Tag Archives: back to school concerns

Go Back to School, Not Back to Stress with Bright SUITE

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July is a quiet month for most educators. Schools close, summer break begins in earnest, and teachers enjoy a bit of time away from the classroom. Just as quickly as it starts, though, the break’s over and educators are working to clear their lists and prepare for another school year and coming back to school. Administrators, on the other hand, are working hard throughout the summer to fill open positions, as teacher attrition continues to be a serious challenge.

The Pressures Teachers Face Coming Back to School

While there are many reasons teachers leave the profession, one of the main reasons is that they feel overworked and underpaid. Truthfully, the demands on teachers have continued to expand significantly over the last few decades. Teachers are increasingly being held responsible for a sizable amount of district and government paperwork. They are also responsible for looking after the physical and mental wellbeing of students while ensuring that they achieve good test scores. These pressures, combined with a number of other duties outside of the classroom, has chased away a lot of talent.

Lumen Touch Supports Teachers and Schools Coming Back to School

In order to attract and retain teachers, save money, and deliver a more powerful curriculum to students, many schools have turned to Lumen Touch. Our all-in-one education management system, Bright SUITE, is designed to help schools more effectively manage every aspect of school administration. And because the burden on teachers is reduced using Bright SUITE, they can focus their attention more on their motivation for entering the profession in the first place: having a lasting impact on the minds and lives of their students.

How Bright SUITE Makes Coming Back to School Easier

Bright SUITE is a comprehensive learning management system that helps districts and educators better serve each individual student holistically. School faculty and administrators can better manage and track their students’ educational accomplishments. And by having the ability to integrate with local health services and Medicaid billing, districts can better manage their students’ health and wellbeing, while ensuring superior student data privacy and cybersecurity.

Bright SUITE Saves Time

Our all-in-one enterprise management system creates efficiencies that help teachers with routine tasks, from attendance to reporting to testing, and allowing them to spend more time teaching and less time filling out paperwork.

Bright SUITE Improves Communication

Effective communication is vital to the educational ecosystem. The communication module included in Bright SUITE enables schools to interact with parents, students, and teachers more effectively. Features like parent portals, messaging systems, and event calendars foster collaboration, keeping stakeholders informed about important updates, events, and student progress. As communications are centralized, secure, and systemized, this takes a huge burden off teachers.

Bright SUITE Empowers Teachers

The best part about an all-in-one school information system is the transparency. Teachers can readily see student history, sync grades, and create reports that are compliant with 504 plans and IEPs. With a visual on where students are struggling, teachers can tailor their education plans and help improve their students’ chances of being successful. With access to special education modules, a full library, and modules for individual user data dashboards, Bright SUITE allows teachers to save time, improve student success rates, and benefit from access to real-time data, to make the best decision for every student. 

With Lumen Touch, districts can securely track students from early childhood through high school with one system. This total offering brings many advantages, including tremendous cost- and time-saving efficiencies while allowing students and teachers to embrace technology and accelerate the learning trajectory. Learn more

Preparing for the Return of Teachers and Students to Classrooms

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For some students, online learning has lasted for a year or longer. Some teachers have likewise been making magic in front of a computer screen instead of a class full of students. So, the return to fulltime in-person instruction is an exciting moment, but we cannot for one minute think that it will be easy for anyone.

Isolation Makes Human Contact More Stressful

Have you seen the film Cast Away? After 4 years on an island, when the character portrayed by Tom Hanks was finally thrust back into society, it was an overwhelming experience. While the situations may not be comparable, it’s likely that both educators and students will struggle to adjust when being thrust back into the classroom. Districts should consider having supports in place for their employees as well as strong SEL systems for students. Ted Gennerman, director of student services, and Emilie Tregellas, school psychologist for the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, wrote an exceptional guide for incorporating SEL to support students and improve student behavior.

Beware the Assessment Drive

We realize that there will be a push to complete a lot of assessments when students return to the classroom full time, in order to determine how far behind – or how far ahead – they are from the standard grade level. While we’d prefer to do away with grade levels altogether and simply teach students at their own pace and in ways that motivate them to learn more and love learning more, we urge districts to complete assessments not to hold students back from their grade level but to identify who needs the most support to catch up.

Forward Progress Must Continue

Even as we return to traditional classroom settings, we can bring what we’ve learned about accelerating and individualizing education into the classroom – and we can bring the technology that helped us achieve it, too. Just as corporations are recognizing the benefit of continuing to support a remote workforce, schools are recognizing the benefit of continuing to use the learning systems and technology they implemented during the height of the pandemic.

Technology Improves Education

Hybrid learning does not have to end when schools open. Consider all of the kids sent to school sick because of attendance requirements who could continue to participate in class from home in a hybrid learning environment. Extending this further, consider the capacity for schools in different areas of the country or world that could collaborate on learning through technology. A recent study, “Learning and instruction in the hybrid virtual classroom: An investigation of students’ engagement and the effect of quizzes,” revealed that the ability for students to relate to their peers, as well as their intrinsic motivation, improved when multiple screens and collaborative technology were in place.

As school districts resume full-time, in-person classes, the last thing we want to see happen is that back-to-school means returning to educating students in the same way we did prior to the pandemic. We need to embrace everything we’ve learned during the pandemic, maintain all of the technology and innovation we’ve incorporated, and continue pushing forward.