Responsive Practices to Plan Your Virtual Instruction
- Dwayne Alton, Executive Director, Infrastructure Services, School District of Lee County
- Helen Davis Martin, Ed.D., Assistant Director, Professional Learning, School District of Lee County
- Rob Stratton, Vice President of Learning Innovation and Strategy, SAFARI Montage
- Moderator: Monica Watts, Director of K-12 Engagement, 1EdTech Consortium
Lee County Schools built an effective digital learning ecosystem with 1EdTech standards as the foundation. Using Google Classroom, the SAFARI Montage Learning Object Repository, and other enterprise systems, Lee County Schools designed their ecosystem to provide greater access to quality digital content—simplifying work for teachers and improving student engagement—while offering access to analytical data for valuable insight into student engagement and performance. Although initially designed for traditional instruction, Lee County School's digital ecosystem provides teachers and administrators with resources to create meaningful distance learning for students and professional learning opportunities for staff. Hear how this was critically important during recent school closures.
View the slides from this webinar, a case study on Behind the Scenes at Lee County Schools, and a summary of Lee County’s Learning Impact Award-winning project.
“We are quickly gearing up to onboard about 6,000 teachers into professional development that will help them be successful in this upcoming hybrid environment. Paramount to our professional learning plan is really choice and voice.”
Yes, I would like to learn more about SAFARI Montage!
Equity, Agency, and Mastery: Innovations Needed to Enhance Student Success in a More Virtual World
- Giovanni Benincasa, UX Manager, Chicago Public Schools
- Martin McGuire, Director of Educational Technologies, Digital Solutions and UX, Chicago Public Schools
- Kara Thorstenson, Director of Libraries and Instructional Technology, Chicago Public Schools
- Tim Beekman, President and Co-Founder, SAFARI Montage
- Moderator: Monica Watts, Director of K-12 Engagement, 1EdTech Consortium
Chicago Public Schools is in a first-of-its-kind Curriculum Equity Initiative to ensure that students in every part of Chicago benefit from high-quality curriculum and instructional resources. The district is working with leading K-12 educational publishers and industry partners to provide equitable access to learning resources that all CPS educators will customize and utilize to support both traditional and virtual instruction. Join district leaders for a discussion on how the district has leveraged 1EdTech standards to build a standards-aligned, culturally relevant library of digital curriculum and how they are working to ensure the system will meet all students' needs.
View the key takeaways from this session.
“If COVID has taught us anything—where there may have been a reluctance to "new" in the past, when there is an imperative, when you've made it clear to people what the challenge is and what the options to solve are—we've seen teachers radically transform practice out of local materials they were comfortable with while leveraging new distance tools.”
Yes, I would like to learn more about SAFARI Montage!
EdTech Leaders Perspectives: An Interview with SAFARI Montage
- Tim Beekman, President and Co-founder, SAFARI Montage
Tim Beekman reports that districts that were “ready” for this scale-up are seeing very strong instructional resource utilization and that students are largely ready for digital, which is no longer ancillary. He notes that there is a much greater need for engagement with all stakeholders. Tim states that 1EdTech has set the bar to make digital learning work.
"COVID-19 points out the total value of 1EdTech. I'd hate to see where we are [with] instruction—the chaos we would be in—without all the 1EdTech standards...All you've got to do is look around at the most successful districts during this crisis, and guess what; they're all 1EdTech districts."
Read the Intro to the Learning Impact On-Demand Series by Rob Abel