Good instructional leaders have a vision of individualizing instruction to meet the needs of individual students. Unfortunately, they lack the assessment and diagnostic tools to make this vision a reality. Assessments are the tools used to address student improvement. They range from “thermometers” that tell us what standards a student has mastered or not mastered to diagnostic tools that identify skill strengths and deficiencies, and provide materials to teach missing skills so that standards can be mastered.

The starting point for attacking the student performance problem is understanding the purposes and functions of the three different types of assessments:

• Formative assessments
• Adaptive assessments
• Diagnostic assessments

Formative/benchmark assessments measure whether an academic standard has been learned. Formative assessments are the most commonly used type of assessment. They are administered three or four times during the school year to provide data to teachers and schools about whether students and classes are mastering standards. These assessments measure whether a standard required for the current year’s curriculum—for example, eighth grade math—has been learned. Some of the name brands of benchmark assessments are Acuity, Thinklink, and Scantron Achievement Series. School systems value these assessments as determining whether students and classes have mastered the standards being measured on the end-of-year accountability test.

What format/benchmark assessments do not do is measure whether students have or lack the prerequisite skills needed to master this year’s curriculum standard requirements. Given that more than 30 percent of students cannot master this year’s standards because they lack the necessary prerequisite skills, this shortcoming of formative/benchmark assessments—their failure to provide teachers with information about which prerequisite skills are missing and how to remediate them—is critical.

Adaptive assessments measure growth and identify where the student is on the learning-ladder continuum. A scale score, or RIT score, is provided to show at what level the student is currently performing. This type of assessment is the best measure of academic progress.  While other assessments are like a line in the sand showing what a student has mastered, an adaptive assessment shows where a student is currently, where he or she has grown, and what level of instruction in needed to achieve grade-level performance. Adaptive assessments, like formative assessments, are administered two to four times a year. The name-brand adaptive assessments are NWEA Map and the Scantron Performance Series. Unfortunately, adaptive assessments do not provide sufficient detail to specifically remediate deficiencies. After looking at results from adaptive assessments, teachers are usually left with the question, Now what?

Adaptive assessments are based on Item Response Theory, or IRT. In IRT, students are given an initial question and if they are successful, they will get a more difficult question until they have reached their top level of ability. If they miss a question, they will be given a lower-level question and will continue to descend until they reach their base level. This type of bracketing continues until the standard error of measurement meets a predefined level.

Diagnostic assessments determine missing skills and remediate them.

Diagnostic assessments are the new kid on the block. The two name brands in this category are Knewton, a higher-education adaptive-learning and test-preparation product, and NWEA Skills Pointer. As Knewton has focused on the higher-education market, there is limited data on its impact in K–12 education, though the Knewton approach and algorithms are applicable to K–12 subjects.  Knewton appears to include a large range of variables in its database, such as learning styles, as well as an algorithm similar to curriculum based theory.

Skills Pointer is using Curriculum-Based Theory (CBT) to develop its assessments and remediation. Curriculum-Based Theory is framed around the learning objective. Questions are presented in a format similar to that used in adaptive assessments, but instead of using Item Response Theory, which moves the test score based on each question, CBT measures each skill.  A learning ladder is prepared for each skill, and the student is tested with a sophisticated algorithm to determine if all the prerequisite skills have been mastered. This method allows a teacher to see a detailed learning path of all the skills a student needs to master to get back to grade level. The learning path includes a tutorial for the student and lesson plans for the teacher with practice activities for each missing skill. This approach solves the problem of teachers not knowing what to do after they have identified a deficiency. Like formative assessments, Skills Pointer focuses on mastery of standards, not growth or progress as do the adaptive assessments.

The main thesis of this month’s blog is to differentiate the three types of assessments: formative, adaptive, and diagnostic. All three have a place in every school, but they must be used for their individual intended purposes.

The increased use of diagnostic assessment instruments is necessary to solve the current issue of low performance on standards, and to provide teachers with the tools they need to individualize instruction.

More than 50 percent of students entering high school are two or more years behind in at least one subject on meeting the academic grade level standards; less than 40 percent are proficient; and only 5 percent are advanced. What do we do about the more than percent of students who are missing the necessary prerequisite skills to master their current standards?

