| State: California | Number of Students: 608 |
| School Type: Charter School | Free and Reduced Lunch: 77.3% |
| Grade Level: K-7 | English Language Learners: 39.8% |
School Context
This K-8 network recently opened its first school this year with 300 kids in K-3 and 6th grade. They will expand to 600 students in K-4 and 6&8 grade in the fall. By its third year it will become a full K-8 school with 900 kids and add an additional school to its network. Students come from an urban neighborhood, 82% qualify for Free and Reduced Lunch. The majority of students are identified as English Language Learners.
State of Technology
This school has been trying to make data more accessible to teachers across our school. They really need to make sure data is captured in real time and actionable, so they want a tool that supports daily formative assessments/exit tickets. They are using OER curriculum from EngageNY (www.engageny.org) as a standard curriculum that every student learns, in addition to the blended learning materials such as iRead. EngageNY has a set of paper-based exit tickets aligned to each lesson. They would like to be able to take those exit tickets, differentiate them into a set of 3 questions and then load those questions onto a formative digital assessment tool. These questions are both multiple choice and open response. It is highly important they maintain the integrity and quality of the Engage New York exit tickets. Students would take these digital assessments at the close of each class on their own devices (Chromebooks), and teachers would then be able to instantly see student responses to each exit ticket. Ideally, these assessments are auto-graded and a report would be generated to show what they got wrong and how it's linked to a specific Common Core standard. For open responses, if auto-grading is not possible it is important that some efficiency is created so the teacher can quickly assess whether students got the question wrong or right. Once all the assessments are graded, the report should show very clearly how each student is doing on each Common Core standard. They do use teacher teams, so it os important that they can group students in one whole grade together and that multiple teachers can have access to that group.
Currently, the school does not have tools supporting formative assessments. They use iReady as a blended learning platform for practice. iReady is good at helping them figure out groupings, but it does not break down information into Common Core strands. Due to the adaptive nature, the information is not reliable. Where one student is in the program one day is drastically different from another. They need something that level sets our students against each other and against specific standards every day.
Tech Needs & Requirements
Teachers will not be developing the assessments, they will be using assessments created for them. Each assessment should link to a particular lesson they are teaching. Teachers should have the ability to control the pacing based on which lesson they are on.
The school offers students 1:1 Chromebooks. The tool must be able to: pre-populate with the schools own assessments; export data to a CSV file; save time on grading open ended questions through an automation feature or through some fast grading solution and must preserve the student's original answer, not just a summary; and able to link each question to Common Core standard. The school needs to see performance of each student per Common Core standard. Ideally they could access a report that shows how each student did on each strand, how many exit tickets correlated to each strand and how many each got correct. Data needs to be exportable via a CSV file. The school would like the tool to integrate with Clever, but it is not a non-negotiable. If rostering with Illuminate is possible, then that is a plus.