| State: California | Number of Students: 50 |
| School Type: Charter School | Free and Reduced Lunch: 95.0% |
| Grade Level: 9-12 | English Language Learners: 10.0% |
School Context
This is a proposed charter school in California for grades 9-12 that seeks to offer families the option of sending students to a school with a dedicated mission of connecting in-school learning to social and real world contexts. They are implementing a flex model blended learning environment, and would like all aspects of their model to reinforce student agency.
State of Technology
The co-founder of this school current feels that there needs to be a balance between screen-time, collaboration, project-based learning with her students. She is hoping to make learning more personalized for students, offering them opportunities to build a network, set their own goals, and have agency in their educational experience. They want to create a culture of transparency.
They really like Haiku for its competency based grading and assessment features as well as it's website design features. They also like Summit's PLP for competency based grading and blended learning features.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They are looking for a platform that can support their flex model/blended learning where teachers can design and create courses that students select and work through independently. They also determine their own schedules and set goals independently. To support this model they would like the following.
They need to be able to design courses and store content for those courses on this platform. They should also be able to create assignments and share with students. Ideally, the content that is stored on this platform would vary, but we must be able to include links to external content.
They would like to have access to an open source library of resources and courses. This is not a non-negotiable, but it would be a nice-to-have. If there are any widgets or integration one does with outside content, that would be preferred.
The tool should support collaboration by allowing students to create public and private groups where they can synchronously chat and share content. However, these groups must be monitored by administrators and cannot be totally private to students.
The students should have a calendar that reflects their daily schedule. They like flexibility so that each student could create their own unique schedule for the day. Students should be able to set goals and assign themselves tasks.
They need a grade book included in this tool; however, it should be open and flexible/customizable so that they can create the scale or enter non-traditional learning objectives.
It would be great if the tool had some assessment features that were able to be customizable. If it integrates with NWEA that would be a nice-to-have.
Since student agency is at the heart of the model, some teachers will allow students to go as fast as they want. Others will ask for more consistency. Eventually, they want to support every student to be taking courses of their own choosing and at their own pace.
Teachers will create courses and monitor them. Teachers will be responsible for monitoring and assessing student work on the platform. They would like to be able to see student performance data in the tool.
The tool must have a collaboration space for synchronous and asynchronous chats and sharing, include a calendar and goal setting tools, allow for designing and organizing materials into online courses. The school provides 1:1 Chromebooks. They would like to be able to download data into a CSV, and would like to have visibility of student progress. The tool must Integrate with gradebook, as they do not currently have one selected.