Here at Education Elements, we’ve created a small token of appreciation for all the teachers out there that have impacted our lives and our work.

The process we follow involves four key steps, each influenced by a set of frameworks and rubrics developed by our digital content experts.

• Step 1: Define the role of digital content in your classroom and how much you want teachers to influence the scope and sequence of digital content.

• Step 2: Research the digital content market to isolate the high-quality providers that suit your needs.  At Education Elements, we extensively research content and applications options, using a detailed Digital Content Rubric.

• Step 3: Explore your short list by scheduling product demos.

• Step 4: Select the providers that best fit your needs and be sure to inquire about: references, pricing, implementation, professional development.

There are hundreds of options for digital content and tools and sifting through the sea of options can be overwhelming. Organizing your thoughts and coming up with a strategy about your approach to selection will ensure a smooth process.

For further insights, please check out these recent blog posts by two of our content experts: Meghan’s article entitled “Essential Questions for Selecting the Right Digital Content Providers” and Justin’s article entitled “Digital Content Selection in the Fragmented Market Place.”

Our goal at Ed Elements is to help schools integrate instructional practice and technology to create classrooms that inspire both teaching and learning. Driven by this shared passion to affect outcomes for the next generation of teachers and students, the team at Education Elements has been working hard to make our vision a reality in more classrooms across the country.

In the field, our school consultants and design experts partner with leading schools and districts to re-imagine the classroom experience and engage in a facilitated design exercise to come up with dozens of innovative ideas about instructional model, classroom layout, bell schedule and staffing to fit each school’s unique goals, values and culture. As a former member of this team, I can attest to the level of effort required for schools to make this shift, both in philosophy and in practice. We are incredibly humbled by the work schools are doing to pioneer 21st century learning, and proud to partner with them in their effort to transition to blended learning.

Behind the scenes, our product team is developing our cloud-based platform, the Hybrid Learning Management System (HLMS), which unifies the classroom experience for teachers, students and administrators so that teachers are supported with actionable insights from multiple data sources to drive instruction and students are supported with the right resource at the right time, for a truly personalized learning experience. The HLMS is designed to integrate with an array of content and applications from leading educational publishers; we call this our “ecosystem.”

This past quarter, over two dozen new content and application partners have joined our ecosystem – a development we are thrilled about. Months ago, our team sketched out our partnership strategy. We had a simple yet ambitious goal: to support integrations with the most innovative and rigorous digital content and application products out there. Underlying that goal was a desire to create a platform that afforded teachers and administrators options – the ability to choose exactly the right mix of content and applications to bring digital learning to life in their school. It has been truly inspiring to see a range of leaders in the ed-tech space – from mature publishers such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Compass Learning to newer companies like eSpark, Pathbrite, and Kickboard – come together and align with us in this vision for blended learning. And, it has been even more inspiring to witness our partners’ commitment to learning (alongside us!) how, together, we can create product experiences that really deliver value for schools.

We salute our partners for creating incredible content and application products that are invaluable to teacher and student success. We hope to continue to provide value to our partners in a number of ways. First, through our deep services engagement with schools, we help create environments that drive student engagement and that are broadly conducive to high-fidelity implementations. Second, based on our internal evaluations and insight into how schools are using their digital content and applications, we provide critical feedback that helps our partners strengthen their products. And finally, we provide thought leadership and bring together leaders in a fragmented marketplace, so that as partners in a shared mission, we can focus our collective efforts on creating classrooms that inspire teaching and learning.

Thank you to our 2012-2013 partners and a warm welcome to our 2013-2014 partners! We look forward to our work together and continually adding new members to the Education Elements family.

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Please see today’s Press Release.

For a full list of our partners for 2013-2014, please visit our website.

If you are an innovative content or application provider and are interested in partnering with us, please contact Supriya Booth (supriya@edelements.com).