Good instructional leaders have a vision of individualizing instruction to meet the needs of individual students. Unfortunately, they lack the assessment and diagnostic tools to make this vision a reality. Assessments are the tools used to address student improvement. They range from “thermometers” that tell us what standards a student has mastered or not mastered to diagnostic tools that identify skill strengths and deficiencies, and provide materials to teach missing skills so that standards can be mastered.

The starting point for attacking the student performance problem is understanding the purposes and functions of the three different types of assessments:

• Formative assessments
• Adaptive assessments
• Diagnostic assessments

Formative/benchmark assessments measure whether an academic standard has been learned. Formative assessments are the most commonly used type of assessment. They are administered three or four times during the school year to provide data to teachers and schools about whether students and classes are mastering standards. These assessments measure whether a standard required for the current year’s curriculum—for example, eighth grade math has been learned. Some of the name brands of benchmark assessments are Acuity, Thinklink, and Scantron Achievement Series. School systems value these assessments as determining whether students and classes have mastered the standards being measured on the end-of-year accountability test.

What format/benchmark assessments do not do is measure whether students have or lack the prerequisite skills needed to master this year’s curriculum standard requirements. Given that more than 30 percent of students cannot master this year’s standards because they lack the necessary prerequisite skills, this shortcoming of formative/benchmark assessments—their failure to provide teachers with information about which prerequisite skills are missing and how to remediate them—is critical.

Adaptive assessments measure growth and identify where the student is on the learning-ladder continuum. A scale score, or RIT score, is provided to show at what level the student is currently performing. This type of assessment is the best measure of academic progress. While other assessments are like a line in the sand showing what a student has mastered, an adaptive assessment shows where a student is currently, where he or she has grown, and what level of instruction in needed to achieve grade-level performance. Adaptive assessments, like formative assessments, are administered two to four times a year. The name-brand adaptive assessments are NWEA Map and the Scantron Performance Series. Unfortunately, adaptive assessments do not provide sufficient detail to specifically remediate deficiencies. After looking at results from adaptive assessments, teachers are usually left with the question. Now what?

Adaptive assessments are based on Item Response Theory, or IRT. In IRT, students are given an initial question and if they are successful, they will get a more difficult question until they have reached their top level of ability. If they miss a question, they will be given a lower-level question and will continue to descend until they reach their base level. This type of bracketing continues until the standard error of measurement meets a predefined level.

Diagnostic assessments determine missing skills and remediate them. Diagnostic assessments are the new kid on the block. The two name brands in this category are Knewton, a higher-education adaptive-learning and test- preparation product, and NWEA Skills Pointer. As Knewton has focused on the higher-education market, there is limited data on its impact in K–12 education, though the Knewton approach and algorithms are applicable to K–12 subjects. Knewton appears to include a large range of variables in its database, such as learning styles, as well as an algorithm similar to curriculum based theory.

Skills Pointer is using Curriculum-Based Theory (CBT) to develop its assessments and remediation. Curriculum-Based Theory is framed around the learning objective. Questions are presented in a format similar to that used in adaptive assessments, but instead of using Item Response Theory, which moves the test score based on each question, CBT measures each skill. A learning ladder is prepared for each skill, and the student is tested with a sophisticated algorithm to determine if all the prerequisite skills have been mastered. This method allows a teacher to see a detailed learning path of all the skills a student needs to master to get back to grade level. The learning path includes a tutorial for the student and lesson plans for the teacher with practice activities for each missing skill. This approach solves the problem of teachers not knowing what to do after they have identified a deficiency. Like formative assessments, Skills Pointer focuses on mastery of standards, not growth or progress as do the adaptive assessments.

The main thesis of this month’s blog is to differentiate the three types of assessments: formative, adaptive, and diagnostic. All three have a place in every school, but they must be used for their individual intended purposes.

The increased use of diagnostic assessment instruments is necessary to solve the current issue of low performance on standards, and to provide teachers with the tools they need to individualize instruction.

The use of mobile devices is changing so rapidly that it is hard for education decision makers to know what to purchase or for publishers to know what to produce. In this blog posting we provide a perspective for decision makers in schools, technology, and publishing on the current state of devices and what they can expect in the coming year.

Mobile devices are everywhere. They are changing the way we live. The two major drivers for the increased use of mobile devices in education are—

• The move from textbooks to digital materials.
• The change in state laws (e.g., Texas Senate bill 6) enabling districts to buy less expensive and more targeted digital materials has a major impact on both school systems and publishers.
• The “cloud” is driving the use of digital educational materials.
• The increased functionality and lower price of mobile devices, making 1:1 computing more feasible. THE TABLET IS BECOMING THE STUDENT’S BACKPACK.
• The cost of tablets is gradually heading toward $300, making them more cost effective than laptops or desktops. These new devices are the ideal host for the new digital materials.

