Enhanced mobile access and real-time messaging make it easier and more secure for educators to get the support they need when they need it.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Andover, MA – October 4th, 2023 – K12Leaders, a leading network of K12 educators, staff, and administrators, today announces K12Leaders Mobile, delivering a suite of new features enabling real-time professional learning communities. This game-changing platform is designed to help educators find the professional and moral support they need on-demand; enabling more effective learning environments, collaborative relationships, and better student outcomes.

Built by educators, for educators, K12Leaders.com launched their website in 2022 to address the turbulence within traditional social media networks. K12Leaders Mobile   makes it easier for teachers, staff, and administrators to access a safe space for collaboration, networking, and professional growth. 

“K12Leaders has been indispensable for helping me create better connections and professional support networks over the last year,” said member Dr. Cathy Collins, who is a leader in library and media services. “I’ve appreciated the focused group conversations around topics that matter to me!” 

A prolific voice in educational innovation, Dr. Wesley Fryer also added, “As social media platforms continue to evolve, the K-12 Leaders network is a vibrant community to share ideas and make connections among other educational professionals. It’s become an important ingredient of my daily media diet!!”

Benefits: With K12Leaders Mobile, educators can now enjoy the following:

1. Instant Connection: Educators can connect instantly with colleagues, enabling quick collaboration, brain-storming, and problem solving.

2. Mobile Accessibility: K12Leaders Mobile is accessible from any mobile device, ensuring educators can access crucial resources anytime, anywhere.

3. Peer-to-peer Collaboration: Real-time messaging allows educators to engage either colleagues in their own building, or those they may have met at conferences or other professional development events.

4. Knowledge Sharing:  Mobile ai-enhanced blogging encourages educators to share their experiences within a safe community of their peers and learning communities

5. Professional Pathways: On-demand professional development and learning pathways

6. Security : Comprehensive privacy options, allowing community members to control their data privacy effortlessly.

“The dedicated educators who initiated this network last year had four distinct goals in mind,” said Michael Bronder, CEO and one of K12Leaders’ co-founders. “Those were to amplify educators’ voices, to provide a safe and comprehensive suite of online collaboration tools, to keep conversations going after conferences and professional development, and to cultivate more authentic relationships within and between districts. This release of K12Leaders Mobile empowers us to offer all these opportunities whenever and wherever our members need them.”

K12Leaders Mobile is available free for educators and can be found on the App Store and Google Play, as well as at K12Leaders.com.

About K12Leaders:

K12Leaders is the leading professional network for K12 teachers, staff, and administrators. Built by educators for educators, K12Leaders has become a innovative platform for educational collaboration and driver of positive change in how educators can work together to improve their own practice, enable professional growth, and ultimately improve outcomes for their students.

For more information or media inquiries, please contact:

Contact: Suzy Brooks

Email: Suzy.Brooks@k12leaders.com

Contact phone: +1 617-213-0201

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K12Leaders, Inc.

90 Main St. Andover MA 01810

https://k12leaders.com

K12Leaders is built by educators for educators, as a safe space for K12 teachers, staff, administrators and supporting partners to network and discuss the topics that strengthen education. We have 4 main goals:

• To amplify educators voices and help them discover opportunities for growth
• To provide a safe and contemporary suite of tools to connect our members
• To “keep the conversation going” between point-in-time events like conferences or PD events
• To build more authentic relationships between those dedicated to supporting K12 education

Online privacy is a critical concern of educators. K12Leaders, our private social network, is designed with a strong respect for the safety and privacy of our community members. Let’s take a look at how you can control your network experience.

Your Data, Your Control

We take your data privacy seriously at K12Leaders. We encourage all our members to review our privacy policy, which outlines our commitment to respecting your data. Importantly, you have the ability to export your data at any time, ensuring that you retain control over your information.

Fine-Tuning Your Privacy

As a member of the K12Leaders community, you have the flexibility to customize your in-network privacy and notification settings.

Closed Network

K12Leaders is not open to everyone. We are here to support conversations and collaboration that strengthen education and empower dedicated educators to improve student outcomes. While we have moderation policies, strict terms-of-service, and guidelines for best practices, we also ensure our members are either currently working to support education, or have demonstrated their commitment over their professional career.