The HLMS is a cloud-based platform that provides students, teachers and administrators each with a single entry point to access digital content and the detailed performance data they need to guide instruction and learning. It leverages the latest cloud-based technologies to:

• Simplify access to digital content and applications in the classroom
• Distill detailed data from multiple sources into actionable insights
• Facilitate personalized learning opportunities for every student

The HLMS integrates with digital content from leading publishers such as Pearson, Compass Learning, and Dreambox.  The content portfolio features programs that demonstrate a robust and research-based pedagogy and a rigorous curriculum, and many are specifically designed for the Common Core.  The HLMS also works with a multitude of lesson planning and classroom management applications such as Pathbrite, Goalbook, and Kickboard.  It is an open platform that affords teachers and administrators the flexibility to present the right product to the right student at the right time.

“This effort is all about giving schools options. Our goal is to simplify access to an array of powerful digital content and applications and help make the data they produce immediately actionable. That’s why we are so excited about the expansion of the ecosystem, because it gives schools more ways to effectively bring digital learning to life in the classroom for every student” says David Sanchez, Vice President of Product and Partnerships at Education Elements.

Together with its partners, Education Elements is helping redefine the role of digital content and applications in the classroom.  The move to Common Core in many states is also helping accelerate the integration of digital content as a core curriculum fixture that serves the needs of all students. As part of its rigorous vetting process, the Education Elements content analysis team, which includes a number of deeply skilled former teachers, spends an average of 40 hours researching each partner in depth. This team uses a detailed rubric that considers aspects such as pedagogical approach, content depth, user interface, and data integrity.  This information is also used to make recommendations for clients based on their unique needs and instructional objectives.

“Education Elements has been a valued strategic partner.  Not only have they enabled high fidelity implementation at a number of our most advanced school partners, but they have also provided great technical and academic feedback that has made our product stronger.” – says Arthur VanderVeen, Vice President of Strategy at Compass Learning.

Education Elements develops and maintains a rich ecosystem of leading online content and applications that serve grades K-12 and address core and supplemental material across reading, math, ELA, science, writing and social studies. The company collaborates with 3rd party developers to integrate access to both activities and performance reports into a single, unified experience.

About Education Elements

Founded in 2010 and based in San Carlos, California, Education Elements is an early-stage start-up that aims to help schools integrate instructional practice with technology to improve outcomes. Together with its cloud-based, instructional data integration platform, the company offers rich design and implementation services that help schools effectively build and run blended classrooms.  Education Elements is currently working with over 50 district and charter institutions across the US that are pioneering the concept of the 21^st century classroom.

Education Elements’ ecosystem of content and application partners includes these leading companies:

• Achieve3000
• Apex Learning
• BrainHoney
• Compass Learning
• Curriculum Associates
• Dreambox
• eSpark
• Everfi
• Exit Ticket
• Goalbook
• Gooru
• Haiku
• iLearn
• Illuminate Education
• Kickboard
• Knowmia
• Lexia Reading
• MasteryConnect
• Mimio
• MIND Research Institute
• McGraw-Hill
• NearPod
• Pathbrite
• Pearson
• Middlebury Interactive Languages
• Revolution K12
• Schoology
• Ten Marks
• The Teaching Channel
• Wowzers

To learn more, please visit our website:

www.educationelements.com

By Michael B. Horn

As schools across the country adopt blended-learning models, a few clear trends are settling in, and, at the same time, some groups—like the Next Generation Learning Challenges—continue to help schools push the design envelope on what’s possible for students.

First, many schools are embarking upon a variety of design processes, RFPs from vendors and the like only to arrive at the same cluster of solutions centered around the basic models of blended learning we identified here. There is nothing wrong with that per se. Entering into a design process, for example, can help gain buy in from teachers and others in the community for adopting blended learning, which is still radically different from traditional schooling. Adopting what are becoming tried-and-true blended-learning models (yes, I know it still may be too soon to use that phrase for blended learning, but I just did it) to individualize learning for students and improve teachers’ lives is better than remaining stuck in a failed factory-based model of schooling, even if the model is not the most innovative thing ever that pushes the blended-learning field forward for students. Some standardization around a select few models—and a branding of those models—will likely be necessary ultimately to scale the practice nationwide.

