001and in terms of our time our energy finances recognizing that these were two uh really important components of us moving Danbury to the next level in terms of one being able to assess our students and two providing a robust Learning Management to kind of move us into 21st Century Learning and to be able to track our students progress over time in multiple years the first item agenda it will be a presentation on our I ready assessment system and the second one will be our schoology learning management system and I'll introduce folks as we do the presentation so I first want to welcome Melissa Nadu who is our stem curriculum administrator and also Patricia devino Hall who is our humanities curriculum administrator for K-12 and they were instrumental in helping to launch the I ready assessment
002system recognizing coming out of the pandemic really the need to be able to pinpoint very strategically where students are especially in a in a time and place when our students come to us in grade levels that and that they're looking very differently so how is it that we can pinpoint and really strategize on targeting instruction um at very um key in very key places using standards and using this robust assessment system uh to help support the teachers work and to help parents also to understand where their students are so I'm going to turn this over to Melissa and Trish who will talk a little bit about the assessment system and what it is what it can do while they're getting set up I'll continue to talk for a sec Melissa feel free to steal the
003screen anytime Cara wands are presented a lot of data in the last meeting and we did have conversations around making sure that we're targeting targeting our our students and understanding and digging deeper into more sensitive assessments that give us better information than some of our broader uh Big Ticket items like espa and GSS and sat so this really helps the teacher at the teacher level and I will let Melissa and Trish who have been instrumental in leading these efforts um talk to you a little bit about just sort of high level overview about the assessment system so that the committee and the board understands um what it is what it's capable of and why we use it Melissa Trish hi good evening everybody I'm Trish Hall and I'm here to talk to you a little
004bit about the iready assessment and uh so when we look at iready and why we why we chose I ready was because our former assessment uh was star and it never gave us the uh drilled down data to actually make teacher moves and so with with this new i-Ready diagnostic we're able to get both Criterion and Norm reference data and it gives us a high predictability around how well we can perform on our s-back assessments and so what we've done is um we we adopted the I ready as a diagnostic assessment and it was built from College and Career Readiness standards for both reading and for mathematics it's an integrated system that reflects teaching and learning that's happening right in the right in the teacher's classroom I ready assessments provide comprehensive insight into our our
005student learning across the K-12 skills that pinpoint student strengths and their next steps for instruction so where are the students now and where do they need to go so then it also shows us an aspirational attainable goal for each individual student so it sets up Target uh targets for both stretch targets and an attainable typical growth targets for for our students so that the teachers know where to the students and how to push them to obtain those goals excuse me um in the iready Learning System it engages students through motivating personalized reading instruction and math instruction based on each individual student's skill level that the diagnostic assesses and so it will provide the teachers with these resources for both whole class and small group instruction that Foster student growth and aligns to grade level learning
006that's the critical piece all of these digital resources are put into place for um for the teachers on this iready platform and it also allows uh teachers to save some time in their planning so that they they can really spend the time drilling down to each student's need and hold those students at that high expectation level we go into the diagnostic assessment I don't know if you're runs uh slide three thank you you may be wondering how an uh that this diagnostic assessment works it's actually a just based on each student response to a question each of the students as they answer a question correctly they see more difficult items and questions and as they answer um items incorrectly it drops down to an easier question it adapts to find the precise proficiency level of
007each student at their level [Music] so the i-Ready diagnostic actually starts at one grade level below the student's chronological grade so if they're in fifth grade it starts them off at fourth grade questions and standards and then it will go from there for to either as I said earlier if the questions if the student is getting the questions correct it gets the questions get harder if they start getting questions incorrect they get a little bit easier questions so that it levels off um to get a proficiency and range of skills for the students they're expected to get about 50 percent of the items correct and 50 of the items incorrect so that that proficiency or range of skills is identified much more accurately foreign then generates an overall proficiency level for each individual student in
008both reading and math and it also identifies each student level by domain the information on the diagnostic gathers the process gathers information from I already diagnostic identifies the student strengths as a foundation to support uh to targeted instruction for the teacher so the teacher gets true accurate data about where that student is it also can inform the next steps for for student growth which is captured in these i-Ready reports which Melissa will talk about in a few minutes um but what I thought it would be fun for us to do is to um practice a little bit on our own and I'm going to give you a chat and if you can click on this link in the chat I thought it would be fun for you guys if you're interested in playing around with
