ONLINE EDUCATION
PRnewswire | May 29, 2023
SSC Services for Education, a leading provider of educational facilities services, along with ISSA, the worldwide cleaning industry association, are proud to announce that in addition to achieving recertification of ISSA Cleaning Industry Management Standard (CIMS) Green Building (GB) with Honors, SSC has become one of the first organizations to receive the Advanced by the Global Biorisk Advisory Council (GBAC) certification.
This certification builds on SSC's advanced 50 years of expertise in custodial services, grounds management, and educational facilities maintenance, helping ensure students and faculty are safe and thrive in the spaces they call home during the school day.
The CIMS-GB certification is a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of an organization's management and operational excellence in the cleaning industry. The certification criteria include management best practices, performance systems, and sustainable cleaning practices. By achieving this certification, SSC has demonstrated its commitment to providing high-quality services that promote health, safety, and environmental sustainability.
"Even before the pandemic, we took great care to keep schools clean and open during flu season and other illness outbreaks and that commitment has only continued," said Seth Ferriell, CEO of SSC. "Being one of the first organizations to achieve the Advanced by GBAC certification so quickly after the new guidelines were introduced is a testament to our team's ability to provide exceptional services without sacrificing our focus on environmental sustainability."
The Advanced by GBAC certification requires organizations to have:
• Established and maintained a cleaning, disinfection, and infectious disease prevention program to minimize risks associated with infectious agents.
• The proper cleaning protocols, disinfection techniques, and work practices in place to combat biohazards and infectious disease.
• Highly informed cleaning professionals who are trained for outbreak and infectious disease preparation and response.
This certification is designed to help organizations prevent, respond to, and recover from biohazard situations. By obtaining the Advanced by GBAC certification, SSC has demonstrated its ability to provide safe and healthy environments for its clients, employees, and communities year-round, as well as during times of crisis.
"Every day, we're focused on creating sustainable and healthy environments where students, staff, and communities thrive, and the CIMS, GB-Honors, and GBAC certifications reaffirm our focus on innovation and industry leadership," added Ferriell.
About SSC Services for Education
SSC Services for Education, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, provides customized facility solutions to over 1000 K-12 and Higher Education schools nationwide. Our 10,000+ employees partner with these educational institutions to further the success and well-being of students, staff, and faculty by delivering quality facilities programs – custodial, grounds, and maintenance. As a trusted and specialized provider, we are committed to enhancing educational settings and creating financial guarantees. With SSC, students and staff flourish in improved surroundings, while partner schools focus on their core objective: educating future generations.
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CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
Businesswire | April 18, 2023
Carnegie Learning, a leader in K-12 education innovation, high-quality products and services, and AI, announced today that the company has added new multilingual and bilingual certified math and literacy instructors to the high-dosage tutoring team in Gadsden County, New Mexico, to meet the needs of students in the state’s fourth-largest school district.
“It’s gratifying to see improvements in student proficiency and attendance as well as increasing parent participation in the Gadsden Independent School District (ISD),” said Courtney Lewis, Vice President of Tutoring Services at Carnegie Learning. “The results are impressive. We have been able to fulfill 100% of the requests from students and families in Gadsden ISD who requested a bilingual tutor. We’ve also appointed a bilingual tutor as a liaison to answer questions from families in their native language. Families have a direct dial number to call the liaison directly for support.”
Lewis recently presented a webinar on how to partner with a high-dosage tutoring provider to launch an effective summer school program, which can be accessed here.
Demand for high-dosage tutoring is growing among students in all grades at Gadsden ISD, led by elementary-age students, who are reaping the benefits of one-on-one and small-group tutoring. To meet the needs of the district, Carnegie Learning is expanding their offerings in Gadsden ISD with new K-12 math and literacy, SAT and PSAT preparation to their portfolio of services.
Students and their families are already feeling the impact of tutoring. A third-grade student expressed delight about their tutor, who is a certified teacher like all Carnegie Learning tutors: “I have the best teacher ever!” A kindergarten parent commented that a tutor demonstrated dedication consistently: “She did awesome with our son!”
Personalizing tutoring services to meet the needs of Gadsden ISD reflects Carnegie Learning's commitment to partnering with districts and ability to flexibly develop solutions for emerging challenges. In fact, their national high-dosage tutoring services originated when Maryland district Prince George's County Public Schools approached Carnegie Learning with a need for remote tutoring in 2020 during school closures, and Carnegie Learning built a tutoring team from scratch.
Carnegie Learning has the largest certified tutoring team in the U.S., with an ever-increasing portfolio of new curriculum offerings being added as district needs arise.
Carnegie Learning's high-dosage tutoring services include:
• Live tutors who are all certified teachers with deep content and pedagogical knowledge.
• Bilingual and multilingual tutors are available.
• Instruction that aligns with districts’ standards, scope, and sequence.
• Standards-aligned, high-quality instructional materials to support grade-level learning.
• Robust pre- and post-assessments to regularly track student growth and performance.