The downside is that the process to arrive there can waste a lot of time and energy in reinventing the wheel, when, depending on the problem a school is trying to solve, the level of freedom it has to solve it, and the type of team it deploys to attack it, there is some predictability to the blended-learning model it is likely to adopt. Heather Staker and I are working on a white paper that will have more to say on this topic soon. But by way of an example, elementary schools are most likely to adopt Station-Rotation models or, in some cases, what some call the “Rocketship” model—which tends to be a Lab-Rotation model that emulates the basics of what Rocketship Education, a blended-learning network of charter schools, does today.

Depending on the model adopted or the framing of the problem, there is also some predictability to the groups schools might then work with to implement a solution—a further suggestion that schools ought to cut to the chase and foundations and others fostering the ecosystem should help them there. If a school plans to use a Station-Rotation model for math with one curriculum provider, for example, it will likely contract with one math vendor that provides supplemental math content—like Dreambox Learning or ST Math—or use a free solution like the Khan Academy. If it wants to work with multiple content providers on the other hand, there is a good bet it might work with a company like Education Elements, which is emerging as a leader in helping schools move to blended-learning models and offering a single sign-on software solution for schools so they can easily work with multiple content vendors. Although the company helps schools enter into a design process to rethink the use of time, teacher roles, and so forth, the basic model that most schools using Education Elements adopt tends to be pretty consistent.

Read the full article here.

By Jen Carolan

Aspire is one of my very favorite networks of public schools.  You can walk into any of their 34 schools (serving 12,000 kids) and viscerally feel that these are great schools for kids.  The kids are happy, the educators are amongst the most inspiring, hard-working and modest that I know — and the student performance results shine as a result.  The overall learning system is thriving.   Yet, never complacent, Aspire wanted to do more for their kids.  Liz Arney, a teacher and curriculum specialist by training, envisioned how technology could enhance learning and help Aspire students better prepare for life in a wired world.  Liz led the introduction of blended learning into two of their schools in 2011.

I wanted to share this video with you because I think it captures the spirit of innovation imbued in great schools that are able to evolve along with the changing world around them.  And in doing so, they help their students adapt and become better prepared. Rocketship and Summit Prep embody this ethos of innovation as well.

Read the article and watch the video here.

By Tom Vander Ark

“The Motor City’s traditional district remains the worst-performing big-city school operator in both the Midwest and the nation,” reported RiShawn Biddle . “With 69 percent of its fourth-graders and 57 percent of eighth-graders being functionally illiterate in 2011, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Detroit has become infamous for perpetuating educational neglect and malpractice.” Biddle notes, “the district’s financial mismanagement has been even more spectacular.”

Enrollment in the state’s largest district has has dropped by more than 100,000 students since 2003–more dramatic than New Orleans. The Detroit News reports that, “District officials have shuttered more than 100 school buildings in an attempt to right size the district as it fell deeper into a financial crisis. The city is in even worse shape and was taken over by the state on March 1st.

So, asks the Smart Cities reader, why write about the disaster that is Detroit? Like New Orleans, Detroit families are beginning to benefit from the man-made disruption and corruption. The portfolio emerging from the disaster is worth watching.

Disaster Recovery . Modeled after the successful Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD), Michigan created a statewide school improvement district in 2011. The Education Achievement system will assume operation of the lowest 5 percent of schools. Education Achievement Authority (EAA) started operating 15 Detroit schools in September 2012.

While the RSD has relied on chartering, the EAS continues to operate schools with only a few charters. Chancellor John Covington, building on work he started in Kansas City, is leading development of an NGLC grant winning blended competency-based turnaround model. The Buzz platform built in partnership with Agilix (the Brainhoney people) features Compass Learning’s Odyssey that “uses assessment data to prescribe a personalized learning path complete with rigorous and engaging curriculum and instruction.” The approach is tailored by School Improvement Network.