009this diagnostic simulator so I put in the chat the simulator and if you click on the third grade or the seventh grade the orange ones either of the orange you could choose which one you want you could play around and see and experience what a student actually does experience when they're taking this assessment of course I encourage you to get some answers wrong so that you can um see how how the questions get a little easier we're going to give you a couple minutes to just play around with that and I wanted I wanted you to think about this as you're going what do you notice about the diagnostic and how powerful it can be to benefit students and teachers as you're going through this experience I'll give you like maybe two minutes if you're
010interested foreign what's your last name for the minutes Hall h-a-l-l thank you because I see Divine on the on the screen so people hyphenate my name my last name um and they put Divino hyphen Hall um but my actual last name is just Hall okay thank you you're welcome and so Trish if they um aren't ready to maybe play around with it now they can just certainly copy paste the link and that would be active later on as well correct yes perfect that's what I was just gonna so if we could come back I'll let you play with that after but I just wanted to tell you so once once the diagnostic assessment is completed it then it then turns into a real individualized personalized program for each student it it will absolutely use his
011Insight from that Diagnostic and creates a personalized path of engaging online lessons for each individual student in this way students are receiving instruction and practice in areas where they need the most support they feel motivated in the lessons because they're active they're supportive and relevant to the student the teachers are enjoying the program because they can add lessons adjust lessons in sequencing for their students and how that and know that their students are receiving explicit systematic instruction the i-Ready diagnostic is an Adaptive assessment that places students into lessons at their zone of proximal development which is based on the assessment teachers are able to see the students can do's and their next steps they can see groups of students with similar needs they can access teacher-led tools for instruction to provide small group instruction this
012data from the personalized instruction can provide guidance for how to group students by common areas of strength opportunities for growth and how to provide strategic instruction that addresses specific skills and that's the teacher portion where the teacher can actually assign specific standards or a specific assignment directed towards that personal need for the student it also then generates another um automatically automatic personalized instruction just specifically for this the student themselves that aligns that the students can just practice on their own as well and it includes uh reading instruction and practice on phonological awareness phonics high frequency words vocabulary and comprehension these are lessons are focused on each of the domains that are assessed in this assessment and are are designed to reflect the research and opinions uh summarized to ensure students learn to read with fluency
013and understanding for reading in math IT addresses all the critical domains specified by the National Council of teachers for mathematics and the Common Core such as numbers and operations algebra and algebraic thinking measurement and data and geometry so it really does Target specific student need you'll notice now that um I'm going to turn it over to Melissa who is going to talk to you about the types of data teachers can actually use in order to form inform their instruction and and place those students in those teacher assigned or my path lessons good evening everybody so I'm going to start with a little overview of the different types of data that I know Cara wanzer has probably exhausted you all with these terms but I'm going to take another stab at it because it's very useful
014to keep in mind as we go through the rest of this presentation um we started with how we used to use an assessment system called star we are required by the state of Connecticut to report data that requirement insists that we use Norm referenced data Norm reference data compares the performance of students to other students performance right so when you have a norm reference data you're basically saying this student is falling into a certain percentile maybe 65 percent towards these learning Norms where another student might be at the 85th percentile that's Norm reference when you're comparing them a Criterion referenced is what students know and can do in relation to grade level standards and that's the journey I'm about to take you guys on why these two things are different and why the i-Ready assessment
015system and platform provides us with information called Criterion reference data as well as Norm reference data in order to make strategic decisions in the classroom to Target and accelerate students learning um let's start with Norm reference you know I made I made the comment that's a norm reference data will give you a comparison of students performance so when you look at Norm reference data you're going to have um a student labeled at the 75th percentile and the 95th percentile so student a here what it's telling us is that student performs better than 75 of the students who are in that age group of fifth graders student B we would get information from a norm reference test that that student um is performing better than 95 percent of other fifth graders so I want you to
016put a teacher cap on and think about what that data tells you as a teacher what that data would tell me as a teacher as a former math teacher would be okay I have one student who has more skills than maybe this other student I don't know what those skills are I don't know much about why this kid is BET at 95 percent um proficiency compared to other fifth graders I don't have any detailed information on that and that's where Criterion reference data is different so consider these two students student a a Criterion referenced assessment can give me information that tells me um what this student knows and what it can do against grade level standards and so if I look at student a and I know that that student a is three grade levels
