School Tool: Metryx Provides 'Digital Clipboard' for Tracking Student...

Competency-Based Learning

School Tool: Metryx Provides 'Digital Clipboard' for Tracking Student Mastery

Apr 2, 2013

Free! METRYX is a formative assessment tool that allows teachers to "track, analyze, and differentiate" students across any number of customizable skill sets. Teachers can import class rosters and any number of skill sets via a CSV file, and then individually track students across each skill set as they perform various classroom activities. The granularity of these activities is completely at the discretion of the teacher, though Metryx appears especially useful for project-based learning, skills demonstration, and other activities where multiple-choice assessment data can't fully convey student progress.

The analyze and differentiate features allow educators to view student progress longitudinally across different skill sets, and identify action groups for delivering targeted instruction, respectively. With a device-agnostic platform (smartphone, tablet, and desktop), Metryx essentially provides a complete structure for facilitating student mastery in real-time. Perhaps the only learning curve is the considerable learning curve that teachers must conquer while transitioning from a physical gradebook (and in some cases, from a performance-based to mastery-based grading philosophy), but Metryx's Vimeo channel goes a long way to ease this transition.

EdSurge chatted with Metryx co-founder, Shawn Rubin, who informed us that there's much more in store beyond the current version. With the support of the Highlander Institute, Rubin and co-founder Stephanie Castilla have the luxury of focusing on product development without worrying about monetization schemes. Rubin tells Edsurge that Metryx should ultimately become a one-stop shop for data-informed instruction "where teacher insights and learning data can sit hand-in-hand, but the teacher maintains control of the [data] firehose based on professional opinion."

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