05/06/21
In a transaction valued at up to $500 million, ed tech company
Kahoot! is acquiring Clever, which provides one of the most
ubiquitous services in education IT.
Kahoot! is the maker of the popular education apps used at home and
in formal education environments. Kahoot! and Kahoot! EDU are the company’s
primary offering for K–12 schools. Kahoot! EDU provides interactive
lessons, collaboration, sharing, groups, analytics and other features
for schools beyond the consumer edition.
Clever provides a single sign-in portal, roster syncing and other
services used by more than 89,000 individual schools in the United
States representing about 65% of K–12 school districts and half
05/04/21
The current FCC definition of home broadband 25 Mbps download and
3 Mbps upload speeds is inadequate for at-home learning,
according to researchers who conducted a first-of-its-kind study of
district data for students engaged in remote learning.
The Student
Home Connectivity Study, conducted by CoSN,
the Consortium for School Networking, with funding from the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative, looked at data from 13 (mostly large) school
districts representing more than 750,000 students. It found that
activities requiring high bandwidth, such as watching and sending
video, are prevalent in remote learning and that such activities
require much faster broadband at home.
Among the findings: More than 70% of students live in a household with other students;
A new report using data from 3.8 million students reveals that, in large part, students are performing near pre-pandemic expectation levels in reading, in particular in elementary grades, while they lag a bit more in math. But students in middle school are performing poorly as measured against pre-pandemic expectations, as are students who are members of underrepresented and at-risk populations.
04/29/21
Starting this summer, Clever
will be providing automated
rostering for Google Classroom. Clever provides a single sign-in
portal, roster syncing and other services used by 65% of K–12
schools in the United States. It’s free for districts.
According to Clever, usage of its service has nearly doubled in the
last year. And the number of students and educators using Google
Classroom has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020, from 40
million to 150 million.
With the new integration, districts using Google
Workspace for Education Plus will be able to sync classes in
Google Classroom. According to Clever: “Districts who have
purchased Google Workspace for Education Plus and use Clever will be