Aligning your Edtech product to the Standards is a great start, but educators need more.
The secret to a successful product in the classroom? Proof that the product works. The secret to a successful Edtech product in the classroom? Ongoing proof. Why would I, as an educator, switch from print to digital? Because you’re giving me something more than I can get in print.
I’ll use the Edtech version of your product if it does any of the following better than the print version:
Uses my time more effectively, or
Provides more engagement to my students, or
Gives me more data to make better decisions.
Ideally, it does all three. To convince me to use a new product I need demonstrable evidence.
What does this have to do with Standards? We’ll get there.
Yes, it’s essential to deliver engaging, relevant, high quality instruction and assessment opportunities for the grade/subject you are serving. But many products do that and still struggle to get in and stay in the classroom. Why?
Because those products may be effective but may not communicate how effective they are in the way educators need. The first solution is usually an efficacy study. That’s an incredibly important component to a new product. Efficacy studies help communicate product value, but what educators also need is proof the product works for their students. Proof they can see in data presented on a regular cadence. Real time efficacy in motion. That means ongoing, detailed progress monitoring. And that data needs to answer not only how students are doing right now, but ideally, what they should do next.
Educators are working tirelessly to get their students to the next level. No matter the subject or grade, the goal is to help those students learn what they need to make forward progress. If your product helps them do that, no matter how it helps them do that, then you owe it to your product to demonstrate that through a robust reporting feature.
Here’s where the Standards come in:
What do we mean by reporting? Not just reporting a score on an assignment of your content. That’s a start but educators need more. Ideally, your product includes a translation from your content to their curricular needs. Educators are working with a framework of standards, skills, and/or objectives - the knowledge and capabilities a student needs to demonstrate to move on to the next level. Your product should be aligned with that framework, standard by standard (where relevant). Your product should also communicate its value to educators in how it helps students meet those standards.
Because that’s what educators do every single day - help students learn skills to get to the next level. Your product should work just as hard to prove that it helps educators do that job. That means providing standards-based reporting that is detailed, updated, relevant, and actionable. Your product doesn’t have to help them meet every standard, but it should be clear which standards it does help with and how.
You may have correlated your product to the standards and provided a correlation chart. That's an essential start, but more is needed. Your product should turn that correlation chart into a report on progress. It should help educators determine how the student interacted with the curriculum that is aligned with the standard and help educators determine what to do next. Ideally, your standards-based reporting would be able to report down to the individual standard, assignment, and student, while still providing aggregated data that can be communicated at the school and district levels.
Generally, I find standards-based reporting is on the roadmap for an Edtech product but still sort of far off in the distance, and for a very good reason: It’s complicated and expensive. Standards-based reporting is complicated to build and seed with data and expensive to run in a timely manner. It takes quite a lot of design, engineering, and instructional attention to build and maintain something that needs to crunch a lot of data and still be easy to navigate. And the ongoing server costs to generate regular updates to the standards data are hefty.
Fortunately, we’ve taken on that headache for you at C2C. Our system includes standards-based reporting out of the box at the student, class, school, and district level. And it can be configured with different labels, colors, and cut scores to best represent your product’s Standards story. When you align your Edtech product in C2C, you get to offer your customers the most robust standards-based reporting on the market. Ready to go. Give educators the ongoing proof they need to make the best use of your product. Deliver to a higher standard with C2C. To find out more, click here.
