| State: Texas | Number of Students: 11,342 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 36.9% |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: 4.5% |
School Context
This large middle school is opening a school-within-a-school, that will experiment with personalized learning models and using games to engage students. The school will be opening next fall with its own space and staff. It will serve 150 students, scaling to 500 students in 3 years. The school is a Title 1 school with 50% of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.
State of Technology
The biggest thing they are trying to give students is more time to learn and the time to learn at their own pace. Their goal is to give students 24/7 access to learning opportunities and to break down the walls for parents between the learning environment and home. they see a learning management system as a way to give students access to all their resources and to give them (and their parents) a way to track their learning experience in one place, instead of having seven different websites they have to dig through to grab content and track assignments.
Currently they use Google Classrooms as a way to push content to students and give them a place to turn in their assignments. However, they do not use it for assessments. They use Naiku as a digital assessment tool. Google Classrooms lets them down is in a few key areas, but most of all that it is not designed to allow students to progress at their own pace and does not allow parents to monitor progress. They also do not like that it will not allow teachers to incorporate external links to content or external assessments.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The ideal solution supports laying out and organizing curriculum and content, assessments, a student portfolio and parent access. The critical functionality will be to support mastery based model. Students will move at their own pace through the content posted on the learning management system. They should be able to take an assessment that will either open up the next set of content or trigger the teacher to manually open up the next set of content they can progress through.
The tool should allow teachers to upload all their curriculum at the start of the school year, but make different files available to students as they go. It should allow teachers to link to any external content. It should allow students to access that content at their own pace. It should also allow students to turn in assignments on the tool and allow teachers to share feedback on that assignment.
They would like to be able to create assessments in the tool or link to an assessment bank that they have created in Naiku. It would be great if the results of the assessments could be recorded on the tool.
They want students to be able to keep all their work on the platform, anything from assignments to videos of their work they upload.
Parents should not be able to see other student's responses, but the tool should allow parents to have access to their student's assignments, data and all the work they submitted.
Social/communication type features are not as important. The community will mostly be built off line. Discussion groups would be great, but not a non-negotiable. For grading features, they use Skyward Student Information System. All grades have to transfer to that system. Any connection the LMS can make to that tool would be great, but it is not a non negotiable. They would prefer not to have to enter grades from the learning management system into Skyward, so if there is anyway to make that a smooth transition, it would be great.
Students should be able to go through the content at their own pace and see all their own data.
Teachers will use this tool to store data, but most important is that teachers will use the assessment tool to see which students are progressing through content and on the formative assessments. Being able to grab this data easily is important.
The school provides students with 1:1 Chromebooks. The tool must integrate with Google Apps, support a competency based model and allow students to move through content at their own pace and give parents access to all their student's information. Being able to see how students are progressing overall is very important. They should also be able to drill down into data on an individual student is really important. The most important data from this tool is coming from the assessments that the tool delivers. They will give preference to anyone who is able to integrate with Skyward SIS. The tool must be web based. Any integration with Identity Automation for single sign-on is a plus.