Wouldn't it be great if there was a reliable, powerful, easy to use, and comprehensive solution for all of our school's digital needs?
Just imagine.
Imagine having one place where teachers can EASILY post well-developed assignments:
- that include clear assessment criteria using commonly-developed rubrics that relate directly standards taken from dept. or school-wide curricula;
- that include an exemplar that students can use to see exactly where the bar is being set;
- that can be easily modified for individual students - secretly and quietly - by the teacher or special educator (or maybe even the student themselves);
- that can provide different options for meeting the same assessment goals and provide students with some choice in what they do or how they learn;
- that include access to all the resources students will need to accomplish the assignment (including engaging audio and video media!);
- that can be grade online using a digital rubric or automatically graded in the case of a selected response quiz
Now imagine a system that includes the ability to create self-paced or teacher-guided lessons, integrated wikis, blogs, chat rooms, video-conferencing and an amazing threaded discussion board forum that allows ALL students to take part in class discussion!
Now imagine a system that allows schools within a district to share assignments, rubrics, proficiencies, curricula materials etc. etc.
Now imagine a system that allows schools to import standardized test scores and analyze them in a million different ways (like VCAT). And imagine a system that keeps track of each individual student's standardized test scores, and their achievement of school-wide proficiencies and curriculum expectations, with easy to analyze graphs and charts.
Now imagine a system that does all this IN ONE LOCATION - meaning that teachers only need to enter this information into one spot, one time. They don't have to post assignments using a wiki, grade online using powerschool, upload common assessment achievement and standardized test scores to VCAT and keep paper copies of all this just in case.
Now imagine a system that saves all of this data periodically and which can be backed up on our own server with three mouse clicks.
And now imagine a system that saves every assignment, every rubric, every resource, every quiz question and every single bit of student work digitally and automatically!
And imagine a system that does most of this absolutely FREE! (analytics of data and video-conferencing would cost the entire school about $80 month)
Finally imagine a system that is hosted for us, on servers as large and as secure as Google.com (maybe not as large :)). Imagine a system that has had a 99.98% UPTIME since it's inception 3 years ago. One that meets all CIPA and FERPA requirements. One that is being used around the world by over 600 schools already and offers the promise of cross-cultural learning.
Okay. Stop imagining. The system already exist and is being used by nearly 180,000 users world-wide.