A year ago, many of the mobile devices were specialized for smart technology and prohibitively costly. These devices are currently going through a process of convergence, overtaking the desktop and notebook and computing much faster than expected. Purchasing these devices did not make sense for educational institutions 12 months ago, in the midst of budget cuts and uncertainty. Now mobile devices have the functionality of desktops and laptops at a fraction of the price. The combination of low-cost devices and customizable and lower-cost digital materials is turbo-charging the move to digital devices, making them attractive to school districts.

It is important to note that software delivered by the “cloud” is driving the acceptance of mobile devices in many school districts. For example, due to the success of Apple’s Application Store and other online marketplaces for software, instant downloading is bringing an end to the days of running to the computer store to buy the latest and greatest educational resources. Even Apple’s latest operating system, Lion, can only be installed from Apple’s proprietary App Store. Without question, districts need to be prepared for this instant access to new material and anytime, anywhere access.
How can mobile devices be used in a K–12 classroom? One example is using the mobile-device camera feature at a fraction of the cost of mainstream laptops or desktops with webcams for global collaboration projects. Digital cameras, video streaming, and video calls have become the norm for smart phones and tablets. With the recent release of Skype for iPad, video collaboration is seamless, expanding the possibilities of cross-district or even cross-country collaboration. Now students can strengthen their 21st-century skills of cultural understanding, collaboration, and communication with cost-effective tools.

Another way that mobile computing will impact K–12 is in regard to textbooks. Textbook companies are already offering completely digital dynamic content in place of static pictures and basic text. Using a mobile computing device, the student cross-references information with the tap of the screen, accessing supplemental information, historical data, or even current media articles related to the subject matter. No more waiting for seven year textbook updates.

The Device Race

At the moment, Apple’s iPad 2 dominates the market, simply because it’s the first kid on the block and offers over 7,500 apps. However, over the coming year, look for both less expensive devices and for Android to provide more apps with Flash functionality.

Education is a lemming culture. Currently many leading-edge school systems are piloting iPads. For example:

Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota is using them to provide half their 9th graders with their curriculum materials, and Middletown City Schools in New York is using them to provide all curriculum and assessment to their high school students. The danger for school systems is that, unbeknownst to them, many of their curriculum materials have to be customized by the vendor to be usable. The schools cannot live by iPad apps alone.

There is good reason for the star status of iPad. In its second generation it provides a 9.7-inch display, features front- and rear-facing cameras, and has a 10-hour battery life, allowing for web surfing up to 10 hours, which makes it ideal for classroom use. Apple’s App Store contains 7,500 education apps built exclusively for the iPad. In addition, iTunes U provides a large repository of free resources produced by colleges and K–12 institutions for classroom use.

Adobe, however, has recognized the need for Flash on Apple products and has released a new application called Edge, giving much of the same feel and interactivity as Flash products.

iPads have a few downsides. They are costly; they do not have Flash, which many education applications use, and customization is often needed for commonly used curriculum materials.

Android is Google’s open-source operating system. The Android-based tablets are the Avis rental cars of the education tablet world. They are currently way behind, but this situation could change a lot in the next 18 months. A number of companies are releasing competitive tablets. Among them are the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy. The biggest advantages of Android tablets are the ability to use Adobe Flash and a lower cost compared with the iPad. Interestingly, content generated from the Edge program works on both Android and iPad devices.

Android devices also have their downsides. Currently there are only 400 education Apps and the versions of the Android operating systems differ slightly on different hardware brands causing incompatibility. To become successful in the K–12 space, Android will need one standard platform. Given the flexibility of the android platform, its lower cost, and its ability to use open source, Android could become the major device in the K–12 market.

The number of mobile solution options available to schools is growing every day. In addition to the Apple iPad and major-name Android devices, we are beginning to see lower-cost tablets focused on the school market. Here are two examples:

• The Brainchild Kineo costs less than $300. It offers high-quality content and assessment targeted at schools that are not making AYP.
• The Edutone tablet provides the Edutone Exchange curriculum on a mobile device rather than a PC.

