Don’t Deprive Your Classrooms of These 10 EdTech Solutions

A leading provider of blended learning solutions, Copia Interactive is a cloud-based learning management solution for school districts and state school systems.  Copia works directly with the textbook publishers to collect and distribute their digital content through a single platform that is customized for the schools that are subscribed.

Its publisher agnostic solution allows for a variety of choices through custom development of the published digital content by all major publishers of a school system’s choosing. It’s currently in the deployment stage of the new digital textbook and instructional materials marketplace for the State of Virginia, which Copia earned through a traditional RFP process.

Janet Copenhaver, director of technology for Henry County Public Schools in Virginia, explained that publishing content can be a very time-consuming mission that takes a lot of people resources to accomplish.  “Therefore, if you want to do content, Copia is the vehicle that can bring that to you,” she says.

“By adopting their solution, Virginia is now a forerunner of content management that is made available for Virginia educators to shop whatever content they want for their classrooms.  Offering choices down to the teacher’s level has never happened before.  School divisions want to go digital and this provides them an easy way to adopt that model.”

For 20 years, the School Improvement Network has served as an online professional development tool for K-12 schools to educate teachers on various subjects and disciplines.  Recently, it launched a new division called Personal Learning with a mission of ensuring effectiveness and improved instruction in the classroom.

This new offering is a major change in practice for most teachers, students, administrators and the community. It assists school districts in transitioning to a personalized learning approach to education through its online platform and expertise via consultation.

The School Improvement Network focuses on a four-pronged approach to deploying a Personalized Learning environment: 1) Establish the vision surrounding personalized learning and have the district administrators, teachers, students and parents all contribute to define the mission of the implementation; 2) Provide the right next-gen platform that is supports a customized curriculum and allows for student feedback; 3) Ease curriculum development for teachers by providing the best in breed content from Pearson, Compass, etc into a single platform; and 4) provide a professional development tool through on-demand modules and coaching to support classroom management and culture.

Kevin Viau was a 10-year teaching veteran in the Calgary Department of Education who was frustrated with the quality of online curriculum and lack of effective career and elective course offerings in the marketplace.  So, he started eDynamic Learning, an online platform that currently offers 55 unique career and elective courses reaching tens of thousands of students in almost every state.

eDynamic offers full semester courses that fit into any LMS with either a completely online offering or a combined in-person solution using the districts’ teachers. It has a wide course offering including Biotechnology, Introduction to Philosophy, Personal and Family Finance, Archaeology, and many more.

Recently, it negotiated the film rights for full-feature films to that they can be shown through the coursework within their platform rather than through a third-party streaming solution.  For schools looking to expand their elective offerings, eDynamic is a cost-effective solution that empowers your teachers and students to expand their minds and the breadth of education.

Approximately 2 weeks prior to the ISTE 2015, Observer4Success and EdTrainingCenter announced plans to join their cloud-based platforms to offer an effective all-in-one assessment & coaching tool.

Observe4Success is an administrative platform that allows users to enter their own measurement criteria promoting standardization of the assessment forms for teachers across schools. The collected data is then able to be parsed, tracked, and presented to show trends for individuals, subjects, schools, and districts. It is a very clean and easy format accessible by mobile or traditional platforms alike and can also be exported as PDF or CSV files.

EdTrainingCenter is a professional development library broken down into short 30-minute modules on a variety of subjects, such as Assessment, Classroom Management, Digital Technology, and Models of Discipline. They also offer subject-specific training, such as English, Mathematics, Science Standards, STEM, and Financial Literacy. With the two platforms combined in the same solution, administrators now have a means of assessing the performance of their teachers and then building a custom development program to address areas for improvement.

Administrators can then track teachers’ completion of those programs and any trends of change in their assessments as a result. The most impressive aspect is their business model: subscriptions are customized for the need of the school district with no minimum or maximum licensing requirements therefore allowing the administrators to decide the extent of a deployment of the tool.

