Housing Insecurities Add to COVID-19 Stress

Learn4Life is a network of high schools in California that focuses on at-risk students and former dropouts. “Remote learning has been difficult for our students suffering homelessness,” says Caprice Young, the group’s national superintendent. Learn4Life’s model, with its flexible schedule and one-on-one instruction, works well for housing-insecure students. They work with community support services to help with everything from free school supplies, clothes, and hygiene items to transportation, health care, mental health services, and food assistance. School social workers help families find housing and navigate services and financial aid applications. Read more about the resources and support Learn4Life provides its students at https://learn4life.org/resources.

Free Teacher Resource Brings Beethoven To Life for Students of All Ages

Nancy and Randall Faber invite you to discover a new educational website—Beethoven, Independent Man—a collection of eight biographical stories with online activities that offer a fascinating adventure through Ludwig van Beethoven’s life and music for free at https://beethoven.pianoadventures.com. This site aims to excite young minds with a series of short, illustrated stories that outline Beethoven’s life from boyhood to adulthood, and corresponding “Search & Discover” sections provide activities to help students discover more about the composer. Plus, teachers can share the website with students in private lessons, classrooms, home schools, online media libraries, and learning management systems.

Who Says Podcasts Are Just for Listening?

Harnessing the inspiration and excitement of young and old listeners alike, the Spotify- and Apple-acclaimed Story Seeds Podcast™ has just released an activity book called Imagination Lab: Experiments in Creativity. The activity book is a multimedia, interactive experience featuring QR codes that allow users to easily access and listen to each podcast episode and then embark upon activities. Some elements include graphic organizers for young people to create their own stories, articles about themes on the show, flash fiction and poetry, arts and crafts projects, do-it-yourself STEM projects, and Story Seed writing prompts. For more information, visit www.storyseedspodcast.com.

PresenceLearning Teletherapy Essentials Wins Two Leading Education Awards

PresenceLearning, a provider of live online special-education-related services, received two top education awards for Teletherapy Essentials, its teletherapy and tele-assessment training platform for school-based special education teams. Judges for THE Journal New Product Awards bestowed Teletherapy Essentials with platinum status in the Teletherapy/Wellness Program category. THE Journal New Product Awards recognize outstanding product development achievements of manufacturers and suppliers whose products or services are considered to be particularly noteworthy in the transformation of education technology. Separately, Tech & Learning’s Best of 2020 named Teletherapy Essentials a winner at its annual awards program. Tech & Learning Best of 2020 judges evaluated areas such as value, uniqueness in the market, and the product’s ability to solve specific problems for educators and administrators.

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