child an opportunity to read, write, calculate, and acquire higher learning. Thanks to dedicated teachers, school boards, principals, and parents the system became self-perpetuating with varying degrees of functionality.

Until it was disrupted by a lowly virus in 2019, and communicable disease often shorthanded as “novel coronavirus” or Covid-19 made busing children to a single central location a questionable health practice. Teachers who were pitchforked, unprepared, and sometimes unwillingly, into computerized education got a quick heads up on what they could bring from a standardized classroom and what was simply not possible. Parents, some of whom found their workplace shutdown, while others were deemed “essential” suddenly found that they were in full charge of their children 14 hours a day, seven days a week, instead of leaving a major portion of the training and supervising of their youngsters to the professionals.

Teachers quickly learned that even such simple things as taking roll could be complicated. A child on his or her own at home could log into a class, and then walk away, leaving the teacher talking to empty air. Plagiarism, cheating on tests, and having the book open while taking a test became almost inevitable since hastily improvised home “classrooms” could not be monitored. They learned that virtual whiteboards, while better than nothing, are not a good substitute for giving a child a hands-on response. Could it be that the age of the read-a-chapter take a multiple-choice quiz were dead? What were the possible answers?

One method was to go to require students to develop something.       It might be to create a Minecraft world, write an essay, draw an original picture about an event, or to develop a scientific experiment, accompanied by photographs. These sorts of object productions require the student to actively participate in a way that will show that he or she read the material and that they have some idea of what is involved with the lesson. They are visual, and keep the student engaged. But are they learning? Will reading Sir Cumference and the First Round Table and reporting on it enable a student to calculate the diameter, circumference, and radius of a circle? Will creating a graph of the robin population in the students front yard bring understanding of the complexities of natural science?

Two big lessons from the Covid-19 lockdowns is that few nations are prepared to meet the challenge of educating their youth without public schools, and that what works in a face-to-face classroom does not necessarily transfer to teaching online. Online instructors must be funnier, bolder, more entertaining than the traditional instructor. The biggest lesson is how deeply having children in a supervised school situation from early morning until late afternoon has become embedded in our society, and how one small change can bring it all tumbling down.

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Learning Management Systems 101 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/learning-management-systems-101/ Mon, 12 Jul 2021 08:44:00 +0000 https://www.thetechedvocate.org/?p=33253 Learning Management Systems, or LMS, are methods that provide a platform for teachers, students, parents, administrators, and other stakeholders to provide services and keep records for a set of learners. An LMS has three major components: it delivers information, it keeps records, and it facilitates communication. Let us walk through the day of a student at an ordinary pre-Covid-19 school where an LMS is in use. It could be one of several K-12 management systems. Let us call our student Mike. Because Mike lives across the railroad tracks from the school, he rides a bus to school. When he boards […]

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Learning Management Systems, or LMS, are methods that provide a platform for teachers, students, parents, administrators, and other stakeholders to provide services and keep records for a set of learners.

An LMS has three major components: it delivers information, it keeps records, and it facilitates communication.

Let us walk through the day of a student at an ordinary pre-Covid-19 school where an LMS is in use. It could be one of several K-12 management systems. Let us call our student Mike.

Because Mike lives across the railroad tracks from the school, he rides a bus to school. When he boards the bus, the driver’s assistant checks him off on her Bluetooth tablet. At school, Mike goes to breakfast, where the lunchroom attendant notes that he has three days left on his meal plan. An alert is sent to central operations. Mike meets with his pod for home room notes, then goes to math, language grammar instruction, then to history. Grades for completed work go into the central system. Mike’s mother logs into the online access during her lunch hour, sees the meal ticket note, and sends money from her checking account to cover another month. She sees that he has a perfect score in math, took a book quiz in language class, but had a low score on his history quiz. She ticks a box that will alert the instructor that she is aware that there might be a problem. After lunch, Mike has a physical education class, music, and finally art. He gets sent to the office for painting his face instead of paper. A note is made in his disciplinary file, which has extra security. A request goes to his mother and father for a parent to pick Mike up after school. His father responds, and will meet with the art teacher.

Now, let us walk through a day with students who are learning at home. This describes many children in 2020, as parents scrambled for safe, effective situations for their children, and the platform could easily be a one similar to Pedagogue. At 7:30, Jenny’s mom and dad leave for work. Jenny is sixteen, and is providing childcare for her niece, who is nine. Jenny makes breakfast for herself and Emmy, her niece. Then she helps Emmy log into her interactive reading class before booting up her own instruction on a different laptop. Jenny and Emmy have the same instructional supervisor, and their work goes to her. The instructor also has contact information for both Jenny’s parents and for Emmy’s mom. Jenny helps Emmy with math problems, then messages her instructor that they are  having trouble with a science experiment. The household does not have all the equipment necessary. The instructor suggests an alternative project that involves items easily found in the kitchen and can be eaten for lunch. The instructor then uses the virtual classrooms online white board to help Jenny check her math homework, and to set up a household survey to use later in the evening. Then Emmy has free playtime, and accesses an edutainment game. Jenny uses the LMS to meet with her after schoolbooks discussion group.

These two models of learning management systems are by no means exhaustive. A good LMS can encompass most of the software requirements of a school, help homeschool parents with enrichment lessons and tracking software, or even be incorporated into a business’s online assets to educate employees or customers.

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