Oh yeah, here is an informative rundown posted by Mashable to give a summary (with video) of all the recent and exciting changes with the significant redesign of the social media platform.

The Most Popular Hashtags

• #edchat – Education, worldwide (lots of US teachers). A really useful hashtag if you are interested in tweeting with a wide range of educators worldwide.
• #schools – Massively wide ranging but used far less than #edchat or #ukedchat
• #teaching – This hashtag seems to largely be used for jobseeking, FYI
• #lrnchat – Learning chat
• #TT – Teacher Tuesday where educators suggest others to follow
• #kinderchat – hashtag for discussing kindergarten aged children
• #EdChatIE – The educational hashtag for Ireland for all three levels
• #ukedchat – UK Education
• #ClavEd – The educational hashtag for French Speakers – Wednesdays at 12h(EST) 13h(ATL) 18h(Paris)
• #GlobalEd – Education with a global dimension

Technology

• #edtech – a very wide range of tweets relating to the use of technology in education.
• #elearning – eLearning topics
• #mlearning – the use of mobile technologies in education, also #mobilelearning though this is less used
• #edapp – educational apps
• #gbl - games based learning
• #slide2learn – iDevices and learning
• #vitalcpd – effective use of technology in the classroom

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Make sure you join others who care about education and technology on our Facebook and Twitter.

We hope you have a very social holiday season!

Ignite! Learning

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I woke up this morning to pick through my closet full of items I knew I would never use again.  This “clean-out” wasn’t only attributed to mild OCD, but the Ignite! Learning office has been collecting fun toys, educational games, and other presents for a toy drive to benefit Austin Children’s Shelter.  For a few weeks there has been a festive box in their friendly lobby that has been stacking up rather quickly.

I wasn’t surprised to find classics like Battleship, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Dora the Explorer, Sesame Street, and a whole archive of Sunday afternoon past-the-time activities.  When cleaning out a closet of mine this morning, I realized that I would contribute one of the greatest games of all time (at  least in my opinion), Scrabble.  I have always been a fan of vocabulary progressing games, and I figure some wonderful children could find use and appreciation of the timeless entertainment.  We joked as I brought in the board game because there was already a junior version of Scrabble in the collection of donations.  Some would argue my old-school adult version of the game is a little to difficult for kids to play with, but I would like to give kids in this day and age the benefit of the doubt.

I was happy to pass on a legacy board game that had a staple in my curiosity and obsession with learning more.  The most powerful part of extended your vocabulary is your growing ability to truly explain something to anyone and understand things very well in return.  It allowed me to look at all educational situations and exercises as they were a game like Scrabble.  I proudly pass off the potential for any youthful person to see the fun in education like I did.

With all that we are providing, what feels the best is to be associated and contribute to an organization that provides such a safe, nurturing, learning and healing environment for all children who deal with complex issues of abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence and child abuse.  As a company who strives to improve learning environments in schools, we appreciate the dedication Austin Children’s Shelter has to keep students and kids safe outside of the school environment.

We hope and ask that you find a local effort that you can support and contribute anything you have.  I am sure we all have some closets or storage bins that need some cleaning.

I proudly work with Ignite! Learning and hope that your school, company or household can get involved with the approaching holidays.

Service Above Self,

John and the friendly Ignite! Crew.

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Because she turns into…   

Kadonna has instantly become a lightning rod of organization and clarity, keeping a dozen projects spinning in front of her at all times and allowing our dev team to focus on what they do best – create cool stuff.

Thanks for all you do Kadonna, we appreciate you!

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But the minor issues others have experienced are due to subjective network or internet content filters or firewall settings. These filters are sometimes adopted by schools and districts for antivirus and internet browsing security.  These filters of course have exceptions and amendments, but it is a change that someone (most likely an IT personnel) changes on their end.

If you are having any issues with your trial, reach out to your IT staff to allow our software to download onto your network.  Also, If you have any questions or problems, please contact us at sales@ignitelearning.com or 866-464-4648.

The Trial Page also has any requirements you or your IT might need to reference.

Enjoy your Trial and see how we light up the classroom!

The Ignite! Team

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The first thing you will see when the Torch opens up is a menu to navigate through the large library of digital content.  There are different blue tabs to organize the content, and in this case we have organized by Units.

Once you select a unit,  the drop down arrows open up to allow you to be very specific on the lesson and topic you desire.  The drop-down arrows will lead you to a topic.  Once you select a topic, associated media pieces will appear on the right.  They appear in a square shape with descriptions.

