Tapestry is coming!

09/08/09: I’m on a plane on my way to perform my first Project Tapestry training. After in many ways suffering through the curriculum meetings and organized “meet and greet your child’s new teacher(s)” sessions that accompany the beginning of the school year in my own children’s schools, I finally get to say all of the things to teachers in another state that I wish I could say to my own children’s teachers here in my own (Denver Public Schools) district. Things like, “Yes, you can see test results immediately after administering the test (or even just a test question), and here’s how to do it.” Or, “differentiation just got a whole lot easier—here’s how to find and distribute online remediation and enrichment to members of the same class, and then to easily monitor and document their progress so that you have more time for teaching them.” Or “this is how you can leverage those eager parents who want both insight and engagement in their child’s day to day learning-- in less time, and with more parental satisfaction.” This is a tool I wish our school district had.

As a teacher, I’d love the integrated approach. I’ve not had long exposure to the inner workings of a K-12 school district, but in the past few months on Project Tapestry, I’ve heard about more tools that don’t “talk” to each other than I ever knew existed. I’ve heard about the woes of Scantrons, the difficulty of reaching out to struggling and high-achieving students, and the plague of paper. I’ve also heard about the crazy things parents do to teachers in order to try to understand what their kids are learning and not learning and how they can help. (OK, I have had long exposure to this last one…I can totally be THAT parent….)

Project Tapestry facilitates the daily reporting of attendance and lunch count and the use of the ever present but now electronic Gradebook with which we are all familiar. It adds to the up and coming technologies of online and Smartboard/clicker-based instruction and assessment (this is much easier when conducted through one interface), and it allows sharing of assessment materials between schools in the district (like benchmark tests that can be authored by lead teachers throughout the district, then released and administered across all schools). Teachers can see the results of these tests immediately, so that curriculum adjustments that used to wait weeks on collective test results reporting can be made the next day. And, standards based assessment results can be looked at over time through a data analytics tool—if Johnny is struggling with reading, when did that start to happen? What step was missed or where do we need to backtrack and pick up again to get him on course? Having an easy interface in which to get this sort of historical information on a student or a class is the first step in the teacher identifying Johnny and getting him remedial content that will bring him back up to grade level.

What if Johnny not only reads, but exceeds? Rather than allowing his exceptional learning abilities to languish, Tapestry’s enrichment materials repositories can aid in giving Johnny the extra challenge that keeps him in his seat at school. We can reach into materials that allow Johnny to push ahead while not taking a lot of instructional time from his classmates.

At the end of the day, all of this prescription and progress lives in the same place, under the same happy URL. The Assessment Manager talks to the Gradebook and to the online classroom, feeds the Data Analytics tool so that it can help the teacher move in the appropriate direction for each child without rewriting the whole lesson plan. Student work is held in a secure, electronic environment that is secure from dogs and the things that can happen to it on the way to school, as well as on the way home where parents can see the grade. Soon, parents will be able to check in "at will" in a way that a mere portal doesn’t allow. All of this without an email snowstorm for the teachers, without a phone, and on an ongoing basis that takes the “SURPRISE” out of report card day.

Anyway, I know I’m excited. Not just for the parents, the teachers, the school districts, but for the students. I know of so many students who don’t know where their grades come from, who have no idea that their efforts are measured against standards and not just some idea a teacher has of what is “good.” Being able to use and share this tool with our students will help our kids to understand that they have control over their learning, that the measurement of learning has a logical face to it, and that they can get help or move ahead as their learning dictates. They will be able to work from home, from the library, and from school on material that appeals to where they are at in a given subject, and they’ll be able to know when they’ve succeeded and quickly go on, or recognize where and how they are challenged and go back. I can look at my own kids-- one who struggles and one who speeds ahead of the others-- and I see how this can work.

09/09/09: First training completed, and there are now some excited teachers and admins in this district! Yep, this is going to be good.