Category: solutions

  • Optoma Announces Launch of the New 3-Series Interactive Displays with Google Certification and AI-Enabled Tools

    Optoma Announces Launch of the New 3-Series Interactive Displays with Google Certification and AI-Enabled Tools

    FREMONT, CA – Optoma, a world-leading provider of visual solutions, today announced its latest Creative Touch 3-Series Interactive Displays designed to empower educators and business professionals with new tools and features to enhance learning, make presentations more effective, and increase collaboration in classrooms, lecture halls, boardrooms, remote working and other business environments.

    With Google’s Enterprise Device Licensing Agreement (EDLA) Certification and added functionality, the new 3-Series empowers professionals and educators to deliver dynamic and impactful content by providing cutting-edge tools that streamline management and elevate engagement. The advanced capabilities of the new 3-Series simplify planning and workflow through wireless collaboration, screen sharing, and innovative meeting solutions in both corporate and educational environments alike, all packed into a robust yet user-friendly platform.

    The 3-Series: Purpose-Built for Corporate and Education Environments

    New features and key highlights include:

    Google EDLA Certification: Ensures compatibility and optimized performance with thousands of educational applications and services available directly from the pre-installed Google Play Store allowing users to experience the full Google Suite for real-time collaboration from practically anywhere in the world.  Without compatibility issues or the hassle of connecting an external PC, users can easily access the entire suite of Google-based applications they are accustomed to – including Google Drive, Google Docs, YouTube, and more!

    The Optoma Solution Suite (OSS®): User-friendly software featuring Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled tools, such as Sticky Notes* and AI Handwriting Recognition, the OSS package also includes:

    • Whiteboard: Unleash creativity through a digital whiteboard packed with tools that make learning and sharing ideas engaging – facilitating collaboration in real-time from anywhere.
      • Smart Sketch tool is ideal for drawing diagrams as it recognizes shapes and drawings and converts them into clipart images.
      • Floating Toolbar and Infinity Canvas allow you to seamlessly switch between tools to suit your tasks with a virtually limitless writing space.
      • Innovative Annotation and Highlighter Tools make underlining key points or annotating complex diagrams a breeze.
    • File Manager: Easily save, organize, or move files from local storage to networkable storage or to popular cloud services in seconds.
    • Display Share: Connect any device to wirelessly broadcast, share, or stream your content to the big screen. Bringing your own device has never been easier.

    Exceptional Performance: Seamless performance with an 8-core processor, Android 14 OS, and Zero Bonding screen for that natural writing experience.

    “We are excited to announce our new 3-Series and partnership with Raptor Technologies which truly embodies our commitment to supporting education through cutting-edge visual solutions, enhanced software packages and safety and security,” said Maria Repole, Head of Marketing at Optoma.

    A value-added solution, Optoma Management Suite (OMS®) is available out of the box on the 3-Series Interactive Displays, with a free trial available.** OMS offers IT administrators and technicians a real time remote platform to monitor, manage, diagnose, and update multiple or entire fleets of displays simultaneously that are either on the same network or connected through the cloud. OMS makes it easy to broadcast emergency messages, alerts, or announcements across displays worldwide.

    Optoma is thrilled to partner with Raptor® Technologies, the leading innovator in school safety solutions, redefining the landscape of school security with its Raptor School Safety Software Suite. By integrating Raptor’s software with Optoma’s interactive displays, school administrators and students can receive real-time alerts and emergency notifications using CAP protocols to improve the overall safety of the school.

    To experience a demonstration and learn more about Optoma’s new Creative Touch 3-Series Interactive Displays, please schedule a demo or visit: https://www.optomausa.com/products/interactive-flat-panel-displays-3-series/education https://www.optomausa.com/products/interactive-flat-panel-displays-3-series/corporate

    *Some AI features may require the use of an Optoma (OSS) account.

    **Free trial licenses are available for a limited time. Please register your OMS® Cloud account at https://oms.optoma.com or speak with your local representative.

    OMS and OSS are registered trademarks of Optoma Corporation

    DLP is a registered trademark of Texas Instruments

    About Optoma Technology, Inc.  

    Optoma combines cutting-edge technology and innovation to deliver remarkable visual display products designed to connect audiences with engaging video experiences. From the company’s ProScene projectors to its Creative Touch interactive, Professional LCD and LED displays, Optoma’s suite of products can meet the demands of nearly any professional environment, including conference rooms and classrooms, digital signage, corporate, houses of worship, retail, simulation environments and control rooms. Optoma Technology is the U.S. headquarters for The Optoma Group, with continental headquarters also in Europe and Asia. For more information, visit optomausa.com.   

