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Tag: blended

  • Savvas Learning Company Acquires Pointful Education

    Savvas Learning Company Acquires Pointful Education

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    PARAMUS, NEW JERSEY —  Savvas Learning Company, a next-generation K-12 learning solutions leader, today announced the acquisition of Pointful Education, a provider of innovative, online career and technical education (CTE) courses that prepare students with the industry knowledge and skills needed for future careers.

    Specializing in career-focused courses and certification exam preparation for middle and high school students, Pointful Education offers a wide range of virtual and blended learning solutions that engage students in career exploration and prepare them for the workforce. Its robust catalog features 55 courses that are aligned with nationally recognized career clusters. The courses offer engaging instructional design packed with interactives, videos, projects, language translations, and text-to-speech functionality.

    The acquisition of Pointful Education follows news in February of Savvas Learning Company’s strategic acquisition of Outlier, which offers high-quality, online college-level courses that enable high school students to earn dual credit while never having to leave their school building. Outlier by Savvas provides immersive, cinematically-produced courses in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences taught by world-class, charismatic instructors from NASA, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and other top institutions.

    “There’s a growing demand in the education marketplace to provide secondary students with multiple pathways for college and career learning that ignite a passion for career exploration,” said Bethlam Forsa, CEO of Savvas Learning Company. “In addition to providing students an opportunity for college learning with our Outlier offerings, the acquisition of Pointful Education allows us to provide the millions of secondary students we serve with a broader array of high-quality technical, career-focused courses for high-demand, high-skills, and high-paying careers.”

    From CTE courses to exam preparation, Pointful Education courses give students the edge they need to be successful in their field of choice and master career-readiness skills training. Its catalog of elective and career-focused digital courseware includes titles such as: Adobe InDesign; Agriscience; Career Exploration in Healthcare; Construction: Fundamentals and Careers; Cybersecurity; Drones: Remote Pilot; Early Childhood Education; Robotics: Applications & Careers; and Social Media Business Marketing. Nearly half of Pointful Education courses are directly aligned to an industry-recognized certification exam, so when students are done with the course they are prepared to take the exam.

    “We built our courses to give students the tools they need to develop the job-specific knowledge and skills for success in their future careers,” said Steve Southwick, CEO and founder of Pointful Education. “We’re so excited to join Savvas and be able to accelerate the development of new, high-quality career-focused courses that help schools support and expand their CTE pathways and grow their program offerings.”

    ABOUT SAVVAS LEARNING COMPANY

    At Savvas, we believe learning should inspire. By combining new ideas, new ways of thinking, and new ways of interacting, we design engaging, next-generation K-12 learning solutions that give all students the best opportunity to succeed. Our award-winning, high-quality instructional materials span every grade level and discipline, from evidence-based, standards-aligned core curricula and supplemental and intervention programs to state-of-the-art assessment tools and the industry’s most well-rounded portfolio of college- and career-readiness solutions — all designed to meet the needs of every learner. Savvas products are used by millions of students and educators in more than 90 percent of the 13,000+ public school districts across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as globally in more than 125 countries. To learn more, visit Savvas Learning Company. Savvas Learning Company’s products are also available for sale in Canada through its subsidiary, Rubicon.

    eSchool News Staff
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  • Friday 5: Blended learning

    Friday 5: Blended learning

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    Key points:

    Blended learning is not a new instructional approach, but it became more mainstream during and after the COVID pandemic, when educators and students elected to keep parts of entirely-online learning they favored during pandemic learning.

    Here are some facts, trends, and advantages you may not know about blended learning–also known as hybrid learning:

    What are the five pillars of blended learning?

    Blended learning–along with a little empathy–can open up a new mode of teaching and learning and help motivate students on a deeper level. Five important components and advantages of this learning modality are face-to-face instruction, online learning, flexibility, personalization, and integration. Discover the unbeaten path to hybrid learning.

    What is the strength of blended learning?

    Blended learning examples are life-changing for many students, extending personalized and flexible learning options to select individuals or groups. But with onset of the pandemic, widespread adoption of hybrid models suddenly became a necessity across all student populations. Now, years later, how have districts overcome the initial challenges and applied the lessons learned to re-imagine teaching and learning and develop an innovative vision for change in their school communities? Learn about hybrid learning’s strengths.

    What is the argument for blended learning?