Amazon’s Kindle is like a backpack for textbooks. It is reasonably priced, it provides the convenience of having all books on one device—a device that never loses your place, lets you highlight content or make notes, and gives you access to additional information. The disadvantage of the Kindle is that it does not provide the collaborative functionality of an iPad or a Droid device, and its main purpose is delivering books. The Kindle can be an interim solution for traditional school systems that are moving from books to digital interactive curriculum.

Mobile Is More Than Tablets; for Openers, Add Cell Phones.

Cell phone use in the classroom is increasing significantly. As more and more students have their own cell phones or smart phones, educators are considering the possibility of using them for instruction. To use cellphones, districts must have the technical capacity to ensure that the cellphones can be used only for academic purposes on the district’s network during school time. Many districts ban cell phones within the classroom, but with the right policies and procedures in place, a “bring your own technology” approach could enhance the classroom experience with little or no cost to the district. Consider, for example, a web application called Poll Everywhere. Using this free web application, a teacher creates a quick poll or quiz inviting students to text in answers, making cell phones instant student-response systems at no cost to the district.

With continued advances in mobile computing, the traditional textbook will become a dinosaur, replaced with a classroom environment that is as dynamic and interactive as Internet content.

Issues for Educators and the Industry in the Coming Year to make Mobile Devices Effective.

Can Schools employ these new devices effectively, avoiding the adoption problems of the past. What’s needed is a combination of good policies, high quality interactive customizable curriculum and assessment at reasonable prices, adoption management, content, and follow-up activities, so that mobile devices can achieve their educational promise. That outcome will depend on both the schools and the vendors..

Issues for education decision makers and content providers need to address to make effective investments?

Educators

• The educators should be piloting mobile devices to gain the technical capacity to manage the new delivery system.
• Since the schools will no longer need complete textbooks, they need to determine what standards-based curriculum should go on the devices and what type of LMS will be needed to deliver it.
• The districts need to ensure that their chosen content will fit their device.
• Schools will have to deal with change management necessary for teachers to deliver instruction on mobile devices in a more collaborative way.
• ADOPTION PRACTICES ARE THE SINGLE BIGGEST ISSUE SCHOOLS HAVE TO ADDRESS. Adoption is the area where schools have failed historically. .The integration of the mobile devices into teaching and learning will need to be planned, adopted and supported over a three- to four-year time frame. The mobile devices need to be treated as educational delivery systems to be effective.
• The districts need to carefully watch Android and Apple to determine which of the devices will be the most cost effective and flexible, as well as able to support the curriculum that they wish to use, without large amounts of customization.

Content and Device Providers

• The curriculum providers will need to modularize their curriculum and ensure that it can be used with a variety of devices. There will need to be usable pricing models for the modularized content.
• The technology and content providers need to be service oriented, supporting schools in selecting curriculum for the mobile devices and continuing to support them after the sale.
• The curriculum providers need to be think about increasing interactive curriculum, adaptive assessment, professional development and learning objects that fit into a repository.
• The device providers have distinct issues. Apple will need to determine how it solves the Flash problem, and the Android providers will benefit from a standardized common platform.

IT Is 2012 not 1980. The vendors, publishers, and schools have the capacity and experience to utilize the new mobile devices so that they produce improved educational outcomes. We think the combination of new mobile devices in tandem with high quality content, new business models for content pricing and effective adoption practices by schools will significantly improve education delivery.

For further information contact Eliot Levinson
Eliot@blegroup.com
Tel 202.255.4391

Additional details at Sentry 360

Read the full story at Techcrunch

What is it, and how many are there?

LMSs, learning management systems, are the platforms that deliver digital content, which makes them a very critical app in the transformation from print to digital delivery . Still in their early stages, they offer the potential for individualized learning plans and customized instruction for all students based on need, learning style, and ability.

The biggest problem with LMSs is that the term means different things to different people. As the market matured, LMS technology changed and new functions were added, but the term remained the same. “LMS” is now used to describe a very broad range of functionality. The stages described below illustrate the delineation of the main types of LMSs.

Whatever their differences, however, all LMSs share the following two functions:

• The ability to deliver digital content to a class or an individual
• The ability to communicate assignments to students and parents

This blog specifically treats the issues surrounding LMSs in K–12 education. The environment for LMSs is more hospitable in higher education than in K–12, largely because higher ed has not had to cope with the accountability movement, standards, NCLB assessments, and problems associated with large-scale implementation. Part of the difficulty that K–12 education has faced with the adoption of LMSs is that many LMSs were developed for the more flexible environment of higher education and have not transferred well into the more rigid K–12 context.

