| State: Texas | Number of Students: 13,773 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 59.9% |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: 27.8% |
School Context
This district is the fastest growing district in this state’s largest metro area. They currently serve 14,000 students. In the next 5 years, they anticipate growing to 25,000 students. 60% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The district has good infrastructure to support technology, but they are working to move towards more intentional use of technology.
State of Technology
While this district uses technology in the classroom, not much is aligned. They want to enable teachers to store their content online so that they do not have to recreate new materials that already exist. They would also like a way to align content with standards so that they can easily track student progress and give feedback to students, without making students use several different programs to do it. They would like a cohesive approach to both content and feedback.
This district facilitates a rotational model in classes, where students are learning online part of the time and teachers are pulling students for small group instruction. For content, they currently store all content in Google Drive. Curriculum specialists often make PDFs which are stored in lesson plan software, Eduphoria. For feedback tools, they usually just use google docs. Often times teachers are patching lots of different tools together. In addition, they have a gradebook on Skyward where the final results are stored. Ultimately, they want to improve this system so that teachers are spending less time trying to curate content and so they can streamline the feedback process so teachers spend more time giving feedback and less time managing the process. They also think it is really important that kids be able learn on their own online but also be held accountable for that learning.
Tech Needs & Requirements
Their ideal solution would allow to create and share content in three ways. First, they would like to create curriculum at the district level and give teachers access to those documents so they can organize them into their own courses. Second, they would also need to allow teachers to create their own content and weave that into their online materials. And finally, they need to enable teachers to link to external curriculum solutions such as iStation and ALEX math so they can tie them into their curriculum. Additionally, they must be able to tag content by state learning standard.
The tool should support students to turn in work and allow teachers to apply a custom rubric to that work in order to provide feedback. Students should be able to respond to that teacher feedback. Additionally, teachers should be able to assign a grade to work from students and those grades should sync to Skyward through an API.
They would like to have the ability to administer quizzes on the platform and digital assessments that teachers could grade and that would sync with the grading features.
They need the ability to assign grades to assignments and integrate grades from assessments into Skyward. They must have an API that links this data back into Skyward Student Information System.
A communication feature would be nice, especially if it could enable group discussion so teachers could grade and monitor the quality of discussions, but these features do not need to be as advanced.
Students need to have the ability to access every resource from their classroom at any time, from anywhere. They also need to have the ability to track where they are in their learning progression and what their grades and data look like.
Teachers need to have the flexibility to use district create content or create their own on the site. Teachers also need the ability to assign assignments and give students feedback.
This district provides students 1:1 Chromebooks in grades 3-12. 6th graders - 12th graders get to take devices home. Pre-K-2nd graders have a 1:3 ratio of tablets and Chromebooks. The tool must store content from the district level and allow teachers to curate that content, allow teachers to create their own content, enable a two way feedback loop between teachers and students over assessments, support an API to transfer grading info between the system and Skyward, must integrate with google docs, and must support single sign on with Google. Teachers need to track student assignments and how each assignment ties back to a standard. They should be able to look at data that tell them how each student is progressing or mastering each standard so that they can target students and individually assign kids content. CSV exports are preferable. The tools should link to Skyward, integrate with Google and provide a Single Sign On with Google.