Teach for America was shut out of Detroit for years but two years ago they were invited back to the District, to EAA, and to charter schools in the city. The University of Michigan, in nearby Ann Arbor, sends more grads to TFA than any other school.

Matchbook Learning is another NGLC grant winner and EAA partner working with middle schools in Detroit. As we noted in January, the conversion focuses on school culture, teacher coaching, stakeholder engagement, and blended classrooms powered by EdElements. Students are “grouped into small and flexible groups based on student readiness, interests, learning style and profile, and specific instructional objectives.”

Read the full article here.

Last Friday, Dr. Lisa Duty wrote a post on Tom Vander Ark’s blog on Education Week entitled “Shaping Communities as the World’s Classrooms.” Dr. Duty is Senior Director of Innovation at KnowledgeWorks, a social enterprise that incubates and scales up innovative schools and education initiatives. In her post, she lays out a vision for a learning ecosystem created through the fusion of blended learning and collective impact. Such a fusion would connect learning experiences across classrooms and communities, providing a “nexus point through which multiple providers can systematically connect, unlock, and reallocate existing resources to provide young people with access to more/quality learning opportunities than may be available under distinct and separate organizations.”

We are excited to be partnering with both KnowledgeWorks and Reynoldsburg City Schools to co-design, implement and support this model of a “learning oasis”. This school year, we are already working within the Reynoldsburg City Schools district to launch blended learning. One of the schools, Hannah Ashton Middle School, just recently successfully launched blended learning with one-to-one laptops for the seventh grade. These schools which are starting with traditional blended learning now will set a strong foundation for the development of Oasis across the district over the next few years.

We plan to share our lessons along the way, so that other districts can learn from our work connecting schools and communities. One of these opportunities is through the SXSWedu conference in March 2013. We proposed a panel entitled, “In It Together: Blended Classrooms and Communities,” to be led by Dr. Duty, my colleague Amy Jenkins, and myself. During the panel we plan to discuss our goals, our design challenges, and our successes to date. Panels are selected in part based on voting, so if you are interested in hearing more we hope you will vote for the panel. Voting is open now through October 5^th.  Even if you can’t attend, we will share our presentation and our learnings here on “The Garden” after the event.

If you are working on similar initiatives, have experiences to share, or have questions to ask we would love to continue the conversation. You can reach out via Twitter @LisaDuty1 and @edelements, post a comment on our blog, or reach me by e-mail at vanessa@edelements.com.

UPDATE:

A few months later, our work together on Oasis continues to move forward. Last week, Lisa Duty, Amy Jenkins and I had the opportunity to introduce the concept and discuss our latest work on Oasis at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, TX.

The underlying vision of integrating learning experiences outside and inside the classroom through a fusion of blended learning and collective impact remains the same. Through continued research and development and partner meetings we have laid out the plans for a pilot at Hannah Ashton Middle School (HAMS) starting in Fall 2013. The principal, Denise Lutz, and the teacher team have had a busy year launching a blended learning program in the 7^th grade. The lessons they have learned will prepare them to expand blended learning to the whole school and implement the initial phase of the Oasis model in the fall.  The experience at HAMS will serve as a proof point for Oasis before launching in other schools across Reynoldsburg.

We are deep into the “Design Phase” with KnowledgeWorks, their subsidiary EdWorks, the HAMS team and local community partners, as we develop what the program will look like in its first year. In addition to the typical design process that Education Elements follows with other blended learning clients – which includes developing the instructional program and selecting digital content – we are also layering in how community partners will also be involved using the strategies of blended learning. We are particularly excited for the work ahead and look forward to sharing more about the design soon.

Last week, a number of good blog posts and articles were published, outlining the main themes and top ideas coming out of SXSWedu. Tom Vander Ark published a nice article, “SXSWedu Halftime Report” and Edudemic highlighted 10 EdTech Questions SXSWedu is Trying to Answer. As I look back on the week, I remain inspired by the breadth and vibrancy of the conversation and I wanted to focus on a few other underlying and related threads that permeated the conference.

