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The value of parental involvement on student achievement is clear. Multitudes of studies and research findings repeatedly show the strong correlation between the degree of a parent’s involvement with their child’s education and success in the classroom. The Harvard Family Research Project, an advocacy organization based out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is an ardent supporter of policies and initiatives promoting greater family involvement in schools. Many schools are going to extreme lengths to institute programs encouraging and increasing parental involvement within their districts.

At Blackboard, we take pride in providing reliable technology solutions to enhance learning and teaching within K-12 schools and districts across the country. So, we’re delighted to see a handful of our clients named as the Top School Districts in Digital Technology. Over the past seven years, the e.Republic’s Center for Digital Education and the National School Boards Association have teamed up in issuing the Digital School District survey to all U.S. public schools for recognizing exemplary school boards and district’s use of technology to govern the district, communicate with students, parents and the community and to improve district operations. Based on the survey responses, the school districts were ranked according to their fullest implementation of technology for continuing digital education evolution.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to visit an elementary school in Arlington County, Virginia and witness kindergarteners and third graders using iPads and iTouches to practice writing letters, combining phonetic elements to make words, and adding coins to make $.25.  As a former second grade teacher, I have to admit I was amazed at how facile these young students were with these devices, but not at all surprised at how engaged they were.

Earlier today we announced that Blackboard Mobile Central is now available on the Android, making Mobile Central available as a native application for all major mobile platforms. We’re excited to bring Mobile Central to the Android as it’s quickly becoming one of the most popular smartphone devices, with very cool Android-only features like widgets and shortcuts.

Mass Notification Event No Match for Blackboard Connect Capacity

Last week, millions of California residents participated in the Great California ShakeOut, an annual drill to promote emergency preparedness in the event of an earthquake. More than 7.8 million people across California registered to take part in the event, which happened at 10:21 a.m. on Oct. 21.

Many schools, campuses and municipalities rely on Blackboard Connect for communicating during critical situations. On Thursday we helped send out more than 1.12 million messages for the ShakeOut event, including:

• More than 75,000 multimodal messages sent in K-12 schools and districts
• More than 800,000 messages distributed at colleges and universities.
• More than 700,000 messages to residents in cities, towns and counties.