History and Taxonomy of LMSs in K–12

The history/taxonomy of K–12 LMSs is messy. In fact, the reality of LMS evolution was sloppier than the taxonomy we lay out here. The goal of this taxonomy is to make the delineation and origin of functionality clear and understandable. The functional differences will be important as LMS platforms take on a greater role in moving the delivery of digital materials into a cloud-based system in the age of Common Core curriculum.

Stage 1—The CMS Stage The term “LMS” emerged about 10 years ago with Blackboard’s introduction of what was primarily a content management system (CMS) with some additional communication ability. These products allowed teachers to distribute content and announce assignments to students, and communicate with parents.

Stage 2—The Instructional Process System Stage This stage began with the development of instructional process systems such as Schoolnet, EDmin, Global Scholar, SchoolCity, Follett Cognite, and RM, which were driven by NCLB and the accountability movement. These products focus on teacher leadership of the classroom and feature an embedded instructional process including standards, instructional content (lesson and unit plans), assessment, and data analysis. Their objective is measurable instructional improvement. These are costly enterprise systems that have often presented school districts with complex technical problems and challenges related to organizational adoption (change management) and implementation. Instructional process systems are the most prevalent form of the LMSs. As the products have matured, vendors and schools have improved in their ability to address the implementation and change-management issues.

One of the smaller but more innovative instructional process systems, SchoolCity, is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, SchoolCity understands the importance of the adoption process and has a method for careful, deliberate planning and monitoring of this initial phase. Second, it does an exceptional job of utilizing data to inform instruction at the classroom level. Like other smaller LMSs, SchoolCity has lower price points compared with larger competitors.

Stage 3—The Website System Stage This stage began with website systems such as SchoolFusion, Schoolwires, Edline, and eChalk, which had been around for a while and focused on school-to-home and internal school communication. In addition to enabling communication between school and home, these systems had the ability to enroll students, and they featured interoperability with other systems such as SIS, special ed, and assessment. The website systems were the basis for single sign-on. Seeing an opportunity to grow from their base, they began morphing into areas such as data analytics and automated gradebooks. They are now entering the instructional process domain, but they lack the academic rigor of dedicated instructional process systems.

Stage 4—The Open-Source System Stage This stage emerged with products like Moodle and Angel, which had content-management systems built on open-source platforms and then began to add instructional process functionality. The appeal of these systems was low cost and their ability to be shared between school districts. But version control became a problem. In addition, many districts using open-source systems found that they had to hire costly staff to maintain them; many districts stopped using them because they weren’t money savers after all. Moodlerooms, which is based on Moodle, is trying to solve the problem by providing a hosted, standardized enterprise solution.

Stage 5—The Social Networking Stage These are the new kids on the block, represented by products such as Schoology and SchoolTown, which have the look and feel of Facebook. They differ from other LMSs in that they originated from student use of social networking systems and the focus on 21st-century skills rather than on accountability and teacher-centered classrooms. These systems facilitate student-teacher collaboration. Their strength lies in the seductiveness of their social networking functionality and the fact that students are already accustomed to working with this type of system outside of school. Their pricing is low or based on a “freemium” model. These systems are not yet focused on instructional improvement and are just beginning to move into the realm of enterprise systems, a shift that school districts are requesting.

At any stage, SharePoint can be the vehicle to facilitate the implementation of an LMS. Products such as Microsoft SharePoint and IBM WebSphere provide content management, social networking, and web applications. Developed for business organizations, they often lack the functionality K–12 demands in terms of security and ease of use, but they offer single sign-on, collaboration, and role-based access to applications (employee, parent, and student). The flexibility of these products allow districts to integrate their legacy and third-party applications, especially those listed above, by providing a framework to tie these systems together in a way that is completely transparent to the user. In addition, SharePoint can step in to provide some of the functions missing in traditional K–12 LMSs, such as content management and social networking.

Many school districts using Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange expand to Microsoft SharePoint to leverage the feature set while minimizing the learning curve. SharePoint can be used as an LMS, it can deliver LMS-like features from other providers, it can be used as a platform for a customized LMS (like ITWorx), and it can “mash up” a number of other services.