017below um on a strand called numbers and operations and two grade levels below on a strand for geometry I'm probably as a teacher going to provide very different supports for student a because of where they are standing in Criterion reference data as opposed to student B who is above grade level for numbers and operations and on grade level for geometry right so these two different students require different things in my classroom so this Criterion reference data provides me with enough information as a classroom teacher that I can start begin to Target the needs of student a who needs some support to accelerate their learning towards grade level standards but also Target student B because we have both of these students in Danbury public schools so I need to also know how to treat student B's
018classroom experience to keep them accelerating their learning and and continue their their growth as well so let's talk about what this data looks like for teachers on a Class View so this is a screenshot um of a grade five what you would see in a grade five classroom I'm a grade five teacher this is the iready data that I look at when I look at it at first glance it's giving me Criterion reference data on these students I have the four strands of mathematics below it's telling me that three of my students are mid or above grade level it's also telling me I have to move some stuff around on my screen it's also telling me that I have three students three or more grade levels below so if I'm a teacher and I'm planning
019for my instruction I need to ensure that I'm reaching those top students and I'm also providing the supports necessary for the students who may not yet have reached grade level standard wow so this is another score report that teachers would see um this shows uh grade five class and I'm going to take you through some steps of Criterion reference data the first information I get is a scaled score I ready when the students take the test will calculate a scaled score and this is what bases the norm reference data that we'll talk about in a little in a few minutes the scale score will inform the overall placement okay so if I'm a fifth grade teacher and I see well three of my students are at early grade five but three of them are at
020grade four I'm gonna have to understand what to do for those grade four students to allow them access to my grade five standards if we look at this section it's called placement by domain so in mathematics we have four domains numbers and operations algebraic thinking measurements and data and geometry so all of these four strands are really important in mathematics especially depending on what you're about to teach so if I look at this and I look at that last student I'm noticing something about their geometry scores their geometry scores are still on a grade three level so if I'm a fifth grade teacher and I'm getting ready to teach concepts of volume I need to understand how that is going to affect that student's ability to ascertain the information I am sharing with them and
021then this is a very important measurement I ready which we've never actually had a measure like this before the i-Ready system will calculate a growth goal two growth goals in fact four students the first growth goal is called the typical growth goal that's typically the growth we'd expect a student to see so in January our students are going to take a second Diagnostic and we're going to get a read on their typical growth goal a typical growth goal is going to begin growing those students towards one grade level of growth so if students are meeting that typical growth goal in January we know as teachers we are right you know we're getting to where we need to be if they are not it can give us information on how we we need to better Target
022and provide supports for those students the stretch goal is obviously larger stretch right it's a higher growth goal not typical we don't expect to see a stretch growth but that stretch goals if if we reach it we are really bringing students along further than a Year's worth of growth in a year so keep these in mind these are all Criterion it's giving me information as a teacher about what my students know and what they can do now like I said earlier we are required by the state of Connecticut to report Norm reference data Norm reference data may not necessarily help a classroom teacher but what's unique about the i-Ready system is it gives us both which our old assessment system did not it only gave us Norm reference data which was not tangible for a
023teacher to go and make changes in their instruction so a norm reference data would give us this information about the students which I referred to before right it's not necessarily something that a teacher can act to change in their classroom but this data is absolutely important for our reporting back to the state of Connecticut so I'm gonna now go into so that's classroom view for a teacher right I I have a whole view of my class in this all of the students sitting in front of me now I want to talk about a student view okay and there's also data and reports on individual students right so if I have I'm sorry I'm trying to play DJ and talk and click buttons here this is an example of a score report for Anna Jones Anna
024Jones is a fictitious um character she does not exist um in hopefully in our district but this is a fake report and this report gives me a classroom teacher some really interesting information um let's start with this line right here that line that green line that says mid on grade level is where a student would be in grade five if they were on grade level as you can see based on her Diagnostic and Anna Jones is scoring at a grade four okay so she has not yet made that mid on grade level line for grade five but that whole green box where you see that typical growth goal of 488 that's where we want to get Anna Jones in this score report it gives that differentiated growth measure for this student in particular so if
