Education Resources Blog

Put on annually by EdTech Digest, the 2022 EdTech Cool Tool Award Finalists and Winners have been announced, and we're pleased to share that VariQuest® was selected as a finalist in three of its categories! In its 12th year of existence, the US-based program is the world's largest program for recognizing education technology, featuring the biggest names in edtech – and those who soon will be. The 2022 EdTech Awards honored companies and individuals in 3 areas: the Cool Tool Awards, the Leadership Awards, and the Trendsetter Awards, featuring industry products, leaders, and innovators respectively. Entered in the Cool Tool Awards, VariQuest was honored among this year's finalists ranging in everything from data dashboards to artificial intelligence to interactive coding tools.

There are plenty of reasons and ways to recognize students. Doing so promotes self-confidence, determination, a positive attitude, and overall social-emotional wellbeing! In the age of cell phones, social media influencers, and YouTube stars, the word "selfie" has become commonly used in our vocabularies, and the concept is foreign to no one. Alongside displaying student artwork in your school hallways and classrooms, allow students to showcase work they're especially proud of, and infuse parental involvement in a modern way with this fun and easy selfie station in your classroom!

Traveling from classroom to classroom, assisting students, completing necessary documentation, and on top of their vital instruction and planning, these are the challenges that middle and high school special education teachers face every day. Creating schedules to meet varying needs and keeping well-organized notes and records is of the utmost importance, to avoid becoming overwhelmed.  We've joined with Cathy Henry, founder and partner of The Curriculum Corner and Free Word Work and with a Master's Degree in Special Education, to bring you this toolkit complete with printable charts, posters, handouts, and more to assist you in organizing and managing your important workload.

We tend to think of visual cues as supportive tools for students with special needs or for English language learners, but sets of visual prompts can also be helpful to students outside of these groups, and especially important for classroom management. This concept might relate to a direction in the classroom, a recognition of desired behavior, or a redirection.

We won! We won! And we couldn't have done it without you, our nation's best educators. The VariQuest® Visual and Kinesthetic Learning Suite was recently awarded with a 2021 Best Primary Tools for Back to School Award by the publication Tech & Learning. The Best Tools for Back to School Awards annually honor leading-edge products that help students, teachers, and families succeed in categories for primary, secondary, and higher education. This year's winners included everything from distance learning cameras to online curriculum programs and of course, the VariQuest Visual and Kinesthetic Learning Suite.

In the fall, the leaves change, and so does our content! We just released our VariQuest® Design Software version 9.0 - packed with brand new and updated Engage Every Learner® Content, and we know you'll love all the latest additions around social-emotional wellbeing, health & safety, movement, and more. Along with new functionality adding our new Perfecta® 2400PRO Poster Design System, and shortcuts and options to make using our tools even easier, you'll love having over 22,000 templates, graphics, fonts, collections, cutouts, sensory paths and more to use in your classrooms, hallways, and throughout your learning community.

Teachers and families across the country have been under immense stress approaching a different kind of instruction over the last year and a half, and worrying about how it has affected our students. While focusing on health and safety is always a top priority, as students return to the classroom this year, we may need to broaden that focus and prepare them with an accelerated learning approach. But as educators, we are not only concerned about academics, but also about mental health, and to ensure students flourish upon their return, it is important we look at the whole child. In this 14-lesson plan eBook, created in partnership with Cathy Henry of The Curriculum Corner and Free Word Work, we've put together a variety of lessons and activities for K-12 students, including those in special education classrooms, to work towards project-based, student-driven learning designed to help combat the academic impact of lost instructional time.

Educators know that having strong behavior management skills can be as important, or even more important, as the ability to teach content. We want to help children modify detrimental behaviors, but we also don’t want any of our actions to result in a child feeling shamed or demeaned. This can be a challenge! Because we've all had a challenging past few months, and feelings of embarrassment won’t help children improve their behavior, we've partnered with Cathy Henry of The Curriculum Corner and Free Word Work to put together some ideas to help you work on actions and reactions with your students on a more personal level. These are ideas to help students learn and grow and meet goals, making them proud of their positive results!

Engagement. Inclusivity. Social-Emotional Support. With all that students have experienced in recent months, you're looking ahead to the future. In a "normal" year, your federal funding dollars may have gone towards field trips, student performances, or hands-on lab materials. Now you have decisions to make on how to spend that funding in a meaningful way to set up for what next year will bring. Overcoming challenges from distance learning, promoting inclusion and equality, and expanding your social-emotional support efforts are just a few concepts that will require extra action as students (hopefully) return to classrooms. Today we'll explore a few major funding streams and how you can use aligned tools to face these challenges, head-on.

While celebrating the earth is given a special day each year in April, students are fascinated with learning about the ground and the elements and the weather all year long. Recycling, limiting energy usage, and cleaning up litter are all important concepts to instill in our future generations, but what's equally important is their understanding of how the environment functions as its own thriving system - whether humans are here to enjoy it, or not. With rock cycles, life cycles, tide patterns, and more to explore, today we're going to talk about the water cycle, and tips for teaching it with a full class, in small groups, or as a take-home project for students.