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  • Otus Wins Gold Stevie® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year

    Otus Wins Gold Stevie® Award for Customer Service Department of the Year

    CHICAGO, IL (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Otus, a leading provider of K-12 student data and assessment solutions, has been awarded a prestigious Gold Stevie® Award in the category of Customer Service Department of the Year at the 2025 American Business Awards®. This recognition celebrates the company’s unwavering commitment to supporting educators, students, and families through exceptional service and innovation.

    In addition to the Gold award, Otus also earned two Silver Stevie® Awards: one for Company of the Year – Computer Software – Medium Size, and another honoring Co-founder and President Chris Hull as Technology Executive of the Year.

    “It is an incredible honor to be recognized, but the real win is knowing our work is making a difference for educators and students,” said Hull. “As a former teacher, I know how difficult it can be to juggle everything that is asked of you. At Otus, we focus on building tools that save time, surface meaningful insights, and make student data easier to use—so teachers can focus on what matters most: helping kids grow.”

    The American Business Awards®, now in their 23rd year, are the premier business awards program in the United States, honoring outstanding performances in the workplace across a wide range of industries. The competition receives more than 12,000 nominations every year. Judges selected Otus for its outstanding 98.7% customer satisfaction with chat interactions, and exceptional 89% gross retention in 2024. They also praised the company’s unique blend of technology and human touch, noting its strong focus on educator-led support, onboarding, data-driven product evolution, and professional development.

    “We believe great support starts with understanding the realities educators face every day. Our Client Success team is largely made up of former teachers and school leaders, so we speak the same language. Whether it’s during onboarding, training, or day-to-day communication, we’re here to help districts feel confident and supported. This recognition is a reflection of how seriously we take that responsibility and energizes us to keep raising the bar,” said Phil Collins, Ed.D., Chief Customer Officer at Otus.

    Otus continues to make significant strides in simplifying teaching and learning by offering a unified platform that integrates assessment, data, and instruction—all in one place. Otus has supported over 1 million students nationwide by helping educators make data-informed decisions, monitor progress, and personalize learning. These honors reflect the company’s growth, innovation, and steadfast commitment to helping school communities succeed.

    About Otus

    Otus, an award-winning edtech company, empowers educators to maximize student performance with a comprehensive K-12 assessment, data, and insights solution. Committed to student achievement and educational equity, Otus combines student data with powerful tools that provide educators, administrators, and families with the insights they need to make a difference. Built by teachers for teachers, Otus creates efficiencies in data management, assessment, and progress monitoring to help educators focus on what matters most—student success. Today, Otus partners with school districts nationwide to create informed, data-driven learning environments. Learn more at Otus.com.

    Stay connected with Otus on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Instagram.

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  • How two districts are achieving math recovery

    How two districts are achieving math recovery

    DRESDEN, Tenn. — In early February, seventh grade math teacher Jamie Gallimore tried something new: She watched herself teach class. The idea had come from Ed Baker, district math coach at Tennessee’s Weakley County Schools. Baker set up an iPad on a cabinet in Gallimore’s classroom at Martin Middle School and hit record. 

    Gallimore watched the videos twice, and she and Baker ran through them together. They dissected the questions she asked during the lesson, looked at how much time she took to work through problems and analyzed how she’d moved around the room. As a veteran teacher, she did a lot right — but the meeting with Baker also made her change a few things.

    Instead of throwing out questions to the whole class, now Gallimore more often calls on individuals. When a student answers, she might turn to the other side of the room and ask, “What did they just say?” The tactics, she said, have helped keep her students engaged.

    Coaching is one strategy Weakley administrators and teachers credit with boosting middle school math scores after they crashed during the pandemic. Weakley’s third through eighth graders are more than half a grade ahead of where they were at the same time in 2022 and about a third of a grade ahead of 2019, according to a national study of academic recovery released in February. In three of the district’s four middle schools, the percentage of students meeting grade-level expectations on Tennessee’s standardized math test, including among economically disadvantaged students, rose in 2024 above pre-pandemic levels.