Carnegie Learning believes that students can reach far beyond their perceived potential, academically as well as socially and emotionally. To help students achieve this, they strive to bridge the gap between access to high-quality instructors, award-winning AI software, and high-quality instructional resources.
About Carnegie Learning, Inc.
Carnegie Learning is the leading provider of K-12 education technology, curriculum, and professional learning solutions. With award-winning offerings for K-12 math, literacy, world languages, professional learning, high-dosage tutoring, and more, Carnegie Learning is delivering real and lasting results for teachers and students. Born from more than 30 years of learning science research at Carnegie Mellon University, we are known for using the power of data to improve student performance. Our range of products allows us to support more than 2 million students and educators in all 50 states and Canada. Named a Top Place to Work for six years in a row, our 700+ employees across North America are passionate about partnering with educators in the classroom
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TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Businesswire | May 10, 2023
XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, hosts a virtual event today to celebrate the grand prize winner of the $1M Digital Learning Challenge, Adaptive Experimentation Accelerator from Raleigh, North Carolina, and showcase the technology developed by the challenge’s three finalist teams, including team Terracotta from Indiana University and team UpGrade by Carnegie Learning.
Launched in 2021, the Digital Learning Challenge incentivized teams to modernize, accelerate, and improve the technology and processes for evaluating and measuring effective learning and education. Using tools like AI methods, big data, and machine learning, teams sought to better understand the effectiveness of specific teaching techniques and practices, with the goal of providing substantial benefit for educators, parents, policymakers, researchers, and the tens of millions of Americans enrolled in formal education every year. The challenge is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the independent and nonpartisan statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
The three finalist teams participating in the Accelerate & Modernize: New Methods to Assess Student Learning Outcomes closing event include:
• Grand Prize Winner: Adaptive Experimentation Accelerator – Raleigh, North Carolina (Partnership between Intelligent Adaptive Interventions lab at University of Toronto, Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, & North Carolina State University) o The Adaptive Experimentation Accelerator network aims to involve everyone in using experiments to enhance and personalize education. Our 'MOOClet' toolkit democratizes the contribution of ideas from many teachers, students, and scientists, then experimentally tests which ideas work for which students. Artificial Intelligence algorithms analyze data to adapt experiments in days vs months. This aims to test more ideas more quickly, and to use promising data to more rapidly get better approaches to students.
• Finalist: Terracotta – Bloomington, Indiana (Indiana University)
o Terracotta is an open source plugin to the Canvas learning management system, enabling researchers and teachers to conduct rigorous and responsible experimental studies on learning activities within a course site. Using Terracotta, the team was able to conduct over two-dozen mini-experiments across a variety of courses, ranging from 6th grade to college seniors, where each experiment used local materials and authentic teacher-created assessments.
• Finalist: UpGrade by Carnegie Learning – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
o UpGrade is a free, open-source platform that enables iterative experimental design and deployment of new learning experiences that compare the efficacy of different tools and resources—such as lesson content, interactive elements, videos, algorithms and more—during active student learning. Each experiment measures what works best for whom, advancing the way we understand student learning and engagement and enabling the rapid design, deployment and analysis of large scale studies, including but not limited to complex K-12 school environments.
The final round or demonstration phase of the competition required teams to replicate their experiments at least five times with three or more distinct learner demographics. Based on their demonstration performance, Adaptive Experimentation Accelerator receives the grand prize designation and $500,000, while runners-up Terracotta and UpGrade will each receive $125,000 prizes. The three teams previously shared a $250,000 prize when they were announced as finalists in September 2022.
During the closing event, each of the three teams will present their technology and how it works, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from the Digital Learning Challenge. With the Challenge now concluded, the teams will seek to work with partners across the education and technology sectors to scale the impact and implementation of their solutions.“Through their participation and success in the Digital Learning Challenge, each of these teams has helped make advancements in technology to improve the ways that educators teach and that students learn,” said IES director Dr. Mark Schneider. “These teams have laid the groundwork for a new phase of experiments of frequency, scope and scale not possible through traditional methods of education research, which will ultimately lead to better experiences and outcomes for all learners.”
In the initial pilot phase of the competition, 10 teams had six months to demonstrate the capabilities of their rapid, reproducible experiments in an accredited education institutional setting and then 30 days to launch a replication study with at least one unique learner demographic. A judging panel of education and technology experts reviewed the pilot study technical submissions and selected three teams to move on to the final round and ultimately designated the winner.“We are deeply proud of the achievements of the Digital Learning Challenge finalist teams, whose creativity and commitment to improving education outcomes through technology and experimentation will resonate far beyond the conclusion of the competition,” said XPRIZE Digital Learning Challenge Technical Lead Dr. Monique Golden.“We look forward to working with these teams to forge new partnerships that will ensure they can continue developing and refining their technologies and scale the impact of their solutions.”
The Digital Learning Challenge is part of XPRIZE’s Learning and Society domain which is committed to achieving a future where everyone, regardless of income, race, age, identity, gender, or geography, has access to learning experiences to reflect their unique capabilities, disposition, and aspirations.
About XPRIZE
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment, and human equity.
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