| State: Massachusetts | Number of Students: 957 |
| School Type: Charter Management Organization | Free and Reduced Lunch: 41.4% |
| Grade Level: 5-9 | English Language Learners: 15.0% |
School Context
This network of tuition-free, public charter schools addresses the severe academic underperformance and low college matriculation rates of the student populations in their community. The network serves 224 students, grades 5 through 8. At full scale in 2019, this school will enroll a total of 1,350 students in grades 5-12. 95% of the student body is on free and reduced lunch and are English Language Learners (ELL).
State of Technology
This network of tuition-free, public charter schools addresses the severe academic underperformance and low college matriculation rates of the student populations in their community. The network serves 224 students, grades 5 through 8. At full scale in 2019, this school will enroll a total of 1,350 students in grades 5-12. 95% of the student body is on free and reduced lunch and are English Language Learners (ELL).
For direct instruction, teachers are curating and creating lessons for groups of students to progress from one level of ELL to another.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The network is looking for an ELL tool to provide curriculum support in their ELL classes. In order to teach both directly in an ELL class and scaffolded within a core content area, the network believes that implementing a blended learning solution will help with following concerns: freeing teachers up to work independently with students; make the learning more personalized for students at different levels; prepare the students for electronic testing; and finally, help advance students through the ELL curriculum at a faster rate. To do this, the network is looking for a tools that satisfies as much of the following requirements as possible: has Reading, Writing, Listening and Grammar, ideally, but open to a multi-tool solution; WIDA standards aligned; adaptive preferred, but open to other more manual solution; diagnostic assessment preferred; a way to monitor student progress within the tool -A variety of formative assessment types of questions; and a motivation element, like badges or points.
Students should be able to see where they are in pace and sequence, but not necessarily have control over what they choose to work on. They should be able to progress to more challenging content if necessary.
Teachers will facilitate and help guide students through the material, but they will be advocating for student agency. They should be able to see the data in order to inform instruction.
The tool must: be WIDA standards-aligned or the ability to tag with the standards if it is not already done; the ability to show progress and monitor students; provide rigorous and robust content to help the lowest and highest achieving learner. The network provides 1:1 Chromebooks. They would like to have progress monitoring. They feel it would be useful to see usage data statistics. If it is possible, they would like to be able to analyze small group data, summative data, however, it is not a non-negotiable. The tool should, integrate with Illuminate if possible, but this is not a non-negotiable.