Our country has a digital equity crisis, with many socioeconomically disadvantaged students disproportionately experiencing significant negative consequences from the digital divide. This program evaluation sought to investigate whether the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools (VILS) grant program decreases the consequences of the digital divide…

Effective sexual health education plays a critical role in adolescent pregnancy and HIV and STI prevention. This article describes the formative research conducted to design, and then pilot-test, SkillFlix®, a streaming video training created to improve educators' skills in delivering sexual health education to youth by modeling Microskills®.…

This descriptive qualitative study was designed to understand better California K-12 teachers' experiences with and preferences toward technology-facilitated professional development. The issue is that there have been some changes in professional development since COVID-19 and are these changes with technology-facilitated professional developments…

This quantitative study examined self-efficacy as a factor in teachers' technology use and integration efforts in urban K-12 classroom settings of 327 Catholic school teachers in Southern California. This study employed an online survey that utilized the Technology Integration Confidence Scale (TICS) version 3, an instrument developed by the first…

Technology has become a way of life since March 2020 and the statewide shutdowns after the COVID-19 pandemic. People who had gotten by without ever having to use the internet, much less turn on a computer, had to learn quickly to change and adapt. The administrative team of Fontana Adult School realized the need to help students with basic digital…

Purpose: This study aimed to understand the experiences of community college career technical education (CTE) faculty that used extended reality to improve their program of study and prepare students for proficiency and skill attainment in workforce development. How faculty adapted to learning various pedagogical practices for distance learning,…

This study reports on the effects of professional development (PD) training programs on faculty's perceptions and uses of technology for teaching and learning using mixed methods. Collected data include survey questionnaires to faculty at a school of education (N = 47) and focus group interviews on nine participants. The qualitative findings…

In September 2020, local education agencies ("LEAs") in California adopted Learning Continuity and Attendance Plans ("Learning Continuity Plans"). These plans included key information on how LEAs were preparing to provide instruction, programs and services to their students during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Among other…

Considerable research has documented the impact of teacher perceptions on students' academic-related outcomes (e.g., classroom performance). This body of literature clearly shows that teacher perceptions (resulting from direct interactions with students) can have both positive and negative effects with respect to student behaviors and experiences…

ClassDojo is one of the world's most successful educational technologies, currently used by over 3 million teachers and 35 million children globally. It reinforces and enacts emerging governmental "psycho-policies" around the measurement and modification of children's social and emotional learning in schools. This article focuses…

Fueled by exponential advances in technology, the world will change more in the next few decades than in all of human history, futurist Thomas Frey says. Community college leaders will have to think beyond traditional structures such as semester-length courses and two-year degree programs, designing micro-learning experiences that better match…

Faced with the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, California's adult education programs found innovative ways to pivot and continue serving students. With the support of the California Department of Education and its state leadership projects, adult educators embraced new technologies, virtual modes of professional development, and adapted…

Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that…

Like schools across the country, Green Dot Public Schools California closed its campuses in mid-March and kept them closed for the rest of the school year. Early in the crisis, the network focused on distributing food, Chromebooks, and hotspots to its roughly 11,000 students. It conducted wellness checks by phone with all of its families. Over the…

Like all educational institutions, community colleges rapidly shifted to online instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about what factors shaped individual college responses. This survey of distance education leaders (N = 45) in the California community colleges system aimed to: (a) characterize pre-COVID…