Click on your desired media piece, turn up your volume, and have fun interacting with the ultimate digital curriculum.

Enjoy your demo and enjoy the scavenger hunt if you participate!

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Ignite! Learning is the positive outcome provider for Middle School education, and we want to share statistical support for the argument that we need to be focusing on the transitions of Middle School.  Our content is currently supporting and providing success for middle schools nationwide, and you can read about it here. Most importantly, enjoy the article below!

Study Links Academic Setbacks to Middle School Transition

While policymakers and researchers alike have focused on improving students’ transition into high school, a new study of Florida schools suggests the critical transition problem may happen years before, when students enter middle school.

The study, part of the Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series at Harvard University, found that students moving from grade 5 into middle school show a “sharp drop” in math and language arts achievement in the transition year that plagues them as far out as 10th grade, even risking thwarting their ability to graduate high school and go on to college. Students who make a school transition in 6th grade are absent more often than those who remain in one school through 8th grade, and they are more likely to drop out of school by 10th grade.

“I don’t see eliminating the transition at the high school level as important or beneficial as eliminating the transition at the middle school level,” said Martin R. West, an assistant education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a co-author of the study.

“That to me is a really robust finding,” said David L. Hough, the managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal and a dean emeritus of Missouri State University’s college of education, in Springfield. “All these people are focusing on the transition to high school; it looks to me like they need to be focusing on that transition to middle school.”

Mr. Hough, who was not involved in the Harvard study, has been developing a database of nearly 2,000 schools covering middle-level grades across 25 states. He said that roughly 6,000 schools nationwide are structured in the K-8 configuration and 8,000 as 6-8. While so-called “elemiddle” K-8 schools had been spreading more rapidly than regular middle schools in recent years, Mr. Hough said district moves to swap middle for elemiddle schools have “leveled off” since 2010.

For the Florida study, Mr. West and Guido Schwerdt, a researcher with the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich in Germany, used the state’s longitudinal database to track more than 450,000 students in the state’s public schools who proceeded from grades 3 to 10 between 2000-01 and 2008-09.

They found students who attended elementary schools ending at grade 5 had an early edge over those attending K-8 schools in mathematics and language arts, but their performance in both subjects dropped dramatically when they switched to middle school in 6th grade. After the 6th grade transition, middle school students fell by .12 standard deviations in math and .09 standard deviations in reading compared with students at K-8 schools, and then that gap continued to widen throughout middle school and into high school.

Moreover, students who had attended a middle school were 18 percent more likely than students who attended a K-8 school before high school to not enroll in grade 10 after attending grade 9—an indicator that they may have dropped out.

While the middle school drop was most pronounced in urban schools, Mr. West said the same general pattern was repeated in suburban and rural schools.

The Florida findings are “almost identical” to the results of a smaller, 2010 study of New York City public schools, Mr. West said. In it, Columbia University researchers found that students who started in K-5 or K-6 schools performed slightly better than their K-8 peers in math and language arts in 5th grade, but when they moved to a middle school, the K-8 and middle school students changed places, and the achievement gap between those groups increased through 8th grade.

Middle Versus High

Mr. Hough has found there is “much popular experience about the shock students experience when first entering middle school from an elementary school, but precious little empirical data have been collected to examine it.”

Rather, he said, most researchers and policymakers focus on the transition into high school. In part, that may be because most students who drop out of high school do so in 9th or 10th grades, yet the Florida study found that the transition from middle to high school was much less traumatic for students than the one from elementary to middle school.

Florida students entering high school did see a drop in achievement, but it was temporary and only one-fifth the size of the drop seen during the middle school transition. “For the high school switchers, they suffer a little one-time drop but then recover,” Mr. West said. “It looks like a much less disruptive transition than the one to middle school; the high school transition is not that different from what you’d see in a typical school transition.”

The onset of puberty can exacerbate normal transition problems for younger students, according to Patti Kinney, an associate director of middle-level services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in Reston, Va. “You’re looking at students making a transition during a time when tremendous physical, cognitive, and emotional transitions are going on at the same time,” Ms. Kinney said. “There’s a wide variety of maturation among different children at that level.”

In contrast, the Mountain View, Calif., research group EdSource found no difference between K-8 and 6-8 school achievement overall in its 2010 study of middle-grade achievement in California, “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades,” but it did find students often faced a tougher transition into middle school than high school, according to Matthew Rosen, an EdSource senior research associate.

