Two Brooklyn schools experimenting with edtech products

The Short Cycle Evaluation Demo Night showed innovative edtech products, presented by teachers that used them, in Downtown Broooklyn’s MAGNET Center. Two Brooklyn schools that had been paired with two different startups presented on the products they where using and how it had worked out for them.

The event opened with a sort of open house, with each of the edtech startups showing their product at a table while their teacher partners and invited guests circulated the room and checked out other products.

The larger project is funded by the Gates Foundation, which sought institutions in New York, Chicago and Silicon valley to pair individual schools with specific online solutions and evaluate their performance. This cycle was put together by iZone, the innovation office within the New York City Department of Education.

Two Brooklyn schools demoed edtech products.

Brooklyn Arbor is a magnet school in Williamsburg. It has been using Edusight since opening in August. It’s a way to capture all the data that teachers generate about students. Thea Williams, the tech teacher at the school, said in the demo, “We have to assess every lesson we do. So we have a checklist for every lesson and that checklist is on paper.”

With Edusight, they can put those assessments into a platform that makes it easier for them to track student performance over time and also differentiate lessons for different kinds of learners. A student’s Edusight record travels with a student throughout their school career.

Based on the feedback they got from teachers, Edusight is now working on an iPad app so that teachers can quit using paper to actually record the assessments.

Fantastic time working alongside @BrooklynArbor teachers and @InnovateNYCedu – #edtech #lifechanging pic.twitter.com/xjhZYj4llg

— Edusight (@edusight) December 5, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsP.S. 399 Stanley Eugene Clark uses LightSail, a tablet-based books program, Sharon Holliday, the technology teacher for the school said. P.S. 399 is an elementary school in Flatbush. Their school has regular reading time, and the way it has always worked is students selected a book from a basket that was marked for their reading level. The trouble with using the books is that the selection was low, the teachers couldn’t assess whether or not they were really reading and if they were taking anything in from it.

#SCECedu Demo Night is underway! Warm welcome to the teacher/edtech developer teams sharing their work tonight. pic.twitter.com/DN11O3aF9k

— iZone NYC (@InnovateNYCedu) December 4, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

By moving their reading onto a tablet, students can engage with the text, leave notes, look up words or leave questions for their teachers. It also allows the teachers to give students multiple choice questions or ask them to write in response, to evaluate how well they are reading.

LightSail is also built to measure their lexile growth, a way of assessing a student’s reading level. As they progress, LightSail keeps changing the students virtual basket of books, showing them the ones that are right at their level of reading.

Another advantage of the tablet based system is that teachers can quickly share information about a students reading with their parents and teachers. For the student, it keeps track of everything they read over time.

According to a representative from the company, 14,000 students in New York City are already using LightSail and it’s so being used in other cities, like Denver and Boston.