We rely on “human intelligence,” not AI to do that. And one tool we encourage our members to take advantage of is our free “K12 Verified” badge program. We do not charge educators for validating their credentials. It is one part of our commitment to keeping K12Leaders available to those who rely so heavily on their peers and colleagues for support, motivation, and ongoing professional development.

Email and Web Notifications

As a member of the network, you have precise control over when and how you receive notifications related to network activity. Email notifications allow you to adjust the quantity and timing of email alerts. Web notifications cover pop-up notifications for mentions in posts or direct messages. Configuring these settings is simple—just navigate to your Account -> Email Notifications menu.

Privacy Settings

Our privacy settings empower you to regulate your visibility within the Member Directory and search results. Access these options through the top-right menu under Account -> Privacy. You can configure your online presence according to your preferences, ensuring that you maintain control over your network footprint.

Profile Field Visibility

Your profile is your network identity, and we believe you should decide what information is displayed. Managing your profile field visibility is easy:

1. Visit your Profile.
2. Select “Edit.”
3. Adjust the visibility settings beneath each field you wish to control.

K12Leaders is committed to providing educators with the tools they need to engage with each other safely and effectively. We understand that your privacy is important, and we’re here to help you protect it.

For a step-by-step guide to configuring your settings, take a couple of minutes to watch our tutorial:

Stay informed, engaged and secure with K12Leaders. Join our community and experience the benefits of safe online collaboration for educators. Or if you’re already here, feel free to invite your friends and colleagues to join the conversation!

Is it every week that social media tries to re-invent itself? For all the (valid) dissatisfaction we seem to have with the social networks we’ve relied on for the past several years, it’s clear that we are also (justifiably) suspicious of the “next new thing.” But, as we pointed out when we launched K12Leaders last year, there is an unmistakable need for change… especially for educators.

K12Leaders has grown significantly over the last several months. We’ve had our awkward moments, but we know that what we’re doing -creating a safe online space for educators to grow in their practice- has a huge value to the educators, staff, administrators, and partners we serve.

Perhaps more precisely, it’s actually <you> we see growing… the K12 community. And we are certain that as the online community on K12Leaders grows, so will the value we collectively draw from it.

Here, we’ll take a look at three ways we make it easy to invite, engage, and grow your community of practice. Including one important way we never will! Your invitation is not merely a connection; it’s an opportunity to engage your friends and colleagues in a learning environment that’s committed to supporting their personal and professional growth. Oh… and, yes. You can become a K12Leaders Ambassador, a testament to your commitment to our ongoing learning, along the way 😉

So, let’s delve into these methods, unlocking the potential of connecting, collaborating, and collectively advancing education through K12Leaders:

Exploring Three Methods to Invite Friends and Colleagues to Join K12Leaders

Here are 3 ways to connect and grow your network. And every invitation you send adds to your tally of K12Leaders Ambassador Points.

Top Menu Invites

Navigate to the top menu and select “Invite.” This simply lets you to enter the names and email addresses of the individuals you’d like to invite. Feel free to personalize both the subject and content of the invitation. It’s worth noting our dedicated mail server handles these invitations. That means there’s a chance the invitation might be flagged as spam. To ensure a successful connection, consider sending a follow-up message as well.

Ad-hoc Sidebar Invite s

While browsing pages like the News Feed and Member Directory, you’ll notice a sidebar with a unique URL you can easily copy and paste into your own email message. The embedded codes in this URL link the invitation directly to your account, guaranteeing you earn Ambassador Points for each invitation extended.

Invitations to a Community

To invite someone to join a specific community within the platform, the Community Organizer can activate the “Send Invite” menu. Upon selecting this menu, you’ll be presented with two options: inviting your K12Leaders friends from your internal network or opting for the “send invitations by email” choice. If you choose the email option, you can paste up to 200 email addresses and customize the invitation. Once your friends register, they will receive a notification, informing them of your invitation to join your group.

And that really important one thing we’ll never do?

Right… we didn’t forget. And this really is important.

We’ll never suggest you “import your address book.” Ever.

In our mind this is simultaneously one of the worst things we could ask of you, and one worst things we could do for this network.

First, we see this option on other platforms as grossly devaluing their members. It betrays the fact that those platforms think numbers are more important than individuals. None of us chose a career in education to treat anyone “like a number.”