“The picture we got was schools that were having higher-achievement outcomes were being more intense and intentional about looking at a wider array of student data [during the middle school transition] and finding out what interventions were needed quickly,” Mr. Rosen said.

Easing Transitions

For example, the 1,400-student La Merced Intermediate School, part of the Montebello Unified School District outside Los Angeles, asks the elementary teachers of all incoming 6th graders to fill out academic-history reports, including their previous grades and test scores, problem areas, favorite subjects, and extracurricular activities. “Those sheets allow teachers to go, ‘OK, what is the range of our students’ interests and how do we get them involved in the activities that really resonate with their interests?’ ” Mr. Rosen said.

The teachers from the smaller elementary schools that feed into La Merced also accompany their 5th grade students on a site visit to the middle school, to help the students learn the campus layout and prepare for the differences in structure from one grade to the next.

For the Florida study, the researchers used a survey of principals to compare instructional practices at the various schools, but did not find much difference between practices or class sizes at K-8 and 6-8 schools. However, they did find that 6-8 middle schools had more than twice as many students at each grade level, 363, than the 125 students per grade on average at K-8 schools.

That larger grade-level group may make it harder to tailor instruction and ease the moves from grade to grade, Mr. West suggested.

Ms. Kinney of the NASSP said that effective transitions should be “a process, not an event.”

“A lot of times, people talk about transition programs, and they are talking about what they are doing in 9th grade, when they really need to be working with their middle schools to support students much earlier,” she said.

“Kids develop at their own rates; what’s important is how you are personalizing that environment for them,” Ms. Kinney said. “The grade configuration in a lot of ways is a secondary consideration.”

The NASSP’s Breaking Ranks in the Middle book on improving student achievement in middle grades calls for schools serving those grades to provide each student with a “personal adult advocate” to help him or her understand the changing academic requirements and social dynamics.

“It is easy for those who don’t work regularly with middle-level students to forget that 6th graders are only five or six years removed from their teddy bears,” Breaking Ranks notes, and “those who do work with middle-level students sometimes forget that, by the time students leave ‘the middle,’ the rigors of college are only four short years away.”

Special coverage on the alignment between K-12 schools and postsecondary education is supported in part by a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, at www.luminafoundation.org.

A special thanks to Sarah D. Sparks for publishing such a relevant article and the talented people at Harvard for their research and findings.

We Are Middle School,

Ignite! Learning.

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With upwards of 4-6 emails going out per week, several events and trade-shows every month, a plethora of product collateral, web development always in progress, and many other projects going on, there is a lot of web and graphic design work to be had.

Skills and Experience:

• High standards for design is a must
• Very proficient with HTML/CSS
• Experience designing and coding website
• Experience with creating emails used for email blasts
• Experience designing for print
• Ability to use Javascript/jQuery
• Familiarity with PHP and WordPress is a definite plus
• Several years of experience with Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator is preferred.
• Experience with photography, video, and editing is a plus

Successful candidates will be reliable and demonstrate a disciplined, deadline-oriented approach to their work.

Interested candidates should apply by sending a resume and/or a link to their portfolio to careers@ignitelearning.com with “Web & Graphic Designer” as the subject line.

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The web developer may be involved in various projects related to our web based products and services.

Candidates should have

• 3+ years experience in PHP 5
• MySQL
• Javascript / jQuery
• command-Line Unix/Linux experience

Successful candidates will be reliable and demonstrate a disciplined, deadline-oriented approach to their work.

Interested candidates should apply by sending a resume and/or a link to their portfolio to careers@ignitelearning.com with “Web Developer” as the subject line.

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The flash application developer may be involved in various projects such as

• Maintenance and enhancements to the Ignite! desktop ActionScript 2.0 codebase and curriculum API, as well as underlying application database model and flash-based media learning objects
• Rapid implementation of new features and bug fixes for Ignite!’s desktop applications under the direction and with the support of product development leadership
• Testing code written by peer developers
• Designing new product interfaces
• Providing enhancements to product build toolkits

Required Skills include at least 2 years of programming experience in one or more of the following:

• Flash/Flex ActionScript 2.0 (preferred)
• ActionScript 3.0
• Java
• PHP (preferred)
• or similar programming language

Successful candidates will be reliable and demonstrate a disciplined, deadline-oriented approach to their work.

Interested candidates should apply by sending a resume and/or a link to their portfolio to careers@ignitelearning.com with “Flash Application Developer” as the subject line.

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