     Teacher Jamie Gallimore uses a few new tactics in her seventh grade math classroom at Martin Middle School after working with district math coach Ed Baker. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report

    Amid a grim landscape nationwide for middle school math, Tennessee fared better than most states. In two districts in the state that bucked the national trend — Weakley and the Putnam County School District — educators point to instructional coaches, a dramatic increase in class time devoted to math and teachers systematically using student performance data to inform their teaching and push students to improve.

    How students do in middle school can predict how they do in life. Higher achievement in eighth grade math is associated with a higher income, more education later and with declines in teen motherhood and incarceration and arrest rates, a 2022 study by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research found. In addition, middle school grades and attendance are the best indicators of how a student will do in high school and whether they’re ready for college at the end of high school, a 2014 study found. 

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    Nationally, the news coming in shows trouble ahead: In January, for example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, showed that average eighth grade scores in 2024 were below those of 2019 and didn’t budge from 2022, when scores were the lowest in more than 20 years. Worse, the gaps between high and low achievers widened

    Tennessee, though, was one of five jurisdictions where the percentage of eighth graders scoring proficient in math — meaning they were able to handle challenging tasks like calculating square roots, areas and volumes — increased from 2022 to 2024. That reflects a longer-term trend: Since 2011, Tennessee has climbed from the 45th-ranked state to the 19th for average eighth grade math scores.

    But researchers have struggled to determine which interventions were most effective in helping students recover. A June 2024 study that looked at different strategies came to no conclusion because the strategies weren’t comparable across districts, said Dan Goldhaber of the nonprofit American Institutes for Research. In March, the Trump administration eliminated nearly all staff at the Department of Education unit that runs the Nation’s Report Card, which educators and researchers worry could make it even harder to compare how students in different states and districts perform and draw lessons about what works.

    In the absence of systematic research, attention has turned to states like Tennessee and districts like Weakley and Putnam where kids have climbed out of an academic hole. At Martin Middle School, the percentage of students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam cratered during the pandemic, falling from 40 percent in 2019 to 24 percent in 2022. But in 2024 that number jumped to 43 percent.

    Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

    Weakley County sits in the state’s northwest corner, its flat farmland populated with small towns of mostly modest ranch homes. The county is poorer than most in the country, with a median household income under $50,000.

    When the first federal Covid relief money arrived in early 2020, the district had to choose what to prioritize. Weakley focused on hiring staff who could help kids recover lost learning — instructional coaches for each school to focus on teaching strategies, plus subject-area coaches like Baker, whose role the district created in 2021. “Bottom line, we decided people over things,” said school system Director Jeff Cupples.

    Research indicates that coaching can make a big difference in student outcomes. A 2018 study summarizing the results of 60 prior studies found that coaching accelerated student learning by the equivalent of four to six months, according to Brown University associate professor Matthew Kraft, who led the research team. In a survey of Tennessee school districts last year, 80 of 118 that responded said they employ math coaches.

     Two Tennessee school districts credit the systematic use of student achievement data for helping their middle schoolers rebound from the pandemic-era slide in middle-school math scores. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report

    In 2022, Martin Middle made another big change, nearly doubling the time kids spend in math class. In place of a single 50-minute class are two 45-minute periods that the school calls “core” and “encore,” with the encore session meant to solidify what students get in the first.

    On an overcast March day, Becky Mullins, a longtime math and science teacher who’s also assistant principal, helped sixth graders in her encore class calculate area and volume. On a screen at the front of the classroom, she pulled up problems many of them had trouble with in their core class taught by math teacher Drew Love. One asked them to calculate how many cubes of a certain volume would fit inside a larger prism. “What strategy have you learned from Mr. Love on how to solve this problem?” she asked.

    Related: One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well

    When a student in the back named Charlie raised his hand and said he was stuck, Mullins pulled up a chair beside him. They worked through the procedure together, and after a few minutes he solved it. Mullins said helping students individually in class works far better than assigning them homework. “You don’t know what they’re dealing with at home,” she said.

    Martin Middle seventh grader Emma Rhodes, 12, said individual help in her sixth grade encore class last year helped her through fractions. Her encore teacher was “very hands on,” said Rhodes. “It helps me most when teachers are one on one.” 

    Yet studies of double-dose math show mixed results. One in 2013 found a double block of algebra substantially improved the math performance of ninth graders. Another a year later concluded that struggling sixth graders who received a double block of math had higher test scores in the short term but that those gains mostly disappeared when they returned to a single block.