025Anna makes her typical growth goal this year she will be have she will have made on grade level status and that is our goal for all of our students in this report it also provides us the information on the student for their placement by domain okay so this is mathematics I can see that Anna Jones has some strengths she's a fifth grade student and she's scoring in mid-fifth grade level for algebraic thinking that's phenomenal for me as a teacher because now I can pull on that asset I can use that strength of hers to hit some of those other domains where she has not yet made grade level status thank you the other information that these reports give us um are super important in my opinion and the first one is something that we need
026to do more and celebrate more of what our students are right you guys received statistics last week that are troubling but guess what our students can do a lot of things and why this is important for a classroom teacher is that I know Anna has skills in mathematics and this shows me what those skills are these are the things she can do and if I can pull on those assets I can give Anna success in accessing the material that she has not yet had the opportunity to learn and that's extremely important for a classroom teacher the other thing these reports do for the teacher not only just the classroom teacher but any support staff who may work with these students is give them next steps and resources aligned to the skills that will get Anna
027to reach that typical growth goal so if you look here the next step for Anna is to go into subtracting multi-digit numbers as a teacher when you have a classroom with varying needs having this one access to click and get the resources to me Anna's needs whether it be in the small group in the classroom or whether Anna's going to a school support specialist for for extra help is extremely important it doesn't it get it frees up the time a teacher needs um by providing everything right there instead of them having to search for this for the for the resources that will help animate her needs um and there's also things called tools for instruction as a teacher this provides mini lesson plans with that are very short and targeted to get Anna to a
028point to understand what those topics are in her next step resource area foreign is um instructional support okay so we talked about the reports that give you a snapshot of your whole class we talked about the report that gives you in-depth information on a student now how is a classroom teacher when I have 26 kids sitting in front of me do I meet all of those varying needs and sometimes just an hour of mathematics a day okay that's what these reports are going to give give us insight into um this first report shows you how it I want to call it a groupinator and I don't know if that's a term that makes sense but it groups students based on their assets and based on what their next steps can be so if I'm a
029teacher I know and I when I look at this report that the students listed in group a eight students they are ready to tackle this next topic that I'm about to show the students on grade level students in group b there's three of them they need some additional support they do not have all of the prerequisite skills that they need to access that grade level as you go down you will see there gets um there there's more need there there's more there's there's the teacher needs to provide more access to previous grade level standards so that they can then access the on grade level standards what makes this wonderful for a classroom teacher is that there are recommendations built in to the system so that when you do have a class of 26 students in
030front of you you can provide four different access opportunities for students to reach that grade level standard and that's what the arrow is pointing at there it shows you recommendations for instructional moves that you can take with your classroom to get them to access the material this report exists for math as well as for reading thank you there's an additional report for reading which I think is kind of neat and cool and what it does is it takes students and groups them based on their Lexile levels so you'll see on the top if I'm a teacher 60 of my students in my class can be grouped in a well-matched environment so that if they are working on an assignment together they can both access that reading passage together and support each other's learning however in
031my same group of students there's 60 I have 19 students who I really need to provide some some targeted support and in this case it's it talks about decoding so these 19 students as a teacher I might be able to start getting most of my class on the reading passage by working together but of this group I need to take some of those 19 students and I need to spend some one-on-one time through shared reading or a teacher of read aloud to have students decode the text that they're going to need access to so the iready reports take the guesswork um it allows teachers to make instructional moves immediately sometimes it takes three months to get to know your students I know this as a classroom teacher this gives teachers some immediate insight to begin
032um reaching their needs but it doesn't stop there I feel like I'm a Salesman tonight it doesn't stop there there's also family reports this year families will get a new report going home for the iready report these reports are very similar to the ones you saw teachers looking at okay it provides that same graph of um not graph chart on identifying skill levels in each of the domains and it gives parents information parents and family information on what areas their child may need of improvement on and where they are at a grade level where they are approaching grade level I am currently working with elementary schools around the district to um embed in literacy nights if this is what your score score report looks like and it says that this student needs Improvement here here's
