| State: California | Number of Students: 260 |
| School Type: Charter School | Free and Reduced Lunch: 15.4% |
| Grade Level: 9-10 | English Language Learners: 2.7% |
School Context
This new school of about 550 students strives to make students innovation-ready by helping them develop skills that are critical to success in the 21st Century. They focus on collaboration, creativity, self-management, and communication. Students at this school develop these skills by building deep content knowledge and learning important problem-solving skills. The two principles that guide their educational model are extreme personalization and putting knowledge in action.
State of Technology
The school feels that their students have become a bit stagnant in literacy growth and that their current approach is not helping bolster student engagement that leads students to become life-long readers. They feel that they need to augment their approach to help students strengthen basic literacy skills and fill in gaps in learning to help all learners, not just those that struggle, in a way that complements their current approach.
Currently, English teachers are using a combination of shorter passages and self-created formative assessments to develop students' literacy skills. Some teachers are building text sets, while some are curating literature circles. While their approach is effective, they are still noticing some clear gaps in student achievement and need a way to fill in those gaps for both low level readers and accelerated readers.
Tech Needs & Requirements
For an ideal solution, the English department is looking for a tool or set of tools that can supplement their core English curriculum that will help students build reading stamina and interest in literacy. The tool(s) should have formative assessment built into the tool. They are looking for deeper analysis questions and something that will help students think critically. They would love to have a feature that allows students to have peer to peer interaction. If possible, they are looking for a way for students to see where they are in progression through skills. The tool should be aligned to Common Core standards. They would like quicker, quantitative data from the formative assessments. Rostering with a CSV a nice to have.
Their students like tools where they can get started on some work and see progress/their metrics.
Teachers should not have to make a lot of decisions. Teachers will use the data from the tool to help determine best next steps for students for intervention.
The tool must provide content, have formative assessments, provides quantitative data for progress monitoring and download reports and data to CSV. The school provides Chromebooks. First and foremost, the school would like to see how students are progressing through Common Core standards. Other actionable data will be a nice to have. The tool should integrate with Buzz Learning Management System.