    Schools should reimagine the learning processes and leverage in-person and hybrid learning to help students achieve the best possible results. Forced to go online during the pandemic, schools quickly turned to video conferencing and online tools and these tools helped reveal the advantages and disadvantages of hybrid learning. These new approaches offered ways to reduce many of the traditional barriers to services and support. Plus, they provided flexibility to best meet the needs of students and their families. Here’s more on flexible hybrid learning.

    What are the 5 key ingredients of blended learning?

    With the COVID-19 pandemic impacting learners across the world, we’ve witnessed the growing need for an education option that combines the benefits of a traditional in-person classroom and online learning. But the need for this option won’t just be a fleeting trend. The future of hybrid learning is bright, and the benefits and advantages of blended learning to students are unmatched. Here are 5 components of a great hybrid learning program.

    What are 3 positive outcomes of blended learning?

    The most important thing to remember when implementing new blended instructional strategies is that there is no universal way to do it. Examples of blended learning activities combine a mix of face-to-face and online instruction for students. Gen Z is the first truly internet-dependent generation–getting their entertainment, information, and socialization online, oftentimes from social media. Therefore, to reach these students where they are, we need to evolve our instructional strategies. Here are some positive outcomes of blended learning.

    Laura Ascione
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  • Behind This Week’s Launch of TeacherIn

    Behind This Week’s Launch of TeacherIn

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    Big news this week from ClassIn, a leader in blended, hybrid, and remote learning solutions, who announced what they describe as a first-of-its-kind platform—bringing curriculum and content discovery, management, editing, and distribution into its planning and instructional platform. Since TeacherIn’s beta went live at the beginning of the year, it has gained over 110,000 users globally, and more than 25,000 courses have been created. 

    The platform’s new content discovery marketplace will also manage and distribute licenses and offer copyright protection for publishers by using in-house developed audio-visual encoders to prevent infringement. I had the chance to chat with Ted Mo Chen, Vice President of globalization at ClassIn, before the announcement about the particulars. Click below to listen and scroll down for more details about the service from the company along with a few other takeaways from the conversation:

    Highlights from the conversation: 

    • Collaboration and Efficiency: “Teacher” encourages educators to collaborate, share, and modify course materials, fostering a sense of community among teachers to improve content quality and customization.
    • The Death of the Textbook—This time it’s for real!: Ted discussed the evolving landscape of education, emphasizing the shift away from traditional textbooks in favor of more dynamic, multimedia, and interactive teaching materials.
    • AI in Education: While the platform is not AI-focused at launch, the company plans to incorporate artificial intelligence in the future to help teachers recommend pedagogical strategies and enhance the delivery of educational content.
    • Adapting to the Educational Ecosystem: The company’s platform is designed to cater to the specific needs of teachers and educators, aiming to address the limitations of generic video conferencing and note-taking platforms in the education sector.

    More details from the release: 

    Built with collaborative curriculum and open publishing in mind, TeacherIn helps courseware creators collaborate to create high-quality materials by building upon each other’s curriculum in the cloud. While traditional document editors function on standalone files, courseware creators can now build an entire curriculum in ClassIn. 

    Over the past several years, educators and content providers have emphasized the benefits of digital curriculum over traditional instruction – citing flexibility, instruction personalization, better integration into LMS, the ability to measure curriculum usage, and cost savings. Yet, educators lack a platform to discover and manage their digital curriculum effectively. None of the many tools and platforms available to educators allowed them to complete simple functions, such as tracking versions, collaborating on edits, and clear visibility into updates.

    “ClassIn’s powerful platform manages so many elements of the teaching and learning process – from course planning to lesson planning to the delivery of engaging instruction to student assessment and class analytics, it made sense to add a platform for curriculum discovery and management,” said Sara Gu, Co-Founder, and COO at ClassIn. “Now educators, publishers, and instructional designers have a platform to create and manage all their digital curriculum that integrates seamlessly with the rest of ClassIn’s comprehensive suite of capabilities.”

    In an increasingly resource-constrained system, TeacherIn: 

    • Provides a consolidated curriculum and content discovery platform for educators 
    • Allows for easy course creation by district leaders and teachers 
    • Makes managing digital curriculum seamless—from licenses to edits to pushing the most updated versions to teachers—TeacherIn provides curriculum management that is cloud-based, collaborative, and easy for educators 
    • Provides publishers with valuable usage analytics and makes it easy to manage access licenses – ensuring no copyright issue
    • Provides monetization opportunities for educators and content creators who make their materials available for discovery and purchase 
    Kevin Hogan
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