Tag: save

  • SMART Technologies Launches AI Assist in Lumio to Save Teachers Time

    SMART Technologies Launches AI Assist in Lumio to Save Teachers Time

    Lumio by SMART Technologies, a cloud-based learning platform that enhances engagement on student devices, recently announced a new feature for its Spark plan. This new offering integrates AI Assist, an advanced tool designed to save teachers time and elevate student engagement through AI-generated quiz-based activities and assessments.

    Designing effective quizzes takes time—especially when crafting well-balanced multiple-choice questions with plausible wrong answers to encourage critical thinking. AI Assist streamlines this process, generating high-quality quiz questions at defined levels in seconds so teachers can focus on engaging their students rather than spending time on quiz creation.

    More News from eSchool News

    HVAC projects to improve indoor air quality. Tutoring programs for struggling students. Tuition support for young people who want to become teachers in their home communities.

    Data shows growing GenAI adoption in K-12

    Almost 3 in 5 K-12 educators (55 percent) have positive perceptions about GenAI, despite concerns and perceived risks in its adoption, according to updated data from Cengage Group’s “AI in Education” research series.

    Unlocking potential: The power of online courses in our school

    Our school has built up its course offerings without having to add headcount. Along the way, we’ve also gained a reputation for having a wide selection of general and advanced courses for our growing student body.

    5 AI tools for classroom creativity

    When it comes to visual creativity, AI tools let students design posters, presentations, and digital artwork effortlessly. Students can turn their ideas into professional-quality visuals, sparking creativity and innovation.

    Strategies to help girls stay engaged in STEM learning

    Ensuring that girls feel supported and empowered in STEM from an early age can lead to more balanced workplaces, economic growth, and groundbreaking discoveries.

    5 vocabulary strategies powered by technology

    In my work with middle school students, I’ve seen how critical that period of development is to students’ future success. One area of focus in a middle schooler’s development is vocabulary acquisition.

    The power of goal setting: A skill for lifelong success

    For students, the mid-year stretch is a chance to assess their learning, refine their decision-making skills, and build momentum for the opportunities ahead.

    The importance of teacher-student relationships

    Middle school marks the transition from late childhood to early adolescence. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson describes the transition as a shift from the Industry vs. Inferiority stage into the Identity vs. Role Confusion stage.

    Virtual art meets language learning: A tech-enhanced ESL experience

    Art has a unique power in the ESL classroom–a magic that bridges cultures, ignites imagination, and breathes life into language. For English Language Learners (ELLs), it’s more than an expressive outlet.

    Leadership is key to protecting student data privacy in 2025

    In the year 2025, no one should have to be convinced that protecting data privacy matters. For education institutions, it’s really that simple of a priority–and that complicated.

    Want to share a great resource? Let us know at submissions@eschoolmedia.com.

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  • Can young people help save local newsrooms?

    Can young people help save local newsrooms?

    Can youth doing journalism help save local news media? 

    Unfortunately, this isn’t a rhetorical question. The crisis around the world for local news outlets is so dire, people who understand the importance of unbiased news at the local level are looking for any and all solutions to save the industry. 

    This is a worldwide phenomenon. Data collected by researcher Amy Watson in August 2023, for example, found that more news outlets in the UK closed than were launched. Between 2008 and 1 April 2025, a total of 566 local news outlets closed in 372 communities across Canada, according to the Local News Map crowd-sourcing data initiative. And a report from the Brookings Institution found that in the United States in 2023, some 2.5 local news outlets folded every week.  

    That’s why Global Youth & News Media, a French nonprofit affiliated with News Decoder, is offering an award for youth collaborations that support struggling local news outlets by providing content produced in their schools and helping to expand the outlet’s audience. Entry deadline is 16 June and details are here.

    “We and the partners in this award around the world want to find and spread the word about the lessons from the best cases of success as well as cautions about inevitable problems and challenges,” said Aralynn McMane, executive director of Global Youth & News Media.

    “At the very minimum, ‘success‘ means a discernible audience for the work that youth reporters — up through university age — produce in news media that serve a wider local community than their classmates,” McMane said “It’s even better if their efforts can be linked to financial sustainability.” 

    Supporting local news efforts

    The main goal of the award is to highlight successful collaborations between youth and local outlets so that other organizations around the world can adopt those strategies. McMane said that she has seen this happen many times — smart news media innovators will come up with a solution to a problem, and those solutions can help news producers even very far away adapt that idea to solve a similar issue. 

    Award partners that support local news efforts internationally as well as from Africa, North America, Europe and Asia have stepped up to help make sure the search for such cases is as wide as possible and to distribute the intelligence gained from this search to as many news organizations in as many places as possible. 

    First to sign up to help was the University of Southern California’s Communication Center on Leadership and Policy (CCLP), located within the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication.

    In 2024, CCLP launched the Local News and Student Journalism Initiative to study the role of student journalists across America and issued this first report on their work.