033some of the things you can do at home um to have your student grow in that area the other the other thing it does is it gives the visual representation of where their student is and where they need to go to hit the grade level standards there's a second sheet to this um grade level report which provides a narrative okay so if we had on the previous one the domains that give you information about needing Improvement or at grade level and approaching grade level The Narrative provides a little bit of a detailed report on what that means so you're going to you're going to see additional information about what types of topics students will need to master so that's it from me um you know I cannot I'll stop sharing because nobody wants to see
034thank you written a thousand times um you know I will I will share that if I were a classroom teacher and I had access to the power of this program they would have I'd like to think I was a great teacher but it would have revolutionized my teaching practice and from the conversations I've had with classroom teachers who are implementing and using iready right now it is it is changing how they see the use of time in their classrooms and when I hear teachers telling me that that means more to me than anything I may think or feel about the assessment system so thank you for your time tonight I'll pass it back to Cara thanks Melissa thank you Trish um great job on that um I just wanted to just add to that that
035the you know the a really key part of um the assessment system that we put into place here is allowing teachers the time to actually use it um and to understand it and we've dedicated um a good deal of professional development time this year uh especially at the beginning of the year and we'll be spiraling that through the course of the year so that teachers can use this tool and and plan accordingly so um it has been well received the training has been well received and certainly the leadership behind the training has been well received as well and they've been nothing but absolute Pros in this so it is a comprehensive Tool uh that we use to really illuminate student performance and it's something coming out of the pandemic that we felt we needed a
036really robust and sophisticated program to help us with that um as Melissa mentioned we've only had to report normed data to the state which has been helpful for the state but not necessarily helpful for the for the instructor uh Teresa you have a question you're saying standards do you input the standards into the system or is it already built into the system um how does that work so no the standards are in the system so those are your mathematical standards your literacy standards and so they're based on so that's really student performance against those standards so the standards are fairly common common to all I was just wondering is it state standards yes thank you but Luisa um I don't know if I missed this at the beginning but what grade levels is this being
037implemented and where are we are we using it cross-district already or so we have a K8 um and we you know we can it's it is available through 10th grade um but we started with K8 um we originally were only going to start with K5 and then at the last minute we added six eight once we started to really get to understand the tool and what it could do we'd love to expand on it a bit um it is you know it's one of the it's you know it's a tool that costs money and uh we're hoping to be able to expand a little bit uh either next year or the year after so if I'm understanding with this with this uh program I mean you can specifically get to individual children and identify exactly
038you know pinpoint exactly where they're lacking and how and additionally are getting the tools built in on how to help them in that area yes it's a tremendous tool for a teacher it is it's a it's a gift yeah it sounds fabulous I wish it was there when my my kids were in school because it sounds just that it makes the whole process and I don't want to say easier but just able to kind of you're able to get through to that answer to that question on what each child needs much quicker absolutely it creates a really efficient process for the teacher to be able to quickly organize for to to do their planning um teachers are you know respond to to what happens on a daily basis so um to be able to quickly
039plan a new lesson for the next day based on what they're seeing in class or in between assessments um is really really important additionally some of the um we have the Middle School level we do have some some places where we have an Adaptive piece where in addition students can have adaptive practice that's designed and personalized just for them um that is it's an extra feature in the program and we we are using it uh in some limited places right now to see to see uh you know what what we can do with that thank you yeah anything else Michelle do you have a oh okay sorry um so I think sometime back we had talked about the ability for any student let's say they weren't uh they were just getting by in algebra and
040they decided to take an honors course right you said anybody is available to take any course would this system really identify the fact that they shouldn't be in that honors class and kind of you know what I'm saying like if we can really Target in and say all right these are your strengths and your three grades behind and then they go to apply because I don't know certain things happen their teammates are on that in that class you know wouldn't that really kind of almost put the teacher in a disadvantage knowing that they aren't even prepared to be in that class according to this iready program just wondering how you know looking down further as the assessment really takes hold and the practice that we have where we would allow you know or entertain that
041almost making it more difficult for the teacher sure so you know as students move the grades most of our students have grasped some level of the content along the way whether or not they were several years behind or they're a year behind um and what the what the assessment does is does illuminate the the the places to Target and so where Michelle I may have been a little more concerned about that in the past this assessment will allow teachers to close that gap down pretty quickly um you know the goal that we've been focusing on over the last couple of years has been to really flood our elementary level with a lot of support so that we have less and less kids coming out of K5 six eight um needing such drastic remediation if you
