| State: Maryland | Number of Students: 1,523 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: N/A |
| Grade Level: K-8 | English Language Learners: N/A |
School Context
This charter school is part of a large national charter school with schools across the country. In this particular community over 80% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. They are located in a large urban area.
State of Technology
It takes teachers so long to grade essays with about 3 weeks in between when an essay is assigned and a final grade administered. Students do not get much feedback on their writing and do not get enough opportunity to write. Thus, teachers are hesitant to assign essay type questions. They really need to get kids writing more, but with a faster turnaround for feedback.
Currently, they assign a research paper once a quarter. Students use Google Docs to type that paper up. Then, teachers go through multiple revision processes with them, but usually with three weeks between turning the paper in and getting a final grade. They tried using Citelighter but found the tool supported faster research for students and it had too much dragging and dropping and assumed a lot of prior knowledge. It also did not solve the main problem, which is the speed at which students get feedback.
Tech Needs & Requirements
Ideally, the teachers would have students writing essays every two weeks. Students would use the tool to submit their essay and get automatic feedback. They would then be able to revise and resubmit on the tool for more feedback. The tool needs to give feedback on paragraph structure, sentence structure and word choice (like past and present tense). This will enable teachers to focus their instruction and feedback more on content and less on formulaically teaching kids the basics. The tool should also flag which kids are struggling with the basics, so the teacher can spend more time with them, while letting the kids who get the basics move forward and write more content.
Students should be able to submit their essay and continue to re-submit revisions until it is completely free of mistakes.
Teachers can submit their own ideal essay when needed and they will look at data. But other than that, teachers should have very little involvement.
The school provides students with 1:1 Chromebooks. The tool must ensure no teacher grading involved, i.e., essays should all be autograded. The tool should correct basic sentence structure through instant feedback. It should provide the teacher with some kind of data on the student's progress. They are looking for big picture data that teachers can use to make sure they are giving extra support to students who repeatedly come up with many errors in their writing. Overall, the data does not need to be tremendously detailed. The director of data would like access to the API or a CSV export but this is not a deal breaker. They prefer to have better tech over manipulatable data. The tool should have single sign-on with Google Apps, but this is not a must. It must run on Chromebooks.