Miami–Dade County Public Schools has used SharePoint extensively to provide role-based single sign-on for teachers, students, and parents. SharePoint links third-party systems such as Global Pinnacle for gradebook, Edusoft for assessment, Aspen X2 for scheduling, and Learning Village for curriculum and pacing guides. Teachers use SharePoint’s document management, calendar, email, and social networking features to assign homework and communicate with students and parents. These features, along with data from the student information and human resource systems, are integrated to provide the look and feel of a single LMS.

The Most important Thing about LMSs is the adoption process

From the Textbook Past to the Digital Future

We are entering a time when textbooks are no longer required, but the demands of delivering digital materials in an era of Common Core standards, lower school budgets, and 21st-century skills are significant. The following are the legacies that need to be carried forward from the earlier LMS stages into the new era:

• The relative ease of the social networking stage has taught us that systems need to be easy to adopt and use.
• LMSs need to include instructional process capacity so that learning plans for individual students can be customized based on data and assessment.
• Collaboration and student-driven instruction will be more important in the age of 21st-century skills than in the past, but teacher-centric classrooms are not disappearing.
• Open-source components will be used to help lower system costs.
• The website stage suggests a need for interoperability among different systems.
• The new systems will be enterprise systems that are easily scalable.

An Example of the Evolving LMS

In a recent focus group session, education decision makers analyzed ITWorx Connected Learning Gateway, a new entry in the LMS market, which they perceived as having many of the qualities that they want in LMSs as the cloud spawns digital delivery.

ITWorx Curriculum Learning Gateway (CLG) has been developed over the last five years in the U.K. and addresses the six bullet points listed above. In its product planning and development, the company put considerable emphasis on ease of use for all stakeholders—students, teachers, administrators, and parents—and it paid off; the product is easier to use than other instructional process systems.

CLG incorporates elements of all of the stages of the LMS taxonomy. At its heart it is an instructional process system, but its Facebook look and feel, the availability of collaborative student-teacher websites, repositories of quality teacher resources and of student learning objects, as well as high-quality data-driven analytic capability, move CLG from a teacher-driven LMS to both a student- and teacher-driven LMS.

CLG’s easy-to-use collaborative tools can engage stakeholders in a variety of ways—students and students, parents and students, teachers and students, and teachers and teachers.

Necessary Features for Emerging Needs

Here are some features we believe should be included in LMSs to meet the current and emerging needs of K–12 educators, students, and parents:

1. Support for collaboration between students, teachers, administrators, and parents in various configurations (student-student, student-teacher, teacher-administrator, etc.) to enhance collaborative and project-based learning.
2. Websites for classrooms, schools, and curriculum areas.
3. Repositories for standards-based curriculum and also for game-like learning objects for students.
4. Tools for developing individual learning plans and e-portfolios to customize learning for students.
5. Recognition that assessment drives the instructional process.
6. Adaptive assessment and analytic tools to drive the individualization of instruction.
7. Build in (or at least provide links to) current-year data relevant to the student’s learning and programs surrounding student learning. (In the future we see emerging longitudinal data systems being linked to, or included within, LMS services as districts, states, and vendors work to bring this data to the forefront to help student learning.)
8. Tools for tracking all student social and academic data, which can be used for parent communication and program development.

What Decision Makers Need to Know About LMSs

Schools have little choice. They need learning management systems to address the new age of digital curriculum delivery. What do decision makers need to think about as they move forward?

• Get to know the LMS marketplace. It’s essential to understand the five types, or stages, of LMSs relative to the district’s particular instructional goals and academic realities. Decision makers are ahead of the game if they can understand the variation in LMSs, so that they buy what makes sense moving forward.
• Give equal weight to implementation. Implementation has always been and will continue to be the most important factor in choosing mission-critical enterprise systems. Schools should choose a vendor based on track record of implementation as well as on product quality. Most software systems are still underutilized due to poor adoption processes and lack of ongoing professional development.
• Recognize the shift toward interactivity and collaboration. Although education is still largely teacher centric, the movement toward interactive learning objects and collaborative work is gaining traction and should be a factor in decision making.
• Keep it simple! Ease of use cannot be overemphasized. Systems that are easier to use will have higher usage rates.
• Emphasize assessment and analytics. Adaptive assessment and data analytics are critical in enabling schools to create effective instructional programs.
• Make way for digital repositories. As digital curriculum becomes more important, school systems will need repositories for high-quality, standards-based digital material and learning objects for student use.
• Augment, don’t replace. Decision makers should not replace systems, especially those with high adoption rates, because they lack full functionality. Budgets for initial purchase and—just as important—implementation and ongoing support—are just not going to be there over the next few years. Instead, schools should seek LMS alternatives that will easily integrate or augment existing systems.

