Guest Contributed Posts
These articles were authored by a friend of MDR’s community. If you are interested in being a guest contributor, opens in a new windowplease submit your article ideas here.
By Guest Contributor Saul Hafenbredl What are the major trends in business-to-education marketing that companies need to be aware of to stay one step ahead in a rapidly changing business environment? CB&A’s annual Education Marketing Trends Report provides key insights that help companies succeed in selling to schools—and during a recent Expert Series webinar, the Read More »
Read Now »Motivation: The Key to Engagement in Online Learning
By Guest Contributor Steve Tardrew, VP of Assessment and Research, McGraw Hill School For the past two years, online technologies have allowed students to engage in learning tasks from home, often asynchronously and without direct teacher oversight. And although schools have predominantly reopened and returned to in-person instruction, online learning is likely to continue to Read More »
Read Now »An Interesting Beginning to 2022: K-12 Market Highlights
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe The education market seems to have quieted down a little bit in the beginning of 2022, but there are still lots of mergers and acquisitions, funding rounds closed and big personnel changes to report, including two of the industry’s biggest companies entertaining (or not?) takeover bids. Here are the highlights: Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributors Derek Fay, Josine Verhagen, Angelica Gonzalez, and Yuning Xu, Data Scientists at McGraw Hill A User Guide While data plays a critical role in the modern education system, data literacy is not a common component of teacher education programs. This can leave educators unprepared to evaluate data quality or know what Read More »
Read Now »How has the Pandemic Impacted Schools’ Purchasing Priorities?
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe When in college preparing for their careers, most of today’s school leaders likely didn’t think that they would need to know about planning for in-classroom learning during a pandemic or purchasing high quality air filtration systems. In addition to having to become armchair epidemiologists, they have also faced new challenges Read More »
Read Now »Students Deserve an Answer When They Ask, “When Will I Ever Use This?” In Math Class
By Guest Contributor Margaret A. Bowman, Ph.D., Academic Designer at McGraw Hill Here’s How Technology Can Help Every math teacher has likely heard it before: “When am I ever going to use this?” While some students quickly pick up anything mathematical, others mumble through class about how they don’t like math, they aren’t good at Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe In the words of the poet Robert Burns, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Headlines from the first few weeks of 2022 show that nothing could be truer of the return to school following the holidays. Thousands of K-12 schools have experienced a disruption to Read More »
Read Now »Start the Year with a Focus on Empathy in the Classroom
By Guest Contributor Amanda Schaffer, Online Professional Learning Product Manager, McGraw Hill School Understanding and responding to other people’s feelings, actions, and words is difficult. It’s perpetually a challenge for many adults, and, of course, can be very hard for young people, who are still developing the skills necessary to comprehend experiences or viewpoints outside Read More »
Read Now »Acquisitions, Investments and Personnel Moves From 2021’s Fourth Quarter
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe While 2021 turned out to be a more tumultuous year than we had anticipated (and hoped for), the activity and growth in the education market was robust throughout the year. The unprecedented influx of billions of dollars in federal stimulus funds to help schools mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 Read More »
Read Now »Begin 2022 with a Celebration of Kindness in Your School
By Guest Contributor Jill McManigal, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Kids for Peace Kindness has always mattered to me. As a former elementary school teacher, I knew that creating a supportive, happy and compassionate classroom culture was essential for students’ overall success. Then, when I became a mother of two, I experienced the importance of Read More »
Read Now »5 Critical Steps to Operationalize Privacy in a School District
By Guest Contributor Andy Bloom, VP, Chief Privacy Officer, McGraw Hill The K-12 privacy landscape is changing rapidly. The ways in which technology is applied to learning and the environments in which students and teachers use that technology are evolving. The sudden shift to online learning during the pandemic only accelerated that evolution and caused Read More »
Read Now »Teachers and Parents Agree: Social and Emotional Learning is More Important Than Ever
By Guest Contributor Dr. Shawn Smith, Chief Innovation Officer, McGraw Hill I’ve written previously in this publication on the role of EdTech providers in a post-pandemic landscape – on embracing flexible learning models, leveraging adaptive technology, and driving with student data. Today, I want to explore the role of social and emotional learning (SEL) in that same complex landscape of K-12 education. Even in Read More »
Read Now »A Learning Scientist’s Advice for Back to School: Let Them Play
By Guest Contributor Dylan Arena, VP, Learning Science, McGraw Hill School Group I’ve been fascinated by both learning and playing for my whole life, but it wasn’t until graduate school that I fully appreciated how related they are. Now I love to remind people that play is the most powerful adaptation for learning in the Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe While back-to-school 2021 may have been more uncertain than we had previously hoped, one thing that hasn’t been uncertain this year is growth, acquisition, and investment in the education market. We previously provided you with updates on top news from the first and second quarters of 2021. At the end Read More »
Read Now »The Role of EdTech Providers in a Post-Pandemic K-12 Landscape
