| State: California | Number of Students: 53,354 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 44.7% |
| Grade Level: K-Adult | English Language Learners: 13.6% |
School Context
This is a large district with 40% of students who qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch. They have been focusing on their IP infrastructure for the past 9 years. Now that the foundation has been built they are hoping to focus on changing instruction to support a more tech rich vision. Last November, the district received a Bond that will be used for instructional technology.
State of Technology
They have adopted a bring your own device program district wide. With this program, they are looking to expand learning beyond the classroom and give students access to learning opportunities at all times. The first way they would like to support this is by making all learning materials available to all students at any time, through a learning management system solution.
Currently, our county is working to develop a collaborative curriculum development project across all county districts. To support this project, they are using Haiku to share curricular resources with other districts. They launched this pilot last spring, but they are only using it to catalogue all our resources and share it with other districts. They are also using Office 365 as a class collaboration site, where classrooms can have a calendar and access resources. However, they do not like that with Office 365 teachers cannot organize and present their full curriculum and they cannot deliver it to students in an instructional way. So far, they do not mind using Haiku, but they would like to make sure there are not other solutions that cannot more fully support instruction.
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.
Ideally, the system would allow each teacher to upload all the resources they use and organize those resources in a way that makes sense based on their instruction. They would love the ability for teachers to share their resources with each other or for teachers to submit those resources to be vetted by administrators. That is ideal, but not a make-or-break requirement.
They would love teachers to share videos, PowerPoints and resources they created to kickstart a conversation around those resources. Also, they would need the ability for teachers to assign work to students through the platform and for students to be able to turn that work back in on the platform. Discussion boards for each class would be ideal to further collaboration. The ability for teachers to populate a class calendar would also be important.
The system should allow teachers to administer some kind of quiz to students, so they can check for understanding. If the system had a gradebook where the teacher could record the results of this assessment that would be great, but not a non-negotiable.
A nice-to have, but not a non-negotiable, would be a parent portal or some way for parents to see only some of the information on the platform so that they can track and keep up with their student's work. The option of making some of the info on the learning management system public would be ideal so that parents do not have to log on with a password.
Students should be able to log on and access resources and do activities. This should be largely self paced, but they should have some chances or ability to work collaboratively together through the platform.
Teachers should have control over the content they upload and how they organize that content. Teachers should also have a calendar so that they can plan things in advance and launch specific assignments on specific days. They should also be able to communicate directly with students. Teachers will control what is visible when and to which audience. They will have complete control over their class on the learning management system.
Every student has their own device. They support a bring your own device program, so devices vary. This district does not want to use this tool to do a bunch of data analytics. They already have Illuminate and use that for all our formative and summative tests and quizzes. Any links to Illuminate would be great, but not necessary. The data that this tool would provide them would be light. They would like to see how many people are logging on and the length of their log in. They would also like to track what resources they used and what was the most helpful. Additionally, being able to tell where they are logging in from would also be helpful. CSV data exports for quiz data would be preferable. over the data from assessments into Vangle, their SIS that would be great, but not a non-negotiable. The tool must be a web-based. An optimized version for mobile would be preferable as well.