Secondly, importing everyone would simply dilute the value of the network. K12Leaders isn’t for everyone; and that’s okay. We are here to serve those who serve education.

Inviting friends and colleagues to join K12Leaders not only enriches your network but also contributes to the vibrant educational community we’re building together. Explore these three options to connect, collaborate, and earn Ambassador Points as you help K12Leaders grow!

FETC 2023 broke some new ground this year! After 40 years in Florida FETC hosted a packed exhibit hall and breakout rooms filled with professional development opportunities in New Orleans. It’s a busy season for education conferences, with TCEA and TASA just weeks away, and FETC kicked it off with leading educators, technologists, and solution providers sharing their perspectives on how to serve the ever evolving world of education.

When I tour exhibit halls I’m often struck by the aggressive nature of many vendors… I understand that. The reps on the floor are often evaluated on how many “leads” they can capture from an event, and that drives behavior. At FETC this year, though, I was able to connect with a number of companies and non-profits who were clearly motivated by something greater than ‘collecting leads.”  These mission-driven organizations are interested in supporting educators, students, and parents with solutions that address some fundamental needs in the system. What was refreshing was that each of these organizations opened their conversations with their Mission, and only then got into details about their services or solutions that directly manifest those missions in meaningful ways.

Eradicating Illiteracy- Reading Horizons

I was able to spend some time speaking with Matthew Laamanen, a former AP English teacher, who recently joined Reading Horizons to support their mission to “Eradicate Illiteracy.”  Reading Horizons provides reading and writing instruction programs that are primarily used in K-12 education, though they can also be used in adult education and ELL programs.  Reading Horizons is based on the groundbreaking work of Charlotte Lockhart, who started Reading Horizons in 1984 as a small business in her home, and since then, it has grown into a leading provider of reading instruction programs for schools, teachers, and parents.

While there are a number of literacy programs on the market, Reading Horizons’ focuses on the Orton-Gillingham approach, which, while originally designed to support dyslexic students, has been extremely effective for all learners. The program is designed to improve reading fluency, comprehension, and spelling through a multi-sensory, explicit phonics approach. Reading Horizons is supporting over 20,000 classrooms, including those in Miami-Dade.

Along with their commercial solutions, such as Reading Horizons Discovery, and Reading Horizons Elevate, they offer a free resource library, The Science of Reading Collective.

Eradicating Suicide- The Cook Center for Human Connection

The Cook Center for Human Connection is a non-profit organization that focuses on mental health and suicide prevention, specifically for youth. Led by another experienced K12 educator-turned-executive, Anne Brown, they provide a variety of methods for achieving this goal, including direct giving, where they fund different programs that go into schools, and direct support through their program called ParentGuidance.org, which helps parents navigate difficult mental health issues their children may be facing, such as depression, anxiety, and cutting. The organization has been providing these services for three years and has been able to reach over 2 million families in about 1500 schools and 300 districts around the country. Primary funding comes from the Cook family, who have designated suicide prevention as one of the pillars of giving for their family foundation. While supporting the organization over the last three years, they started with a $10 million gift to a children’s hospital. The mission of The Cook Center is to provide scalable and technological solutions that are free to families and schools and to empower parents and caregivers to support their children in navigating difficult mental health issues.

Audio Matters- AVID Products

It’s not often that I come across a product company that does a deep-dive on how their offerings impact learning, but that’s just what AVID Products is doing by exploring how audio affects both learning and growth. Building on 70 years of experience developing audio solutions for aerospace and healthcare, AVID has gone in hard on addressing the needs of K12, higher-ed, and lifelong learning. While hinting at some pending technology designed to specifically create more effective learning environments, AVID currently has some of the highest-value head-sets and headphones on the market.

And they’re doing their research on how to better serve education. In a recent white paper, they cite 5 reasons personal audio is an essential component of digital learning plans including- attention and focus, lost academic meaning, testing disparities, diagnostic truth, and function inequality. 

Addressing the STEM Participation Gap- Kinderlab Robotics

Robotics was well represented on the exhibit floor at FETC 2023. Many of the solutions focused on the “battle bot” model, and middle-school and older students. It was all very cool stuff, and focused on fun competitions, robotics clubs, and collaborative problem solving, but I only heard about closing the STEM participation gap from one solution provider.

