| State: California | Number of Students: 239 |
| School Type: Charter School | Free and Reduced Lunch: 70.3% |
| Grade Level: K-8 | English Language Learners: 43.1% |
School Context
This California charter school has a deep focus on project-based and inquiry learning. They hope to incorporate socio-emotional learning as well in their model. While their school day is similar to that of a traditional school model. This school hopes to differentiate learning for all students in order to account for the wide range of skills that students have demonstrated.
State of Technology
Faculty and staff have a decentralized method for creating, storing and collaborating on resources and materials. The school would like a tool that helps them have a productive, secure and user-friendly place to group teachers so that they can collaborate and share information in a productive way.
They currently use email, Google Chat and Google Drive. This has been a good enough solution, but they often have trouble documents, have trouble sharing and did not have enough training to make this solution useful. The school feels that they need something with a bit more structure and organization and better training upfront to achieve their goals.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They would like a tool where faculty and staff can share, create, store, and collaborate on resources, lesson plans, forms, etc. Essentially, they are looking for a tool that is a bit more structured and organized than Google Drive but not as robust as a full LMS. They would like to tool to primarily function as a content management tool, but also allow for synchronous collaboration and communication. The school desires several features.The tool should have the ability to make groups like PLCs for teachers. The tool should have integration with Google Docs so they can use materials previously created. Sharing materials must be easy. The tool should have the ability to share and store files, videos, articles, agendas, lessons and assignments. The tool should provide curriculum materials for scope and sequence. A chat function would be a nice to have, but they plan on keeping their Google email. If there were a workflow feature for signatures, that would be a nice to have.
Teachers will be creating, storing, collaborating, accessing and organizing documents within this tool.
The tool must be able to group staff members for protected and structured sharing and collaboration. The tool must provide a way of creating logical and structured organization of materials. The tool must support a collaboration feature. The tool must be able to store and/or create a variety of documents like PDFs and Google Sheets. The school offers Chromebooks. The tool should provide data that shows a history of collaboration and ability to search for documents. The tool should integrate with Google.