LEARN
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Blended eLearning
Blended eLearningSchoolTown makes it easy for teachers to create learning units and exciting media-rich assignments that engage students. K12 education is being renewed with innovation. The old model of teachers lecturing “at” students and students taking notes and reading from textbooks is changing. The tide is turning. Recent studies show that blended learning – combining eLearning with classroom learning – generates better results in student achievement.
An eLearning initiative must be easy to roll out to succeed. It also needs to address the needs of multiple audiences at multiple levels, from students to administrators, from different grade levels and subjects. Sometimes even spanning schools and even district boundaries. The best platforms can integrate and unify digital resources so every teacher, student, and parent is empowered with tools to learn, communicate, and collaborate. Collaboration tools are a must. Finally, it must be affordable.
SchoolTown’s eLearning, collaboration and sharing platform meets all of these requirements and more. Educators learn to use SchoolTown in an hour and are ready to set up digital classrooms, invite students and begin teaching. They can build and share learning units, lessons and assignments. SchoolTown makes it easy to bring eLearning and collaboration to the classroom, school, district, and beyond.
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Collaboration
CollaborationSchoolTown has won awards for our innovation in collaboration and its potential to impact student achievement. When learners collaborate, they are empowered to take responsibility for their own education, and they develop vital 21st century skills.
In SchoolTown, it’s easy for teachers to collaborate with students, parents, other educators, and to set up environments where students collaborate with each other. SchoolTown’s multitude of communication tools enables teachers and learners to work together in real time, or on their own time, from anywhere. These tools include:
- Secure chat rooms
- Discussion groups
- Messages
- Announcements
- Calendar
- Event planning
- Goal setting
Plus, SchoolTown allows teachers to monitor and provide feedback on students’ collaborations. This helps keep kids safe and moving in the right direction.
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Professional Learning Communities
Professional Learning CommunitiesFoster relationships between teachers in different buildings and leverage master teacher knowledge. Unlike other platforms where your only choice is to purchase off the shelf content, SchoolTown lets you empower your resources for District generated materials lead by your master teachers. The literature on professional learning communities repeatedly highlight these five attributes:
1. Supportive and shared leadership
2. Collective creativity
3. Shared values and vision
4. Supportive conditions
5. Shared personal practiceWe offer packaged courses from renowned experts like Meg Ormiston but the real power comes from our easy to use authoring tools that empower your teachers to create learning modules of their own on any topic. Your learning communities can connect teachers in different buildings or other groupings. Isn't it time to leverage your own experts, administrators, instructional leaders, teachers, and outside authorities so your district becomes efficient and effective.
What's more, each teacher's personal learning plan and accomplishments can be monitored.
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Digital Repository
Digital RepositorySchoolTown's Resource Exchange allows educators to easily upload or download lesson plans, videos, files, activities, unit plans, or assessments..
On upload, educators categorize the resources based on subject, grade level, time of school year, file type, state, differentiation, and other tags.
Searching for resources is as easy as entering any tag. The search results are displayed with various information such as date posted, number of downloads, and descriptive information. Users can also view resources before downloading it to their computer.
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Funding
FundingCall us toll-free at 877-755-8696 and ask to speak with a funding specialist. Here are a few of the many examples of potential funding sources that can help you join SchoolTown:
Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT)
EETT provides funding for a variety of technologies, including learning management systems that enable teachers to better manage instructional practices, organize subject-matter content, and support classroom communication and collaboration.Title I
Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) supports programs that improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students.School Improvement Fund
School Improvement Grants are used to improve student achievement in Title I schools identified for improvement, corrective action, or restructuring.E-Rate
The Schools and Libraries Program of the Universal Service Fund, better known as E-Rate, reimburses telecommunications, Internet access and internal connections providers for discounts on eligible services provided to schools and libraries.Questions? Call the SchoolTown team toll-free at 877-755-8696 and ask to speak with a funding specialist.
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Video Tour
Video Tour -
Content Sharing
Content SharingThere is great teaching happening all over the place – in your classroom in your school, in other schools within your district, and in schools across the country. The problem is, when you spend most of the day in your own classroom, it’s hard to share ideas and resources.
In SchoolTown, sharing is easy. When a school or district joins SchoolTown, it can aggregate all of its digital learning resources so every educator and every learner can easily use them. Through our Marketplace, teachers can exchange lesson plans, handouts, rubrics, or project ideas with each other. SchoolTown gives you the tools to connect with other educators beyond the classroom walls, making your job easier and more fun, and inspiring your students to achieve more.
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Presentations
PresentationsWe'll post presentations and related information here soon
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Success Stories
Success StoriesEngaging Students, Differentiating Instruction, and Improving Communication
VOISE Academy is an amazing success story for blended learning. They've moved from a graduation rate of 8% before blended learning to 100% now graduating!
VOISE Academy provides low-income African American students on the west side of Chicago with a unique online learning environment in a traditional high school setting. VOISE stands for Virtual Opportunities Inside a School Environment. Chicago Public Schools designed VOISE around online learning to increase student engagement, differentiate instruction for individual student needs, and foster 21st century skills. In order to realize this vision, VOISE needed a 21st Century learning environment designed specifically for K-12 education. SchoolTown provided a solution that enables teachers to manage individual student learning in highly differentiated and dynamic 21st century classrooms.
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Project Concepts
Project ConceptsPilot - a handful of teachers setup classes, invite students and BAM, a SchoolTown test drive is running in a few hours.
PD leads the way - The central office creates PD content and invites teachers into collaborative courses from around the district. Almost immediately after starting with PD, some teachers start using SchoolTown for teaching their students. Things lead to things.
Central Office Starts - The central office uses our powerful administrative controls to create the district, schools, create curriculum, upload teachers and students, create rosters, and big bang!
School Wide - A school is selected to go all in and report results to the district.
Birds of a Feather - A category of the district is chosen to pilot. We've seen "model classrooms" in many buildings, grade levels across district, and grade and subjects across district.
District wide - the best of all worlds... go big!