In this year's cohort of 356 National Blue Ribbon Schools, New York accounts for 6% of the award winners! Check out the full list and put your hands together for these schools that have excelled in academic performance and/or made noteworthy progress towards closing achievement gaps.

Student and teacher engagement continues to be a challenge across the globe, yet we know it's one of the biggest indicators of student success. What will it take to ensure that everyone is engaged in New York's classrooms? ​We surveyed 6,000 administrators, teachers, parents, and students to find out.

With sessions, seminars, and swag galore, be sure to attend these upcoming conferences:

• Long Island Technology & Engineering Summit (LITES), Oct 18th, Melville
• School Administrators Association of New York State (SAANYS) - Oct 27-28th, Lake Placid
• Science Teachers Association of New York State (STANYS) - Nov 1-4th, Syracuse
  
  Bonus points if you stop by our sessions! Look out for our SAANYS workshops: Achieving District Goals while Engaging ALL Students and Dare to Dream: Building a STEM Passion Project. We'll also be hosting three sessions at STANYS: Constructing Science & Engineering Knowledge, Inspiring Elementary Students to Pursue STEAM Careers, and a Digital Playground.

"Using the LEGO^® Education SPIKE^™ Prime and SPIKE^™ Essential sets addresses a large swath of the NY Computer Science and Digital Fluency standards. Students are not only immersed in authentic activities that utilize computational thinking; it highlights many of the aspects of Impacts of Computing and Digital Litercy standards. When students have to design, build, refine, code, debug, and work together to complete missions or innovate a design solution, they are not just acting as engineers, coders, designers, etc., they are actually fulfilling those roles."


JoEllen Schuleman
STEM Specialist & LEGO^® Education Ambassador
PS 199 Jesse Isidor Straus Elementary

To combat chronic absenteeism, these NYC schools are using data, peer-to-peer support, incentive initiatives, and more. Learn more about their approach in this Chalkbeat article.

With 7 units and over 40 lessons free of cost, LEGO^® Education SPIKE^™ Prime has 100 hours of content aligned to New York Computer Science & Digital Fluency standards. In addition, we offer extensions, monthly challenges, Python Units, and more, giving you plenty of content to cover your students throughout the school year.

Explore our sample 45-day Scope & Sequence to learn more.

As fall approaches, many people enjoy going apple picking or to the pumpkin patch. What types of crops grow in your area? How are those crops harvested?


In this engineering lesson, students are tasked to develop a model that can indicate when a crop needs to be watered using LEGO Education SPIKE^™ Essential or SPIKE^™ Prime. Develop criteria for success, test, and iterate on designs as a class! Give this agriculture lesson a go.