042will and so um this assessment will again help to accelerate that process I do want to ask Melissa they do um this is so this has been a topic of conversation that we've tossed around for for quite a bit we do have an open enrollment system um part of part of our open enrollment system you know there's a counseling piece that occurs as well about where students typically are to terms of their skills and students get some guidance on where where where they may find some success but also still be challenged enough for that for that stretch learning so um Melissa do you want to talk a little bit about um because this is not actually this is probably more of a common problem than than you think with uh with in our students being
043uh where they are especially with the data that was presented last week we have students who are not on grade level in some areas yeah so are you asking me to speak specifically to enrollment in like AP courses or honors like is that what you're asking me to speak with okay so I mean go ahead I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut you off I guess right where you start to be able to select those courses you know so those are higher grades than eighth grade right we're moving into high school where we're just talking about possibly 10th grade extending it to that level so I mean I I I hope that we can extend this assessment system it is phenomenal right so um to I guess I'll start with this what I hope this
044assessment does for us is gives students the opportunity to get on grade level before this question you know is even an issue I hope that we can use this um as an advantage to do that um because all students deserve opportunity to learn at high levels the second way I will answer this is you know I'll just start with with you know our current classes and and how they are enrolled I don't think we have an overabundance of students enrolling in AP classes that don't belong there um our classes are actually relatively small at the AP level um in most cases I will not pretend that many kids struggle in our AP classes because AP classes are hard they are college level courses um so many times we are developing ways to improve skill work
045over the summer prior to them coming into our courses we have various conversations um across Math and Science in particular right because they're interconnected you cannot take a science AP without having math skills um and you cannot do well in math without have critical thinking skills that are really developed in science and so we spend we spend time in our professional development sessions crosswalking skills um that are really necessary to be successful in in an AP but also an honors course and I won't I won't pick on the two ladies who you're going to hear from next but I think very highly of them um Amanda Peterson um has been at the high school for many years she's is now at our Middle School level but she has been part an integral part of that
046work right so like when we look at how do you support a system how do you support a system how do you support a student through a systemic Vision to be successful in those classes it's a it's a conversation that we try to have between departments to look at those skills along the way I think where we have struggled in Danbury is once they get you know we have to get them to the high school to even be able to have the opportunity to choose any class where what we need to work on is that path that learning progression that occurs between the k through eight Realm especially when you have 13 elementary schools filing into you know three schools soon to be four and then those four schools filing into one large Comprehensive High
047School how do we really design a system that's based on a learning progression that will have all students Master these skills prior to that choice happening I think it will be another data point that we can use to successfully counsel kids into the right decision for their learning progression thank you Cara I hit it but not hard enough anything else before we move on to Schoology one more question you mentioned that it's an expensive program I did speak with um Kevin Wilson last night and I had asked what are what what is the cost of this program um I could I can get that to you uh it's the the cost of the hosting at per school is different than the cost of the PD so this year um in the first year of any
048implementation you pay more uh for the professional development package that comes with it and the training that comes in so I can get the I can get the exact numbers for you but um these these programs our last program was upwards of a hundred thousand dollars for the entire District this one is is hovering I think just slightly over that okay yeah if you could that'd be great thank you okay so I would thank you so much Trish and Melissa um I would like to introduce you now to Rachel and Amanda and uh before I let them take these take the screen uh just a little shout out because you know we do not have a large um Ed Tech uh staff here in our district um if you were to look down the road
049in Naugatuck you'd see seven or eight um digital technology coaches you'd see digital directors you'd see digital Innovation directors you'd see a multitude of Staff dedicated to digital learning um when we rolled out schoology it was myself Gina Jasmine our director of Technology was also in charge of all the infrastructure as well uh and then Rachel and Amanda who volunteered as step up to help us out and have been just doing incredible work to really dig into um this this learning management system and to help not just teachers to navigate the shift which has been um uh definitely challenging coming off of our pandemic and our use of another tool and getting used to something different um but also uh their their patients and developing tools and resources for this program so I just want
