The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

This week, Shanna Peeples was honored as American’s Teacher of the Year. The high school English teacher from Amarillo, Texas has taught refugee students from war-torn countries who faced challenges that would discourage any student. But through Peeples continued efforts, these students thrive. The impact of a great teacher such as Peeples can follow a student for years – from elementary to college – even all the way to the White House.

When I crossed the threshold at 1201 Connecticut Avenue in May 2011, the nation’s graduation rate stood at 72 percent. The best data we had on the use of technology in education was from 2009 and indicated that only 40 percent of teachers used technology “often” during instructional time. The term “digital learning” was not well-defined and could be construed to mean online learning, blended learning, or the use of calculators.

This week is my last at the Alliance as I prepare to depart for a three-year overseas tour with my diplomat spouse. But looking back at the last four years, I’d say it was time well spent. The graduation rate is now 81 percent. Students of color have made significant leaps. And digital learning, for lack of a better word, is a “thing.”

The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

During the sixth of thirteen Future Ready regional summits Wednesday, Dr. Tiffany Anderson hit the nail on the head for many in attendance when she said she believes ‘relationships, pedagogy, and curriculum’ can help even the most struggling schools and students achieve with technology. Speaking to an audience of more than thirty school district superintendents and their leadership teams from across the region, the superintendent of Jennings School District in Jennings, Missouri left many attendees echoing her feelings on how to maximize digital learning in the classroom.

The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

The Common Core State Standards have been adopted and implemented by more than forty states and the District of Columbia. Opinions, some in opposition, of the English language arts and math standards are everywhere, but support for the standards from teachers, students, and parents continues. As Jayne Ellspermann, principal of West Port High School in Ocala, Florida, put it in the Hechinger Report’s Core Debate: “I support the Common Core because it challenges our students to think.”

Parental support, Ellsperman wrote, is key to successfully implementing the standards.

This blog was written by Jennifer L. Scheffer, Certified Google Educator and  Technology Integration Specialist/Mobile Learning Coach for Burlington Public Schools in Burlington, Massachusetts. This post originally appeared on Scheffer’s blog, Make IT Happen: Innovation & Technology in the Classroom.

It was an honor to receive an invitation to attend the Future Ready Summit in Rhode Island and represent Burlington Public Schools as a local area expert. I had the opportunity to share the success of Burlington’s student run Help Desk and talk with school leaders about how they can develop a similar program to support their own 1:1 initiative. I also had the privilege to learn from several exceptional education thought leaders; including Michael Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools.

The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

Deeper Learning allows educators a way to deliver core content to students in innovative ways while taking into consideration the concepts of critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and communication.  Some would argue that certain gaps in education can be filled by these competencies.

For many, the Common Core State Standards is aiding in filling the need for more complex practices – in arts education. In a Monday article entitled, “Do the arts go hand in hand with Common Core?” The Hechinger Report’s Sara Neufeld explores how the standards’ focus on critical thinking and reasoning skills is helping Brooklyn’s Ascend Charter School network engage its students in the arts.

The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

As the school year nears a close, millions of K-12 students are engaging in new standardized assessments. In some states, parents have chosen to opt their students out of the tests aligned with Common Core State Standards. But some argue that parents who remove their students from testing are in fact opting themselves out of the opportunity to be closer to their child’s learning experience.

Much of the great work being done in our schools every day by teachers, administrators, school staff, parents and students is unknown to the general public. The exceptional commitment, extraordinary contributions and innovative collaborations among educators around the nation are generally hidden and unrecognized.  Yet, every day, educators are doing great things for the children they serve.

Today, changing conditions, a new culture of transparency, along with the need to share best practices and inspire others is breaking the historical silence among educators.

This year a passionate network of education organizations are working together to encourage educators in every sector of the community to share the stories of the great things happening in our schools.

The Main Course, a daily post from the Alliance for Excellent Education, provides an overview of the day’s main news story on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education-related news.

The use of technology continues to make its way into the day-to-day stream of classroom learning. K–12 students and teachers are familiarizing themselves with iPads, Chromebooks, apps, and programs.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asked in a recent post for Medium, “What can technology do for tomorrow’s children?” Duncan asserts the continued use of technology in the classroom is important to growing student success, and it is critical that the digital divide some schools and school districts face does not keep less-advantaged students from achieving those successes.

The Daily Dish digs deeper into one of the day’s top news stories on K–12 education. Make sure to add High School Soup to your RSS feed for all the latest updates and follow the Alliance on Twitter at @All4Ed for more education news.

A student’s ability to comprehend and communicate day to day curricula hinders greatly on his or her literacy skills. Fostering strong literacy skills for students is a continued effort of the National Adolescent Literacy Coalition (NALC). On Thursday, April 23, NALC is slated to host its spring forum on Literacy in Changing Times, an opportunity for those interested in discussing “new developments in research, practice, and policy to advance literacy for all adolescents.”