In a recent study, CDW-G surveyed 400 IT professionals from K-12 public and private schools to assess classroom connectivity to the internet. With its compiled data, it developed the “K-12 Connected Heat Map” tracking national trends state-by-state for connectivity.

Its study showed that while nearly all of America’s K-12 public schools are connected to the internet, 63 percent of schools do not have enough bandwidth to meet the current needs for digital learning trends.  The average school has about the same connectivity as the average American home, but serves 100 times as many users.  CDW-G has established a new division with a focus on being a complete solutions provider to K-12 schools in helping to bridge the gap between education’s demand and marketplace supply of internet connectivity.

Offering solutions in consultation, software, hardware, service, and content management, CDW-G has a wide variety of solutions and ways that can help school administrators to provide their students and faculty with the tools and bandwidth necessary all under one solution provider.

For Google Classroom users, Alma is a combined student information system (SIS) and learning management system (LMS) that should be considered.

Alma is the first K-12 Student Engagement Platform that takes a holistic approach to managing curriculum, assessment, student performance tracking and communication. Alma provides a user experience for students, faculty, parents, and administrators to provide full visibility on student performance in and out of the classroom.

It provides a simple, dynamic user interface and performance insight in a cost-effective platform.  Some of the tools and features supported by Alma include, but are not limited to: attendance taking, behavior tracking, enrollment history, meal management, bulletin boards, emergency notification, teacher messenger, text alerts, course management, scheduling, report cards, gradebooks, task management, data visualization, state reporting, et al.  It is an all-in-one solution for schools looking to unite under a single platform.

Extron has been and continues to be a leader in education presentation technology and technology training since their founding back in 1983.  This year it showcased its PoleVault Digital Systems, which essentially includes all aspects of the AV in the classroom except the projector.  It provides the mounting hardware, standard CATx cabling, input plate(s), control interface, speakers, switchers, and amplifiers all in one package.  Extron makes the product specification for most classrooms as easy as a single line item for ordering plus getting a projector from another vendor.  It simplifies the ordering process, helps to reduce costs, and provides a single warranty for the whole solution.

ViewSonic has an entire line of presentation displays targeting the K-12 education market. One trend that seems to be increasing over the last several years is a display for interactive flat-panel displays due to the desire for the interactivity but the budget-ease of not having to stock projector lamps. ViewSonic’s interactive large format displays target the creation of an immersive learning experience focused on collaboration. Its displays, such as the CDE7060T (pictured), support multitouch using either the included stylus or finger touch.  The display hardware is designed for heavy use in a school environment with a tempered glass overlay, antiglare treatment, and rounded corners for student safety.

If all that were not enough, ViewSonic even extends a “Friends and Family” discount to teachers and faculty for any products purchased for personal use!

Projector manufacturer Epson was featuring its multi-source projection tool known as Moderator.

Epson Moderator works wirelessly over a school’s WiFi network to allow for up to 50 computer or mobile sources to be displayed in up to quad tiling format.  Further, the software allows for an engaging interactive collaboration session between students and faculty.  When content is annotated on the projector, the annotations also appear on the student device.

The same is true for when the student annotates on the device locally; the annotations appear on the projected image.  This technology has a built-in management tool for the faculty to be able to select student sources or override them, giving the teacher complete control over what is projected on the screen.  It is a truly two-way, immersive solution for the modern classroom.

The Bretford TechGuard Charging Locker system is an energy efficient, secure, and easy-to-implement solution for in-classroom device management.

The lockers are configurable in the same manner that a hotel safe locks. Users open the locker, plug in their devices into the offered two 2.4 Amp USB ports and the 120v AC outlet (both of which are offered in each locker), closes the door and sets a 4-digit code to lock the panel. The system comes with RFID badges for administrators and teacher to allow for the overriding or resetting of the code for inspection purposes or if the student forget their code.

The units can be ordered in 1, 5 or 10-bay configurations, which allows for scalability in the deployments and allowing for infinite expansion.  The solution is versatile, secure, energy efficient, and spacious for the maintenance of BYOT policies in an education environment.