By Guest Contributor Dr. Shawn Smith, Chief Innovation Officer, McGraw Hill School Group We’re in a transitional moment in K-12 education. As an institution, education has always had an incremental relationship with change. But within that relatively static institution, individuals – teachers, students, principals – have been making their own changes at the scale of their classrooms, schools, and learning communities. Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Erin Werra, Skyward Behind just about every public school district is an elected school board. Here are a few considerations to cultivate harmony. It takes a village to run a public school district. Harmony is the goal, but in turbulent times like these, tension arises quickly. As communities navigate changes and challenges, defining Read More »
Read Now »Four Ways to Help Schools Keep Parents Engaged in Education
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Parents have always been involved in school and their children’s education. They’ve gone to PTA/PTO meetings, participated in parent-teacher conferences, volunteered in the classroom and, of course, helped with homework. But 2020 and the closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic took that involvement to a whole new level. Read More »
Read Now »Continued Investments, Acquisitions and Plans for Back-to-School: Q2 2021 in Review
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe While there wasn’t quite as much activity as in the first quarter of 2021, the education space remained a hot bed of acquisition and investment activity in the second quarter with some significant initial public offerings (IPO) and leadership appointments. Here are highlights: McGraw Hill acquired Kidaptive, Inc., an adaptive Read More »
Read Now »Five Tips for Helping Schools Accelerate Social Emotional Growth
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe There’s been a lot of talk over the past year about the “learning loss” K-12 students may have suffered as a result of the switch to remote learning, but it is also important to shine a spotlight on the toll it may have taken on their social and emotional development Read More »
Read Now »Big Opportunities to Support 2021 Summer Learning
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Summer learning is a big topic this year among educators and plans are taking shape for many school districts now. While many school districts traditionally offer students some type of summer learning program, this year is seeing a surge in these offerings as educators and parents strive to ensure that Read More »
Read Now »Investments, Growth, Acquisitions & Reopening: Q1 2021 in Review
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Lisa Wolfe joins us again to provide an update on education news. From an education perspective, reopening schools and the status of spring assessments dominated the education headlines during the first quarter of 2021. Plus, the news of investment, growth, and acquisition in the education community during Q1 is Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Caroline Gilchrist, Skyward, Inc. In a world of connectivity, pockets of darkness remain. Twelve million children in the U.S. lack the internet access or devices they need to participate in remote learning. This disparity has only become more apparent—and devastating—amid the pandemic. Are you looking to light up the dark? Here are Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Now that the second half of the school year is underway, let’s take a look at the hot topics in education for 2021. Although COVID-19 has put added pressure on the education system, many of this year’s topics are the same ones that the community has dealt with for ages. Read More »
Read Now »By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Just weeks ago, Dictionary.com named “pandemic” its Word of the Year and users of the online dictionary selected “unprecedented” as the People’s Choice 2020 Word of the Year. No “words” are truer as we have all spoken and written those two words during 2020 more than ever before in our Read More »
Read Now »One of the Greatest Lessons 2020 Can Teach is Intellectual Humility
Between a global pandemic, a presidential election, and heightened focus on equality and justice, 2020 has been a year like no other for learning. Amidst the challenges and uncertainty this year has brought, students of all ages are being challenged to reevaluate not only how they learn, but how to relate to one another. They Read More »
Read Now »The Undoing of Systemic Inequities in Instruction
By Guest Contributor Lacey Robinson, President and Chief Executive Officer of UnboundEd Lacey Robinson is president and CEO of UnboundEd. To hear more from her, watch our webinar, Ensuring Educational Equity for the 2020-2021 School Year and Beyond. School looks different this year, and so could our instruction. COVID-19 continues to expose the unhinged, weathered, Read More »
Read Now »Ensuring Educational Equity for the 2020-21 School Year and Beyond
By Guest Contributor Lisa Wolfe Back-to-school 2020-2021 is like nothing any of us has ever experienced before. Everyday there seems to be new developments as school calendars are evolving, instructional models are changing, and new concerns for student, teacher and staff safety arise. And all the while, educators are striving to ensure educational equity for Read More »
Read Now »An Insider’s Point of View: A Principal’s Plan for Back to School — Part One
By Guest Contributor David Huber, Principal, South Side Elementary School, Connecticut This guest blog post is the first in a series by David Huber, principal of South Side Elementary School, in Bristol, Connecticut. Huber reflects on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on learning in his school and district and the long-term changes that will Read More »
Read Now »An Insider’s Point of View: A Principal’s Plan for Back to School — Part Three
By Guest Contributor David Huber, Principal, South Side Elementary School, Connecticut This guest blog post is the third in a series by David Huber, principal of South Side Elementary School, in Bristol, Connecticut. Huber reflects on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on learning in his school and district and the long-term changes that will Read More »
Read Now »An Insider’s Point of View: A Principal’s Plan for Back to School — Part Two
By Guest Contributor David Huber, Principal, South Side Elementary School, Connecticut This guest blog post is the second in a series by David Huber, principal of South Side Elementary School, in Bristol, Connecticut. Huber reflects on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on learning in his school and district and the long-term changes that will Read More »
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