| State: Louisiana | Number of Students: 1,643 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: 96.8% |
| Grade Level: PK-8 | English Language Learners: N/A |
School Context
This school is a member of a charter school network that has spent the last year piloting various versions of blended learning at different schools. This school was given further funding to spread their model across the whole school.
State of Technology
The school facilitates a station rotation model where students are broken up by reading levels. They rotate through stations where they get direct instruction, independent reading and spend time practicing reading comprehension through an online program. They need an online tool that can facilitate this station. Ideally, this tool can support both remediation and on grade content. For remediation, they focus on comprehension, grammar and asking students to provide evidence for why they choose answers. For more advanced students, they want to see them responding to reading prompts, providing evidence based answers and practicing vocabulary. These tools need to guide the student with direct instruction as they go, not just solely assess students.
This year, the school was facilitating the station rotation model at the end of the day. Students were broken by reading levels and work on Accelerated Reader, while teachers did guided learning activities with the rest of the students. However, while Accelerated Reader was a great tool to encourage students to read a book, it was not a great tool for students to practice and learn reading comprehension or vocabulary. The school would like a tool that can be more of a supplementary instructional too, not simply an online reading tool.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The school wants teachers to have some control around what content a student starts with, but it would be nice if the tool adapted the students’ path, adjusting content up or down, based on how they move through the material.
It is extremely important that the content these tools cover focus on higher level ELA skills, such as comprehension, vocab building and providing evidence for an answer. If it cannot support the development of these skills both on grade level and a few grade levels below, then they cannot use it. The school has one computer cart per grade level, which means that 50% of students have a laptop at all times. The school provides students with either Asus Netbooks or Chromebooks. The school wants to be able to see what content students have successfully mastered. They also want to be able to track their growth over time. They will use this data as a formative assessment tool. Teachers should be able to look at this data and make a decision on what to teach or reteach next. They do not need data to be exported. They do need a dashboard that a teacher can easily view with minimal manipulation. The tool must be web based.