    “We are delighted to partner with Global Youth & News Media to celebrate impactful local news stories produced by young journalists around the world, as well as to share and amplify their efforts with the goal of inspiring more young people to cover the news of their communities who are already providing first-rate local news coverage,” said Geoffry Cowan, center director. 

    Inspiring young people to tell important stories

    Another national academic partner, the Medill School at Northwestern University, released a report earlier this month about collaborations between local news outlets and student journalists in the United States as part of its Local News Initiative.

    The report found a trend for such collaborations in the United States. “Instead of news organizations giving boosts to students, students are supporting often-short-staffed outlets by providing coverage as part of their curricula,” the report said. 

    Senior Associate Dean Tim Franklin, the project’s director, said Medill started the initiative seven years ago to see how they could leverage the school’s resources to help local news outlets, journalism organizations, scholars and scholastic media at a time of crisis in the industry.

    “Our research provides insights about trends and issues in local news in this fast-changing landscape,” Franklin said. “And through our programs, we’re helping news organizations with things like business strategy and product development at a time when many can’t do R&D themselves. We’re also creating opportunities to inspire young people to pursue careers in journalism.”

    The quest to help local news is global. The Austria-based International Press Institute, for example, has run two editions of an “accelerator” program to support digital innovation in local journalism’s editorial and business models around the world. It also runs a related network.

    Other partners include the International Center for Journalists and the Media Diversity Institute, both of which have extensive local news programs, Youth Community Journalism Institute founded by the Strong Mind Strong Body Foundation, a U.S. nonprofit, Europe Youth Press, a consortium of outlets in 34 countries, Africa Media Perspectives, The Media Lab in Jordan, Asia division of the Asian-American Journalists Association, the Panhellenic Federation of Journalists’ Unions of Greece and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research Project. 

    Empowering youth through journalism

    Stefano Zamparo, an executive board member for Europe Youth Press said that the award aligns with the group’s work empowering youth voices through journalism, ensuring their stories resonate within their local communities and beyond. 

    “Celebrating successful collaborations between young journalists and local media helps foster greater press freedom and media literacy across Europe,” Zamparo said. 

    Ivor Price, founder of Africa Media Perspectives, sees young people as the driving force behind a rebirth of local news. “For local news to survive and thrive, it must become a true reflection of the communities it serves, which means opening our newsrooms and our storytelling platforms to new voices,” Price said. 

    Since 2018, the Global Youth & News Media Prize has honored the important work that sees news media meaningfully engage the young with notable results that benefit both parties. 

    Its first award recognized a cooperation between the United States digital edition of the The Guardian news organization and reporters from the Eagle Eye, a student news operation at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which was the site of a 2018 school shooting in which 17 people were killed. Through the journalism collaboration, the Parkland students contributed live digital coverage of an anti-gun violence demonstration in Washington, D.C. 

    News Decoder has been a partner in these competitions from the start.

    “This particular award theme resonates particularly strongly with us,” said News Decoder managing director Maria Krasinski. “All around the globe, student journalists are telling important stories, but often those stories aren’t heard outside their schools. This competition will rightfully recognize the important work youth are doing to help inform local communities.”

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  • FIRE’s president to Donald Trump: Here’s how you can help save free speech

    FIRE’s president to Donald Trump: Here’s how you can help save free speech

    Since the 2008 election, our President and CEO Greg Lukianoff has written to each new president upon their inauguration, offering FIRE’s perspective on how they can help defend free speech and academic freedom.

    Read LETTER FROM Greg Lukianoff to President DONALD Trump

    As President Trump enters office today, there is much work to be done. Free speech is under attack on college campuses. In fact, last year was the worst on record for free speech on college campuses, as more attempts were made to deplatform speakers on campus than any year since FIRE began tracking in 1998. And professors are censoring themselves more now than at the height of the McCarthy era.

    Off campus, the situation is alarming as well.

    Greg’s letter to President Trump highlights some policies his administration can implement to help remedy the situation and protect free speech over the next four years, on campus or off.

    1. Support the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act

    A 2024 FIRE study found that only 15% of public colleges and universities’ speech policies comply fully with their First Amendment obligations. This should be a national scandal.

    But there’s a simple way for the Trump administration, working with Congress, to better protect the free speech rights of our nation’s students.

    FIRE to Congress: More work needed to protect free speech on college campuses

    News

    FIRE joined Rep. Murphy’s annual Campus Free Speech Roundtable to discuss the free speech opportunities and challenges facing colleges.


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    We ask that Trump support the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act — or another piece of legislation to protect campus speech rights — to codify speech protective standards  including ending “free speech zones” that limit where students can hold demonstrations, the levying of viewpoint-based security costs to punish student groups seeking to host “controversial” speakers, and encouraging institutions to adopt the Chicago Principles on Free Expression.

    At least 23 states have enacted some of these commonsense provisions, but student free speech rights deserve federal protection. Legislation to ensure that all of our nation’s public colleges and universities finally protect the basic free speech rights of their students should be a top priority.

