| State: Washington | Number of Students: 19,672 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 65.3% |
| Grade Level: PK-12 | English Language Learners: 25.8% |
School Context
This is a public school district that has been at the forefront of blended learning for the past four years. They have scaled blended learning environments in ELA and math at over half of their schools. They are very intentional in their thinking around technology and are very thoughtfully about how to support the implementation of any tool they adopt.
State of Technology
The district is trying to increase student comprehension of nonfiction texts. They would like to be able to give students nonfiction content appropriate to their individual reading levels. They would like a tool that could place students into the correct lexile level, provide them with nonfiction texts and test their comprehension of those texts. Ideally, this tool adapts as students get better, making the texts or the questions harder as they complete more. They are fine with using different tools for different grade levels.
Currently, the district uses Achieve3000 across their 3rd - 8th grade classes. Teachers use the tool as a supplement to the different reading or writing workshops they facilitate. They use the tools during a whole class lesson, where students start together but then work through the tool on their own at their appropriate level. Then the teacher brings everyone together at the end to debrief what they learned. They are looking to replace Achieve3000 because the tool has more features than they need and it covers too many different ELA needs. Teachers end up using it like a full curriculum, when they really just need to use it as a supplementary tool. The district needs a lighter weight tool that is designed to support instruction.
Tech Needs & Requirements
The tool should be adaptive to some extent so that students can use it without too much teacher intervention. However, if a student needs to level up or level down, the teacher should have some control to modify the tool’s recommendation or placement of the student.
The tool must have nonfiction text options. The district offers students a variety of hardware, mostly PC or Chromebooks. The district wants teachers to be able to see what reading level each student is at and their success at each level of the comprehension questions. Teachers will use this data to quickly scan for mastery of different concepts and to easily group students or make interventions. Ideally, the tool can export the data so they can explore possible insights. The tool must have some API capabilities. It is highly preferable if it can pull data from the SIS, Illuminate to generate rosters. In the future, the district would like it to input data into the SIS as well, but this is not a must. Also, if the tool works with Active Directory, they can roster data from there, too.