Kinderlab is focusing on much younger learners, and trying to blend creativity with an accessible (and durable) robotics kit designed to engage early-learners before any socialized behaviors begin to dissuade young girls from being interested in technical subjects. Their main product is KIBO, a screen-free robot that children use with wooden blocks to create a sequence of actions for the robot to take. The robot is designed to support coding education, computer science, engineering, and small group collaboration. Kinderlab believes that young children learn better with concrete manipulatives rather than screens. The curriculum is designed to teach children to take responsibility for technology equipment, recognize their peers, and help others. The company also offers add-ons that give the robot additional capabilities and ways to interact with its surroundings. Kinderlab also offers a range of professional development options, including remote professional development, and 2 hours of live professional development with every classroom package they sell.

Wrapping up the Roundup

I’m encouraged by the trend we’re seeing towards more mission-driven solutions. It’s clear that, especially post-covid, educators need organizations that are committed to partnering with their schools and districts to find the resources and innovations educators struggle to develop while focused on the students in front of them. What about you? Where do you see the need for a strong partner in your practice? 

 

 

All K12Leaders members are encouraged to apply now! 

Particularly given the recent news around social media, we know how important it is to trust the online environments you’re a part of. This is especially important for K12 educators, staff, and administrators who are so committed to serving our schools, but also need to expand their perspectives and engage with each other outside the schoolhouse.

K12Leaders is designed to be that space… purposely built by educators for educators.  With that narrow focus, we are able to rely on “human intelligence” to help ensure the members of our community are here to strengthen education, not to tear it (or you) down. From our first day we have committed to manually checking each member is who they say they are.

And now we’re excited to provide educators an alternative to “that little blue check” with our own orange one! And it’s free for educators. Always.

The K12Verified process provides an additional layer of assurance that each participant in our community is representing themselves accurately… that educators are actually educators. With K12Verified, as our members create groups of their own, they will have another tool at their disposal to establish their cohorts with productive community members.

We’ve designed a process we feel is rigorous without being burdensome, and relies on human intelligence (not AI) to review key details helping us continue to ensure the integrity of this space.

All K12Leaders members are encouraged to apply now! 

Careers in K12 education can be very isolating. How ironic given how many colleagues we have, students we work with and families we support. However, each of those relationships are guided by the structure of the school day. Teachers and administrators are “always on” and this is why professional conferences are such a draw. The chance to get out of the schoolhouse for a day or two, talk with other educators and learn more diminishes isolation and increases engagement. Attending events gives everyone a chance to take a breath, discover new ideas, and recharge batteries to better serve students, schools, and communities.

Fortunately, there is no lack of events to attend. From international conferences to local meet-ups, the possibilities are endless! On the flip side, finding and keeping track of those opportunities is understandably challenging…

With the sheer volume and variety of conferences, professional development, and webinars each year, is it any wonder why it takes significant effort just to remember when “what” is where ?.

These challenges led K12Leaders.com to develop a searchable Master National K12 Event Calendar. K12Leader Members are welcome to submit an event- whether regional or national conferences, association events, webinars, or meet-ups. The K12Leaders editorial staff will review, publish and help promote it.

Are you thinking “That’s great!”?? We agree, but have even more ideas to share! At most conferences, attendees are asked to download and register on an app for a limited time. After learning to use the app, finding information and making connections, the event ends and the app is deleted until next time. Those in-person connections made during the conference? They may be on social media, or on business cards, or added to phone contacts. As K12Leaders grows, we are working hard to improve the ways those in K12 connect and continue the conversation in and out of the schoolhouse. A new feature on K12Leaders is a QR Code embedded in the app. With only 3 clicks, a member can access the “Connect with Me” feature. Codes can be easily shared with anyone, making it simple to stay connected long after the event ends.

Our members may have also noticed the new ability to see what events our members have created and are attending in the upcoming year. Listed on a member’s profile under Events is now both “My Events” and “Events I’m Attending”; affording everyone the opportunity to connect before, during and after an event. We are excited how this feature will strengthen relationships and bring conversations to a new level.

Say goodbye to Education Isolation! We hope these free offerings for K12 educators, staff and administrators continue to make it easier for our members to collaborate with each other, and find the energy we all need to stay focused必利勁 on our students’ success!