As other elementary schools across the country were preparing for the new school year by cleaning classrooms and training teachers, Hermosa Elementary, in Artesia, New Mexico was also installing a network of wireless microphones that could pick up the specific concussive audio signature of gunfire. Placed high in classrooms and hallways, the golf-ball-sized devices can alert authorities to the sound and location of gunshots, reportedly within 20 seconds of firing. They can also identify make and model of guns, and automatically lock doors and sound alarms throughout the campus. They are a technological balm for a terrifying problem: In the wake of the Parkland shooting, and Sandy Hook before that, school districts across the nation are spending hundreds of thousands to outfit campuses with high-tech surveillance, crisis response, and police technologies. Playgrounds are cordoned off by biometric locks requiring face and iris scans, parking lots are scanned and license plates are recorded, gunshot-detection devices are embedded in cafeterias, human police wear body cameras, and autonomous robots patrol hallways to detect weapons.

A look at IBM's Teacher Advisor tool, powered by Watson. The new-age approach to mathematics is drastically different to what most parents were taught during their own early education experience, and as such it's created a major pain point in nightly homework routines across America. But with a new initiative involving IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson, elementary math lessons could become easier for students, teachers and even parents. Over the last two years, the IBM Foundation has teamed with teachers and the American Federation of Teachers union to create an AI-based lesson plan tool called Teacher Advisor. The program essentially uses Watson's cognitive smarts to answer questions from educators and help them build personalized lesson plans, understand concepts and learn strategies to improve student comprehension.