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A leading provider of blended learning solutions, Copia Interactive is a cloud-based learning management solution for school districts and state school systems.  Copia works directly with the textbook publishers to collect and distribute their digital content through a single platform that is customized for the schools that are subscribed.

Its publisher agnostic solution allows for a variety of choices through custom development of the published digital content by all major publishers of a school system’s choosing. It’s currently in the deployment stage of the new digital textbook and instructional materials marketplace for the State of Virginia, which Copia earned through a traditional RFP process.

Janet Copenhaver, director of technology for Henry County Public Schools in Virginia, explained that publishing content can be a very time-consuming mission that takes a lot of people resources to accomplish.  “Therefore, if you want to do content, Copia is the vehicle that can bring that to you,” she says.

“By adopting their solution, Virginia is now a forerunner of content management that is made available for Virginia educators to shop whatever content they want for their classrooms.  Offering choices down to the teacher’s level has never happened before.  School divisions want to go digital and this provides them an easy way to adopt that model.”

For 20 years, the School Improvement Network has served as an online professional development tool for K-12 schools to educate teachers on various subjects and disciplines.  Recently, it launched a new division called Personal Learning with a mission of ensuring effectiveness and improved instruction in the classroom.

This new offering is a major change in practice for most teachers, students, administrators and the community. It assists school districts in transitioning to a personalized learning approach to education through its online platform and expertise via consultation.

The School Improvement Network focuses on a four-pronged approach to deploying a Personalized Learning environment: 1) Establish the vision surrounding personalized learning and have the district administrators, teachers, students and parents all contribute to define the mission of the implementation; 2) Provide the right next-gen platform that is supports a customized curriculum and allows for student feedback; 3) Ease curriculum development for teachers by providing the best in breed content from Pearson, Compass, etc into a single platform; and 4) provide a professional development tool through on-demand modules and coaching to support classroom management and culture.

Kevin Viau was a 10-year teaching veteran in the Calgary Department of Education who was frustrated with the quality of online curriculum and lack of effective career and elective course offerings in the marketplace.  So, he started eDynamic Learning, an online platform that currently offers 55 unique career and elective courses reaching tens of thousands of students in almost every state.

eDynamic offers full semester courses that fit into any LMS with either a completely online offering or a combined in-person solution using the districts’ teachers. It has a wide course offering including Biotechnology, Introduction to Philosophy, Personal and Family Finance, Archaeology, and many more.

 
Approximately 2 weeks prior to the ISTE 2015, Observer4Success and EdTrainingCenter announced plans to join their cloud-based platforms to offer an effective all-in-one assessment & coaching tool.

Observe4Success is an administrative platform that allows users to enter their own measurement criteria promoting standardization of the assessment forms for teachers across schools.  The collected data is then able to be parsed, tracked, and presented to show trends for individuals, subjects, schools, and districts. It is a very clean and easy format accessible by mobile or traditional platforms alike and can also be exported as PDF or CSV files.

EdTrainingCenter is a professional development library broken down into short 30-minute modules on a variety of subjects, such as Assessment, Classroom Management, Digital Technology, and Models of Discipline.  They also offer subject-specific training, such as English, Mathematics, Science Standards, STEM, and Financial Literacy.  With the two platforms combined in the same solution, administrators now have a means of assessing the performance of their teachers and then building a custom development program to address areas for improvement.

Administrators can then track teachers’ completion of those programs and any trends of change in their assessments as a result.  The most impressive aspect is their business model: subscriptions are customized for the need of the school district with no minimum or maximum licensing requirements therefore allowing the administrators to decide the extent of a deployment of the tool.

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