Sesame

SUMMARY

Sesame is an online teacher work environment that combines planning, assessment, and curriculum standards. Teachers can create units, lessons, and assessments along with rubrics for grading these activities within Sesame; students and administrators can view students’ progress towards completing activities in their individual student profiles. Sesame, as well as its iPhone and iPad app Sesame Snap, are free for teachers and students to download; school-wide use can be purchased for a per-student license.

GOALS

Sesame is an online teacher work environment that combines planning, assessment, and curriculum standards. The product is designed to help teachers streamline the process of capturing and documenting artifacts of student learning. It also aims to communicate information about students’ progress to students, parents, and administrators.

APPROACH

Teachers begin creating their online classroom by adding their instructor profile, what grades and subjects they teach, and the students in their class. Teachers can create units, adding the appropriate Common Core or Ontario standards from a list within the application. Teachers can place this unit into a calendar and share it with their students, colleagues, or other teachers in the Sesame network. Teachers can create lessons within these units, tagging with standards where appropriate. Teachers can also create assessments and rubrics for grading assessments and other assignments based on the standards assigned for these lessons.

Student and administrators can view students' progress in their individual student profiles. These profiles contain the results of the assessments, plus any notes that are added by the teacher. In addition, teachers can use Sesame’s mobile app Sesame Snap (for iPhone and iPad) to take photos of student work and immediately add them to a student’s profile. The profile can then immediately be shared with administrators and parents. Teachers can also share student work with other teachers to cross-validate assessments.

IMPLEMENTATION

Sesame is a web-based application that is compatible with laptop and desktop computers. Sesame also has a mobile app for iPhones and iPads called Semame Snap.

PRICING

Sesame, as well as its iPhone and iPad app Sesame Snap, are free for teachers and students to download. Individual teachers can use the product for free, but a school wide license costs $5/student/year.

WHO IS USING IT

Over 50,000 students and more than 5,000 teachers are using Sesame.