Postscript: Here is a list and links to LMSs mentioned in this article:

Content Management Systems: Blackboard, www.blackboard.com

Instructional Process Systems: GlobalScholar, www.globalscholar.com; Schoolnet, www.schoolnet.com; RM learning platform, www.rmeducation.com; Follett Cognite, www.follettsoftware.com; SchoolCity, www.schoolcity.com; EDmin, www.edmin.com

Website Management Systems: Edline, www.edline.net; Schoolwires, www.schoolwires.com; eChalk, www.echalk.com; SchoolFusion, www.schoolfusion.com

Social Networking Systems: Schoology, www.schoology.com; SchoolTown www.schooltown.net

Open-Source Systems: Moodle, http://moodle.org/; Angel, www.angellearning.com

Next-Generation Systems: ITWorx CLG, www.ITworx.com;

We did focus groups for 20 firms at TCEA and . the following are the major trends we saw…

1. Schools are increasingly outsourcing work that is not core to their educational mission.
2. Content is being delivered virtually
3. A plethora of new and varied Learning Management Systems continue to hit the market
4. Assessments are moving to the next generation. They are less judgmental and more supportive to providing teachers and recommending content to students.

NOTE Web based P.D is growing but I am going to skip it, as we did not see anything new in the two products we looked at.

Below are comments and examples of the specific trends..

1. Outsourcing

These are products or services that streamline district performance and outsource non-educational work. They temd to lower cost for the district
• Facts Management. With the tightening of budgets, schools are collecting fees for activities. Schools do not do this very well and it takes lots of personnel time.

Facts Management owns the fees management business for private schools and wants to move into public schools. They can streamline the collection of everything from football, to band to after school care. This should increase revenue and cut down on administrative costs. LOOKING FOR PANELS…to modify their product for public schools

• Truancy has become a major issue for schools as drop outs increase and the money goes with them. There is an opportunity for technology based firms to assist schools with truancy issues.

End of Truancy is a mobile phone device that tracks truant students’ movement combined with mentoring by disabled veterans who talk with the students regularly, providing anonymous intimacy and support.. The combination of a tracking device and mentoring is impressive and a product that will be effective in the age of GPSs and social networking. EOT will not completely do away with truant officers but is very promising and should keep some kids in school and provide districts with revenue.

I think we will see more specialized products and services, that will take advantage of new technologies to assist schools

• N- Compass- GIS web based tools and service for planning and decision support. This is a system that starts with household demographics and layers on levels of data. It is fabulous for transportation, school boundaries , closings, and growth, marketing, and other decisions. Our panelists thought this was a disruptive tool which will improve decision-making, make the planning process more efficient and enables scenarios for schools in the future…. This is a real winner.

NCompass illustrates that a firm with specialized technology and skills can be of great value in areas where schools do not perform services efficiently or effectively.

II Virtual Delivery of Content.

Increasingly interactive web based products, are taking the place of textbooks. This transformation is occurring due to a combination of issues including changes in state text book adoption laws and the relative savings for e-materials., Within the next 2 years the old text book business model will likely be replaced by repositories of interactive learning objects linked to standards that will be in Schools will pay for using the objects and develop their curriculum around it. We are still not seeing allot of simulation and gaming but expect that to increase as virtual devices come on line.. The traditional text book companies have not quite figured out the business model yet, and innovation is coming predominantly from new digital companies.

At the panels we saw 2 new products in the virtual curriculum category that were outstanding

• Capstone Digital Learning – is a library of virtual books delivered on line, the student takes a lexile placement test and then chooses books of his interest …e.g. cowboys, dolls, Australia…. and receives the books. To read. There is a social networking component where they can discuss the books on line with their teacher. The books come in different forms, comic books, and regular books and with sound…this is the first of the truly individualized products that we have seen….