050to thank the both of them because uh they've been amazing Rachel is our stem supervisor for six eight and Amanda is our is our stem coach at the middle school level well they have been fantastic so um they have been really in the driver's seat of a lot of the teacher learning on the teacher side of this and been super super helpful and resourceful so um with that I will let Rachel and Amanda talk to you a little bit about our learning management system and some of the whys of switching and sort of the urgency behind why we needed to do that thanks care all right all right Amanda's sharing and so Cara introduced us but uh just a little bit of background in uh last fall all of the um secondary principles the department
051heads and coaches got training on schoology I was in a unique position because I taught a class so I kind of um asked and volunteered if I could jump right in and and start using it with my class in December uh which I think then ended up being the reason why I became like the liaison for schoology and the rest of the training and Amanda um jumped on board so uh we got a lot of experience with this and we're going to kind of talk you through about uh five different things uh tonight like The Power of schoology why we're using it how it works and looks portfolios and how it connects to portrait of a graduate and the work we're doing there um a comparison with what we had before with Google classroom and
052just kind of a slight training rule out overview uh first is just kind of the power of it um we really um you know it's a learning management system uh you might see it uh shortened to LMS a lot of times and um with the with learning management systems like this this is what students are going to find when they go to college um all the colleges and universities are using things like canvas and Blackboard um and and so schoology will really provide them that kind of stepping stone in order to get to um to that preparedness for what college life is going to be like uh it provides them with really this like platform for Interactive Learning through the um through the computer that's not just like a zoom call right now um or
053just a place where they can gather files uh what we can do on schoology kind of like the big what we can do is uh we can create we can create courses right into schoology uh we can use materials we can share out materials we can also um create uh lessons and activities where we can actually assign standards to the uh lessons themselves uh zoology has the capability to connect our great like the grading can be done right in the schoology platform and it syncs with our PowerSchool Gradebook systems um so that's really nice and um like I was saying before it is it is a system um Google Classroom while it sounded great and it met our needs for the um for the pandemic it is it is really just a file sharing platform
054there's not a lot of interaction that can be done through Google Classroom that you can get through um an actual learning management system so how it works and looks is extremely important and what you're going to see when you go into Schoology uh so the first thing you see is when the kids sign in they see recent activities so here's kind of that other connection to Google Classroom where they just get a feed of everything their teachers have posted for all of their classes I would like to pinpoint here that we also have what's upcoming their reminders overdue so they're constantly getting these reminders you see that same thing again when they go to their course dashboard so now the students can go in between their different classes but they're still getting all of these
055reminders and when they go to a specific course they're getting that specific course reminders and things that are upcoming there is also a calendar feature for our students so they can actually use the calendar up here Blue on Blue is a very bad color Choice sorry um I did Circle it but it's all organized in one place for them you'll also notice I should point out we have folders so the organization part of schoology as a teacher I can say here's everything that goes into unit one and I can put it in there I think that's actually my next slide nope it's not you'll see you later it's later in our presentation um but it folds out so I can see specifically what I'm doing and it just allows more freedom for the teacher um
056so I have also been involved in a lot of the different subcommunities sub Committees of uh some of the portrait of a graduate work that's happening here and um something that was very powerful and a very strong push for us to move to the schoology platform is that there is a built-in portfolio section that students can utilize through um through uh schoology um and and this portfolio feature is is really kind of special because while um with Google classrooms you could create like different files and um a class where you could house a portfolio these portfolios and schoology will actually follow the student so they're not attached to any specific course they go with the student so right now 6 12 students could start things in grade six and and collect and organize and and
057start building towards the attributes of portrait of a graduate from the time they're in sixth grade all the way until the time they graduate so it will all be housed and it will all be connected to them it is their personal portfolio um shared with any of the teachers they currently will have but um and if we expand this to kindergarten this can even start as as early as kindergarten and then it really comes down to what is this comparison um and the comparison between schoology versus Google Classroom so this is the same teacher different years and so this is the teachers um honors Algebra 2 class right now where here's unit one and everything the kids need for week four is listed here and then if you look at what happened with Google Classroom
058it really just was a stream of information and there was no um nice way capability uh to organize it so we wanted to make sure we showed you the side by side comparison and then we were going to make a Venn diagram but a list kind of worked better here um so parents can access the entire course for schoology we're in Google classroom they couldn't they just got an automated email every week with updates schoology has some really good accessibility features where they have text to speech and so the students can actually now click a button and whatever that announcement was the teacher just made will talk to them there was none of that built into Google classroom before both of them do have mobile applications um both of them work with Google applications so
