| State: California | Number of Students: 407 |
| School Type: Charter School | Free and Reduced Lunch: 50.4% |
| Grade Level: K-8 | English Language Learners: 0.5% |
School Context
This is a small and very established charter school that has been open for 20 years in a rural community. They have been growing over the past couple years and have 400 students in K-8 grade. 50% of students are low income and 20% of the population is classified as "special needs." The school uses a lot of project based lessons, but aims to incorporate basic skills into this type of teaching.
State of Technology
Being in a more rural area, there are not a lot of high quality professional development opportunities available for teachers. The professional development opportunities that are available are after work or on a weekend are difficult for teachers with families or other obligations to attend. They would like to make it easier for teachers to access high quality cutting edge professional development resources. They would like teachers to do professional development on their own time, when it is most convenient for them. They also have a staff of mostly experienced teachers who need to learn how to incorporate new strategies into their existing structures and routines.
Currently, they use Teachpoint for evaluations. The principal uses their digital evaluation tool to give teachers formal feedback. Recently they have realized that our teachers need more support. They have teachers who attend a conference here and there, but it is hard for them to come back to their classrooms with actionable changes to their instruction. They have also hired professional development providers to come in and deliver in-person professional development sessions to teachers, but then they do not have any way to re-play or re-share that experience with other teachers who did not attend or teachers who are new the next year. They are also not big enough to afford ongoing in-person consultants for professional development. So they would like to find a more sustainable solution.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They would like a learning management system that can be a repository of curricular resources for each teacher and that can be used to extend learning in many ways outside of the classroom.
They have three parts for an ideal solution. One part is teachers sharing video of their own practice for feedback with their peers. They will create a system so that teachers can video tape themselves and then send the video of the practice to one of their peers for specific feedback. The teachers should decide on the area orgoal they want to improve on and be able to note that when they solicit feedback. Giving feedback should be easy. They have a feedback rubric which could be included if possible.
Another part is providing professional development resources. Teachers should be able to access high quality videos exemplifying different teaching strategies. They should be able to share resources back and forth with each other. Ideally, they would be able to have highly skilled teachers share their own videos with the whole team. The most important part of this is that all the preloaded or accessible resources are high quality and curated, not just random resources put together.
Lastly, they would like to be able to do walk throughs of teachers classrooms and share
feedback with them in a coaching capacity. They would like to share resources with each teacher based on their walk through so they can use information that is related to their practice. Also, the principal does formal evaluation walkthroughs with teachers and having a digital tool to track those more formally would be great if it can all be in one place. They are willing to put combinations of products that do these different things, but they are also willing to look at a platform that do them all.
The teachers need to be able to upload their own video and have control over who they share that content with. They need to have the ability to share resources with each other and search for resources on their own. The feedback teachers give each other should be private, as should the coaching feedback given to teachers in their walkthroughs.
Hardware provided varies.
Teachers need to have control over who they share things with. High quality curated video resources need to be available if resources are being shared. Video upload process must be easy and user friendly. They do not need a lot of data. Knowing who is sharing and participating is good, but not much more detail is necessary. The tool must be web based. For the observation tool, iPad compatibility would be a huge plus.