    The share of Martin Middle School students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than before the pandemic. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report

    Weakley and Putnam County staff also credit the systematic use of student achievement data for helping their middle schoolers rebound. Tennessee was a pioneer in the use of academic data in the early 1990s, devising a system that compiles fine-grained details on individual student achievement and growth based on state test results. Both Weakley and Putnam teachers use that data to pinpoint which skills they need to review with which students and to keep kids motivated.

    Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

    A four-hour drive east of Weakley in Putnam County on a day in early March, seventh grade math teacher Brooke Nunn was reviewing problems students had struggled with. Taped to the wall of her classroom was a printout of her students’ scores on each section of a recent test in preparation for the Tennessee state exam in April. One portion of that exam requires students to work without calculators. “This non-calculator portion killed them, so they’re doing it again,” Nunn said of the exercises they’re working on — adding and subtracting negatives and positives, decimals and fractions. 

    The data on her wall drove the lesson and the choice of which students to have in the room at Prescott South Middle School, where she teaches. Starting about 10 years ago, the district began requiring 90 minutes of math a day, split into two parts. In the second half, teachers pull out students in groups for instruction on specific skills based on where the data shows they need help.

    Teachers also share this data with students. In a classroom down the hall, after a review lesson, fellow seventh grade math teacher Sierra Smith has students fill out a colorful graphic showing which questions they got and which they missed on their most recent review ahead of the state test. Since Covid, apathy has been a challenge, district math coach Jessica Childers said. But having kids track their own data has helped. “Kids want to perform,” she said, and many thrive on trying to best their past performance.

    The district is laser focused on the state tests. It created Childers’ math coach role in 2019 with district funds and later other instructional coach jobs using federal pandemic relief money. Much of Childers’ job revolves around helping teachers closely align their instruction with the state middle school math standards, she said. “I know that sounds like teaching to the test, but the test tests the standards,” said Childers.

    Something in what the district is doing is working. It’s not well off: The share of its families in poverty is 4 percent higher than the national average. But at all six district middle schools, the percentage of students meeting expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than in 2019, and at all six the percentage was above the state average.

    Goldhaber, the AIR researcher, speculated that the focus on testing might help explain the rebound in Tennessee. “States have very different orientations around standards, accountability and the degree to which we ought to be focused on test scores,” he said. “I do believe test scores matter.”

    The share of Martin Middle School students meeting grade level expectations on the state math exam was higher in 2024 than before the pandemic. Credit: Andrea Morales for The Hechinger Report

    If Trump administration layoffs hamstring the ability to compare performance across states, successful strategies like those in the two districts might not spread. Weakley and Putnam have taken steps to ensure the practices they’ve introduced persist regardless of what happens at the federal level. Most of the federal Covid relief dollars that paid for academic coaches in both districts stopped flowing in January, but both have rolled money for coaches into their budgets. They also say double blocks of math will continue. 

    Cupples, the Weakley superintendent, worries about the effect of any additional federal cuts — without federal funds, the district would lose 90 positions and 10 percent of its budget. It would be “chaos, doom, despair,” he said, laughing. “But one thing I’ve learned about educators — as one myself and working with them — we overcome daily,” he said.

    “It’s just what we do.”

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about math recovery was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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  • CoSN State Chapters Grow With Additions of MACE and CoSNE

    CoSN State Chapters Grow With Additions of MACE and CoSNE

    Washington, D.C.– CoSN today announced that the Mid-America Association for Computers in Education ( MACE) and the Nebraska Chapter of the Consortium for School Networking ( CoSNE) have been approved by the CoSN Board of Directors as official State Chapters. CoSN State Chapters play a crucial role in advancing the organization’s mission at the local level. These chapters provide a platform for education technology leaders to collaborate, share best practices and advocate for innovative solutions in their regions. Through networking events, professional development opportunities and policy influence, CoSN State Chapters empower members to drive impactful change in their school districts.

    MACE is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to advancing educational technology by fostering collaboration, sharing best practices and supporting educators in the effective use of technology. The organization works to enhance education through responsible use of hardware and software, engage with industry partners to establish technical standards, and connect professionals in the field.   CoSNE was established by the Nebraska Association of Technology Administrators ( NATA), along with a group of Nebraska K-12 chief technology officers, chief information officers and technology directors in smaller districts/regions — or not previously associated with NATA. CoSNE is advancing the focus on policy advocacy, professional development, and engagement with state and national entities to advance educational technology leadership and best practices for every K-12 technology leader across Nebraska.