    2. Address the abuse of campus anti-harassment policies

    In the landmark 1999 decision Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court defined student-on-student harassment as behavior that “is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victims are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

    After 25 years of advocating for students’ rights on campus, FIRE knows all too well how definitions of student-on-student harassment that fail to meet the Davis standard will inevitably be used to punish protected speech. Consider the 2022 case of eight law students at American University who were put under investigation for participating in a heated back-and-forth following the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion, after another student said their pro-choice commentary harassed and discriminated against him based on his religious, pro-life beliefs. 

    As president, Trump inherits the privilege and the obligation to defend the First Amendment rights of all Americans, regardless of their viewpoint

    But properly applied, the Davis standard ensures that institutions protect students against actual discriminatory behavior as opposed to punishing students who merely express controversial viewpoints.

    3. Rein in government jawboning

    Leaks and disclosures over the past few years have brought to light demands, threats, and other coercion from government officials to social media companies aimed at suppressing particular viewpoints and ideas.

    This practice, known as jawboning, is a serious threat to free speech. But the Trump administration can prevent jawboning by federal officials with the following steps:

    • Prohibit federal employees from jawboning;
    • Support legislation to require transparency when government officials communicate with social media companies about content moderation. FIRE’s SMART Act is one such model bill.
    • Refrain from threatening or pressuring social media platforms to change their content moderation practices or suppress particular users.

    And, of course, refrain from making calls for investigations, prosecutions, or other government retaliation in response to the exercise of First Amendment rights outside of the social media context as well.

    4. Protect First Amendment rights when it comes to AI

    Over the course of history, technologies that make communication easier have aided the process of knowledge discovery: from the printing press and the telegraph to the radio, phones, and the internet. So too have AI tools revealed their potential to spark the next revolution in knowledge production.

    What is jawboning? And does it violate the First Amendment?

    Issue Pages

    Indirect government censorship is still government censorship — and it must be stopped.


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    The potential power of AI has also prompted officials at all levels of government to move towards regulating the development and use of AI tools. Too often, these proposals do not account for the First Amendment rights of AI developers and users. 

    The First Amendment applies to AI just as it does to other technologies that Americans use to create and distribute writings, images, and other speech. Nothing about AI software justifies or permits the trampling of those rights, and doing so would undermine its potential as a tool for contributing to human knowledge.

    Trump’s administration can prevent this by rejecting any federal regulation of AI that violates the First Amendment.

    Conclusion

    The Trump administration faces historic challenges both at home and abroad. But the United States is uniquely capable of solving our challenges because of our unparalleled commitment to freedom of speech. 

    As president, Trump inherits the privilege and the obligation to defend the First Amendment rights of all Americans, regardless of their viewpoint — and FIRE stands ready to help in that effort.

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  • Can Go Higher students save the environment? By Barbara Milne, Go Higher Study Skills Tutor – ALL @ Liverpool Blog

    Can Go Higher students save the environment? By Barbara Milne, Go Higher Study Skills Tutor – ALL @ Liverpool Blog

    Sustainability and the challenges of protecting our environment are key concerns for the Go Higher Diploma and for the University as a whole. A couple of weeks into semester two, our students were invited to work on a PowerPoint presentation and voice over, focusing on the topic of sustainability and / or the environment.

    The range of topics which they chose to focus on and research was hugely impressive. The task enabled them to not only develop their investigative and PowerPoint skills but also to highlight an issue which was important to them personally.

    Our Go Highers embraced this task, producing work of a high quality: innovative, dynamic, and engaging. By way of example, here are some titles: ‘Sustainability in Fashion’; ‘The important role frogs play in environment’, through to ‘Dogs’ ‘business’’ and its impact on our environment, to the fascinating subject of ‘Light Pollution’, collectively, a wide-ranging and diverse bank of work.

    I chatted with one of our Go Higher, who, reflecting on their presentation, highlighted positive aspects of their ‘PowerPoint experience’. They observed that ‘the presentation was a nice way to lead into the start of the new semester’. They noted, with appreciation, the freedom to select their theme within the topic remit, adding that ‘there were opportunities to settle on a subject that might not be widely known’, drawing attention to it, through the medium of PowerPoint.

    A further reflection highlighted the usefulness of having a sample presentation, plus rough working notes, as part of the task guidance. This advice served as an alarm bell, warning that not everything, however relevant and interesting, could be included within the five slide limit, so encouraging the development of discerning editing skills. The nature of this task was commented on as being instrumental in ‘taking the pressure off’, affording an opportunity to concentrate efforts on an item of work that would receive constructive comment, rather than a grade.

    A positive outcome, resulting from the presentation task, was pinpointed  during our conversation –  the interconnection between this assignment and the forthcoming Philosophy podcast  – feedback evidencing that the path towards making a podcast had been eased, because of the experience of providing a commentary to a PowerPoint presentation, speaking to an audience, a practice run for the podcast. This is a feature of Go Higher: there are linkages throughout the different modules with students supported to develop their skills and potential at a pace that is right for them.

    It’s terrific to see how much hard work has gone into producing engaging presentations that are both engaging and informative. Well done everyone!

    Image by Freepic

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