This is the second article of a 3-part series on how to save time and money throughout the school year. This post discusses the often overlooked side effect of relying on multiple paid services to complete multiple key functions–all of which fall under your job description. You can read the other articles as published here:
- How to Save Time and Money on Lesson Planning (Calculator)
- Schools Could Save Money by Connecting Three Workflows on One Platform (Calculator)
- 4 Ways Schools Could Save Time and Money (Guide)
Let’s talk about efficiency. If we were to ask you to name the best educational tool your school actively uses, it might be tough to know where to start. Before you could name a winner, you might need to categorize your apps by what they do. Most schools use at least 3 different educational apps to create, approach, and track progress on their goals for the academic year: school leaders will use one system to oversee curriculum management, another to coordinate learning and instruction, and a third for data assessment.
But the problem is, having three tools that don’t interact isn’t cost-effective.
Case in point: Say a curriculum director wants to measure a school-wide initiative like standards based grading. To do so, that curriculum director might want to see the full story of information from their curriculum, learning management system, and data assessment tool. This creates a technical challenge when either that curriculum director or their fellow teachers must now use their time bridging the gap between the workflows. Ask any teacher today if they are doing double data entry from tool to tool — the majority do! Weren’t these tools meant to make your school run more efficiently?
Fortunately, schools now have the opportunity to replace these piecemeal systems with one that can address all of their curriculum, instructional, and assessment needs.
With so many variables to student achievement, you need a baseline curriculum so you can make adjustments to instructional practices and materials. But this is no good if it isn’t responsive—like an at-risk alert system, you can use Kiddom to discover students whose grades are slipping early and provide them with personalized support. When all stakeholders can access the same platform and collaborate in real time, you also have less time wasted on meetings.
With all workflows on one platform, imagine the following scenarios:
Curriculum planning becomes responsive:
These sessions would be much more efficient if every teacher and supervisor walked into the room with a full understanding of which curriculum resources are working, which ones can be cut, and where common leverage points exist.
Kiddom allows admins and teachers to collaborate as they build curriculum together and iterate as soon as results come in. This way, they’re able to scale best practices to other classrooms and reuse for new semesters.
Teacher observations become informed:
Administrators have to do less digging and teachers have to do less justifying when all of the artifacts of student learning are organized right along side the curriculum. This allows administrators and teachers to spend more time on collaborative efforts rather than repetitive explanations.
Kiddom keeps administrators caught up on what’s happening in the classroom so observations can be planned at a time that is better for teachers and students.
Parent-teacher conferences become proactive:
Despite every teacher’s best intentions, eventually a parent may take issue with an assessment or instructional decision made in class. When a parent feels their child has been wronged in some way, the conversations can quickly become emotional. But imagine having all of the reporting and assessment data at your fingertips at any given moment. Now administrators won’t have to call a teacher from class to gather pertinent information about a student, but can access all necessary records as needed.
You have a clear view of your entire school or district’s progress towards your new social emotional initiative and you know exactly which classrooms need more support. You’re able to reallocate funding to those who need it the most. Lucky for you, your Monday morning dashboard just got a serious upgrade.
Schools could save serious money by connecting three workflows
Beyond the obvious cost-savings earned by creating more efficient scenarios for collaboration, replacing three workflow tools with one can be much more affordable when it comes to pricing.
Use this calculator to determine how much you’re spending currently on tools for your school’s curriculum, instruction, and assessment workflows. And then, let’s chat about how centralizing school-wide initiative data with Kiddom could help your school’s wallet, too.
How much could your school could save? Find out here:
At a typical Kiddom school, hands are in the air, there’s a buzz in the room, and teachers and students are energized. Kiddom was designed to help improve teacher retention and increase student performance and graduation rates.
For the first time, the most important parts of teaching and learning are connected and simplified in Kiddom. Curriculum lives in one place and is easily measured and refined, instruction is personalized to meet the needs of each student, and data serves as a powerful system of support for every member of the learning community to keep students on track.
Ready to bring digital curriculum to your school or district?
Connect with us in a 15-minute meeting to learn more about available content, and how a digital tool can support your learning community.
What People Are Saying
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AP Whitney Green’s school uses EL Education (ELA) curriculum via Kiddom. She led the rollout of this program, resulting in the highest reading proficiency improvements in her district, and now she’d like to help others in their journey to do the same.
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Kiddom seamlessly connects the most critical aspects of teaching and learning on one platform.
For the first time, educators can share and manage digital curriculum, differentiate instruction, and assess student work in one place. Learners can take assessments online, see student performance data with the click of a button, and teachers have the insight and tools they need to create individual learning paths.
Ready to bring digital curriculum to your school or district?
Connect with us in a 15-minute meeting to learn more about available pre-packaged curriculum, and how the Kiddom education platform can support your learning community.
