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E d Te c h S h o w D a i l y W e d n e s d a y, Fe b ru a r y 5 , 2 0 1 4 4 Lee M. Oser CEO and Editor-in-Chief Kim Forrester Paul Harris Jeff Rosano Associate Publishers Lorrie Baumann Editorial Director Jeanie Catron JoEllen Lowry Associate Editors Yasmine Brown Vicky Glover Graphic Designers Ruth Haltiwanger Traffic Manager David Lopez Account Manager Enrico Cecchi European Sales EdTech Show Daily is published by Oser Communications Group ©2014 All rights reserved. Executive and editorial offices at: 1877 N. Kolb Road, Tucson, AZ 85715 520.721.1300/Fax: 520.721.6300 www.oser.com European offices located at Lungarno Benvenuto Cellini, 11, 50125 Florence, Italy. CALIFORNIA STUDENTS CONQUER MATH WITH ALEKS INDIVIDUALIZED LEARNING Deborah Burton, a seventh and eighth- grade math teacher at Big Bear Middle School in Big Bear, Calif., considers the color-keyed pie chart in ALEKS, a prod- uct of McGraw-Hill Education, as one of her favorite teaching tools. The interac- tive pie chart displays the results of a stu- dent's current knowledge, and each pie slice corresponds to a particular group of math topics. The larger the area of a slice that is darker, the more mastery the stu- dent has of the topic area. Content mas- tery can be visually tracked by determin- ing how much of each slice is dark. Before class begins each day, Burton studies students' pie charts to determine which topics her students are ready to learn. For the first 10 minutes of class, she calls groups of students to the white- board to work on problems before send- ing them to their seats for independent study. She then spends the remainder of the class working with students individu- ally on the topics they are ready to learn. "ALEKS accomplishes two big goals: filling in the gaps of students' knowledge, and teaching them the topics they are ready to learn right now," said Burton. "Normally, I would have to spend time focused only on the students who need the most help. Or, I would teach the whole class the same topics, even though not everyone would be ready for them. ALEKS allows for extremely targeted teaching, which is just wonderful." With its completely individualized EDSBY SOLVES DISTRICT-WIDE DEPLOYMENT PROBLEMS THE MODERN WAY It seems like every district has had one of "those" deployments – the ones that cost double the budget and triple the time. Edsby, the new social learning plat- form, aims to make this a thing of the past. Thanks to the exclusive EdsbyLink architecture, Edsby is able to seamlessly integrate with the district IT infrastruc- ture, which leads directly to more suc- cessful deployments. For Steven F. Asbury, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Edsby, the need for EdsbyLink was clear. "I had pre- viously designed and built FirstClass, a very successful email application used in thousands of districts. When I set out to design Edsby, my goal was to be able to reduce the deployment in even the largest districts to just a few days, and at the same time, remove almost all of the day to day administration workload." EdsbyLink performs three critical integration tasks. First, it enables Edsby to automati- cally and seamlessly synchronize admin- istrative data from a variety of sources in the district infrastructure. This includes not only information about students and enrollment from the district SIS (student information system), but also data from disparate systems such as human resources, account, ERP, etc. The net result of this is that once EdsbyLink is up and running in a district, all of the day-to- day administration of Edsby is complete- ly driven by the existing processes in the Continued on Page 44 Continued on Page 45