059students can still hand in Google Docs and teachers can still assign a Google Presentation that the kids fill out still capable within the schoology um schoology does sync with PowerSchool Google Classroom does not and it really does prepare students for Learning Management Systems in post-secondary schools because as Rachel said earlier there's three there's Blackboard there's canvas and there's schoology and those are the three that are used I should also add as Rachel was talking sorry I remembered another thing as well um schoology does have a feature where the kids can create inside of schoology so if you create an assignment there is just a text feature where they could type or they could insert a video and they can make that video on the platform itself they don't need any special tools or extensions uh
060and so I think kind of the final thing we wanted to share out really is is how our training rollout has happened um as I mentioned earlier in the fall of last year 2021 we the administration the department has been coaches we were all kind of given this initial training um we then moved into super user training where we had about 40 to 50 um 6 12 teachers volunteer to get extra training and start piloting this this work on in the spring we kind of trained everyone on little uh like two to three hour like um virtual trainings so that they got kind of an overview uh over the summer Amanda and I did a lot of work on making little mini like tutorials and videos and little just how-to documents so that teachers had
061a nice like go-to place for little references um at back to school the first the first week of school anyone who was not got who was not trained in the spring got trained and as well as be offered to some teachers who just needed a refresher there has been some additional pde um were about right smack in the middle of it that the department heads are getting right now and coaches uh where we're learning just to go deeper and get some more information and use like some more of like the robust tools that are provided with schoology um you know we we often with any new platform there's growing tools there's growing pains and um so we have when some teachers have expressed a little bit of frustration we have said look yeah we can
062do all these cool things and we will but remember we're kind of like in the The Crawling stages of right now so if you're learning to walk we're crawling and we're using it at the basic level and um we are we are going to grow with this and be able to really use the whole like robust offerings that it provides question any questions on Schoology I think sorry I'm trying to find my there we go Louisa sorry I couldn't I couldn't see uh who was raising their hand so this is rolled out District wide 6 12 6 12. so we started yeah 6 12 and um you know I think the original intent was to do K-12 I think we learned with our limited staff that that we're going to need to at least go
063another year here with with this tool um there's a lot a lot more learning to to happen and um you know this has been a challenging year so we're going to go a little bit slower and reassess um you know the the most the key part for us was really making sure that our secondary level students 612 had access and that we begin to get them acclimated that we also begin um you know possibly next year to start our portfolio development um start tracking portrait of The Graduate um characteristics through here through portfolio and reflection there's a very sophisticated uh system in the back where we tag Mastery standards to what students are working on over time so as we're saying students will students will um you know work towards certain standards these are embedded
064in this system and so you know across across uh courses if if student if a teacher was working on innovator or the collaborator um and they were they were assigning and tagging assignments that lent itself to practice in those areas we could track that across the system we have the capability to do that um and especially through a portfolio a portfolio system but that will come come with time we're going to start I think our kickoff for our K5 future the portrait of The Graduate Continuum will start in a couple of weeks um and so at some point by hopefully by the end of the year early next fall we'll have a full K-12 Continuum um and then we'll see you know what we can use the system for one of the great aspects of
065this is that you can build courses um in this in right into schoology um we have a lot of curriculum that we're going to be organizing with the academy we'll be organizing academies and Pathways and need a very you know structured way to organize the different courses that go with the different academies um and this is this will be a very helpful tool for us to be able to do that where we can push courses out through that foreign but these are these were really two key uh programs for us this year that we've spent a lot of time uh and effort and professional training on and that our teachers are using and that you heard about um over time and so we wanted to make sure that you had an understanding of what the
066programs are what they are capable of and why that they're important um yes Kate the software is very adaptable it's like amazing this technology that's that's in these systems now these days so um and our teachers are are very thankful for it for sure all right well if you have any questions or something comes up later and you think of something or light bulb goes off and you want to you want to do a follow-up please reach out and send me an email and we'll be sure to answer your questions well I think that's that's it um I will uh touch base with Lauren and make sure that she's updated and Theresa thank you for taking notes I see you working feverishly over there to capture it all and we will see you at the
067next meeting you need a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn so moved moved by Luisa seconded by Teresa all those