• MIL, Middlebury Interactive Learning—Virtual On Line Foreign Language Immersion Instruction
Middlebury Interactive is a joint venture between Middlebury College and K12.com. The product integrates the Middlebury immersion process with K12’s on line delivery. The quality of the language instruction and learning is very impressive. The value proposition is that foreign language courses are expensive to deliver because classes are small and it is hard to staff with quality people. MIL comes in 3 flavors—full on line instruction with an on line teachers, supplementary materials for the existing classroom and a hybrid model…. THE QUALITY OF THE VIRTUAL LEARNING IS SUPERB. MIL will release French and Spanish 1 next September and gradually provide courses in 10 languages

III LMSs Learning Management Systems – This is still the year of the LMSs —This time next year half of them will be gone.

LMSs are central to the delivery of on line materials and they often connect, content, assessment, and data analytics. The new LMSs are getting better and better, The BLEgroup has done panels on 10 LMSs in the last 2 years. We see movement toward systems that are much more user friendly, utilize social networking, and provide portals for the major stakeholders; parents, students and teachers.

The big problem is how to define what an LMS is…as there are three types of LMSs that are morphing into each other.
o Content Management Systems, the original Less like black board that deliver content over a platform
o The Instructional process systems like Global Scholar or Schoolnet have a process flow of standards, lesson plans, formative assessment, data analysis and then start all over again
o The web sites like Edline or School wires that started as school web sites and are now moving into content delivery and data analysis.

Follett Software’s , Cognite is very impressive and improving. It is very easy to use for 3 kinds of stakeholders, parents, teachers, and students. It is more like the original LMSs, but has very large amounts of standards, based content and good collaboration. Unfortunately it is not well known as people think of Follett as a library group and at the moment schools need to have Follett’s library management system to use it. Cognite is much simpler and light-years ahead of BB but it needs to address sales and the new types of interactive content. On the content delivery side…. this is the best product we have seen for delivering content and it is well priced…

Schoology is Facebook for schools. It is developing new functionality to deliver customized content. and to date has spread virally. It is one of my picks for disrupting the market and being around next year… A major appeal is that Schoolboy is a freemium product, does not cost much to install and has the potential of doing neutral targeted delivery of content, as opposed to the LMSs of the large publishers which are biased to their content

Skoodat —is more platform than LMS …It is a cloud-based platform that you can put your entire web based applications on and they will interact with each other. The take of the panel was that this will most likely start as a B2b platform that will allow schools to easily download management, assessment and content applications and link it to your legacy systems. this is the beginning of the next generation of cloud based products. It is an early product that is ahead of the market and needs to be flushed out

IV Assessment, The Next Generation

Until now, assessment was either end of year NCLB test or formative assessments that showed the progress being made toward mastery of the standards and end of the year tests. Assessment has been judgmental of both teachers and students. There is a shift occurring in the formative assessment world. The assessments are providing much more support to teachers in helping kids learns and they are becoming linked with delivery of individualized content. The movement of assessment toward supporting teachers and helping students and teachers to collaborate in the mastery of conent is well underway.

We conducted panels for two interesting assessment products in the panels at TCEA.

Wireless Generation has a new product that shows a teacher exactly where each student and the whole class is on the mastery of standards by use of red, yellow and green life and delivers content to help teach that content…. The U.I is in the form of a honeycomb and easy to use. The provision of content to teach the student what they need to learn next is impressive.

Avant Assessment- Avant is traditionally an assessment for foreign language competency. They are developing a new platform for students and teachers to collaborate so that students can master a standard. The assessment tools allow for a variety of ways to show knowledge beyond filling in the blank or extended response…The product is early stage but very collaborative and impressive

The BLEGroup
The BLEgroup is a group of 100 leading ed tech practitioners, composed of a mix of superintendents, CIOs, instructional technology specialists, CIOs and heads of instructions from a wide variety of state departments, large districts, intermediate units, virtual schools, and large and leading edge technology districts. The BLEgroup is unique in that it provides services to both schools and the industry.

The BLEgroup believes that two factors determine the effectiveness of educational outcomes and management of schools:
• The Quality of products
• The ability of school systems to implement products.

At ISTE and TCEA the BLEgroup provides 25 focus groups each where ed tech and publishing firms come to have the tires kicked on their products and to get input on messaging, marketing and implementation from a school perspective. As we are commenting on new products and services, The Instructional leader panels allow us to take the temperature and see trends in the market. The comments below reflect our take on the current status and trends in the ed tech market.

I look forward to your comments

Eliot Levinson
CEO, the BLEgroup