AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) has created a new open educational resource for free, high-quality digital teaching and learning and STEM tips and tools. As a national nonprofit with a 40-year track record of improving teaching strategies for K-12 educators, AVID saw the need to provide a public service to support educators during this time. AVID Open Access provides practical, bite-size tips and grab-and-go lesson plans and teaching resources.

Sourced from organizations like MIT, Club of the Future founded by Blue Origin, Engineering Is Elementary, and Wonder Workshop, and curated by experts with over 130 years of combined experience in digital design for students and adults, AVID Open Access gives teachers meaningful tips they can immediately implement in their classroom. It also offers easy-to-use, standalone STEM activities for various grade levels as well as subject-specific and grade-level appropriate examples that illustrate how teachers can meaningfully embed digital tools in lessons to meet their learning objectives.

These resources show teachers how to engage with both technology and people, so that students get more out of instruction. These collaboration tools, videos, and class activities can immediately be accessed by educators anywhere, free of charge. They work with whatever curriculum, devices and platforms schools may use. Teachers do not need prior knowledge of AVID strategies.  Website:   Future of Privacy Forum released a new series of professional development trainings for teachers in response to the unique student privacy challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools prepare to reopen in the fall, whether in-person, online, or a hybrid, teachers need timely, informative, and easily accessible training resources to protect student privacy while adapting to new contexts, tools, policies, and practices. The “Student Privacy & Pandemics” training is organized into short sections covering key privacy issues educators will face in the fall, such as: 

• Student Privacy 101, covering the key student privacy laws, why protecting student privacy is important, and common student privacy risks. 
• Adopting EdTech, detailing the privacy and security implications of adopting various apps and technologies for educational purposes and how educators can ensure the safe use of these tools in their classrooms.  
• Training Students, covering effective approaches to teaching students about privacy and security. 
• Privacy and Pandemics, which covers COVID-19 specific topics such as measuring student engagement and performance online and answering student privacy questions about video lessons and recordings.  

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