1. “Small data” can be extremely useful to improving outcomes in classrooms.  Everyone is excited about Big Data and how volumes of assessment-level data can help administrators see how students and groups of students are progressing over time. But, there’s also a great deal of value in activity-based data such as the results you get from one digital curriculum application. As Richard Culatta of the US Department of Education suggested, wouldn’t it be helpful, for example, if a teacher could easily see what Khan Academy videos had helped a student master a particular concept and then assign new content appropriately?  Access to this sort of “small data” would give a teacher the information he or she needs to address daily instruction.  Big Data is great, in theory, but its usefulness to teachers hinges on having access to the data in a format that is digestible and actionable.

2. There is a growing focus on security and privacy as access to and use of data becomes more widespread.  This topic came up more than a few times during a variety of different panels. While access to data may solve a lot of challenges schools face, it opens the door to new concerns.  As consumers, we hardly think twice before we purchase something on Amazon.com or use our online bank to organize our monthly payments.  Our comfort arises partly because we’ve been doing it for years and partly because we trust that these companies have put in place the proper security measures to protect our personal, identifiable information. And, that too, is why we are wary of no-name web vendors and random apps that want to know too much about us. As the ed-tech sector explodes, companies need to exemplify rigorous security measures and build trust with schools and parents.  While laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) provide high-level guidelines about how and with whom a student’s information can be shared, participants in the ed-tech market, including product developers and schools, should also take a proactive approach to converse transparently with end-users and parents about what data is exchanged and how it is used.

3. The role of the teacher is changing and we should embrace the change. While the conference buzzed about what technology can do to transform the classroom, the underlying message was that technology enables transformation by providing good teachers with great tools. Charlie Buffalino of Rocketship Education expressed it well when he said that “we (education innovators) need to collectively message that the ed-tech explosion is about building tools that help teachers do their job more effectively and augment what great teaching looks like.” Digital curriculum can be a wonderful way to engage students in understanding and remembering concepts that the teacher is covering in small-group instruction.  Similarly, products like digital grade-books and classroom management tools can help teachers tackle administrative tasks more efficiently. And, dashboards that aggregate results from different systems can provide rich information to help teachers make more effective instructional decisions. At the end of the school day, the central resource for teaching is still the teacher.

4. Personalized learning is the Holy Grail, but there is no “silver bullet” when it comes to delivering a personalized learning experience.  There’s no doubt that technological innovation is opening the door for schools to offer more personalized instruction to students, even in large classes, in a way that wasn’t possible before. However, simply putting technology in a classroom doesn’t inherently create a personalized learning environment. Implementation is critical. What works for one school doesn’t necessarily work for the school down the road.  Things like classroom size and space, teacher and student fluency with technology, and broadband capacity can all impact if and how a technology solution can be used effectively in a classroom.

5. Parental access to student data and engagement is an area both schools and product developers should continue to explore. Parents are also getting excited about the potential of data to improve educational outcomes and many of them want to know how they can get involved.  Plenty of studies show that parental involvement in a child’s education can lead to better outcomes. That’s why many schools and tech innovators are asking the question: how can we leverage technology to more effectively engage parents in their child’s learning path?  Fortunately, there are a myriad of options emerging.  Many of the digital curriculum programs in use in schools such as Tenmarks, a supplemental math program and CompassLearning Odyssey, a reading and language arts program for K-8 offer parent observer accounts, which allow parents to follow along with their child’s progress in the programs. Schoology, a learning management system that enables teachers to store content, facilitate discussions, and foster collaboration allows parents to view grades, schedules (assignments/assessments), and course content. And, Goalbook is a individual learning plan application that facilitates communication and collaboration between all stakeholders of a student’s education, invites parents to get updates on goal progress, celebrations of goals met, and class announcements. Parents and teachers can also exchange files to share student work.