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EdTech Show Daily 2 5 Tuesday, June 27, 2017 may assign homework both online and in print. Others tell students to go the library or local coffee shop to access free WiFi, and some avoid digital tools alto- gether so no students will be left out. But those are just temporary fixes. Kajeet created a sustainable solution by providing more than just internet out- side the classroom. How does Kajeet provide internet to students at home or on the school bus? Kajeet Education Broadband™ provides safe, mobile internet to help close the homework gap with the SmartSpot ® (WiFi hotspot) and SmartBus™ solu- tions. Students can take the SmartSpot devices home and connect anywhere, any time – a particularly helpful solution for 1:1 districts. Diane Doersch, Chief Technology Officer, Green Bay Area Public Schools, says, "The Kajeet SmartSpot is the difference between get- ting work done and not getting work done." Additionally, the SmartBus turns travel time into instructional time, extending the classroom and helping improve student behavior. This is a great addition for activity buses (like sporting events and field trips) and for students with long rides to and from school. What about students who use the devices to visit inappropriate sites or waste data? The innovative Kajeet Sentinel ® cloud portal provides education-only, CIPA- Students without Internet (Cont'd. from p. 1) compliant filters across all Kajeet devices, reducing stress and saving money for schools. Kids will be kids and want to access social media or streaming sites on school-issued devices. But these devices are to be used for educational purposes outside the classroom. Sentinel encourages focused learn- ing by analyzing and categorizing mil- lions of new URLs every day and provid- ing customizable filtered internet access. A convenient dashboard provides educators reports and an easy-to-read dashboard to gain insight into student usage. Who uses Kajeet? Kajeet works with over 300 districts across the United States in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Customers are big advocates of Kajeet. Feel free to ask them! As Jerri Kemble, Assistant Superintendent of Technology, Lawrence School District, says, "Having Kajeet is more than just getting homework done." What is a Homework Gap Hero? One in three kids lack internet connectiv- ity at home, meaning they can't complete their homework. Educators who step up to address this gap are the "Homework Gap Heroes." There are already heroes among us. Are you ready to join? Take the hero quiz at booth #1340 or go to www.kajeet.net. You will get a hero t- shirt and the chance to speak to the team about how Kajeet can help close the homework gap in your district. This can be done using hands-on learning tools like robotics. Here are four tips for teaching problem solving with robotics: 1. Set the expectation that there is more than one right answer. Students are accustomed to test questions with only one right answer. When these students are given a learning platform like robotics, the open-ended questions can be a challenge. Teachers should set the expectation that there is more than one right answer and your solution may change. This teaches students the process of iteration. They may try something that doesn't work, but it is guiding them towards a solution. Once students become more comfortable with trial and error, they can look at the project more openly and start building critical thinking skills. 2. Be specific about what you are grading. It is beneficial to talk about how students will be assessed. For example, I frequent- ly reassure students that I'm not grading on what their robot can do. I'm looking more at how they articulate their thoughts, communicate as a team and lis- ten to each other. By assessing collabora- tion, students are given the opportunity to improve their ability to reason, engage and leverage others' ideas. 3. Start with small activities and work your way up. Learning how to build robots can be intimidating. It helps to start with small- LEGO (Cont'd. from p. 1) er activities so students get used to the process. I often start by telling teams to build the tallest structure they can out of marsh- mallows and uncooked spaghetti. Using everyday items makes students more comfortable because it is okay if some- thing breaks or doesn't work at first. Once students are comfortable with what to expect, introducing robots becomes an exciting challenge. 4. Debrief, contemplate and reflect. It is imperative to debrief with your stu- dents after every activity, so they can reflect on what worked and what could be improved. It also shows students that the learning process is all about iteration. I once judged a robotics competition and had a young student who did not receive enough points to win an award. As judges, we debriefed with the contestants and pointed out areas of improvement. The next year, the same student was named our Grand Champion! When I spoke with her afterwards, she told me she had taken all of our feedback and tried new solutions to make a stronger robot. Teaching problem solving with robotics celebrates the idea of "Try, try again." All of these tips will teach stu- dents that success is about the journey. The perseverance, creativity and collabo- ration learned along the way will build confidence well beyond the classroom. For more information, go to www.lego education.com, call 800.362.4308, email orders@legoeducation.us or stop by booth #1818. every level and helps them quickly gain math fact fluency and confidence as they play fun games. In a multiyear study, students who used Reflex regularly in Charlottesville City Schools in Virginia achieved sub- stantially higher growth on the NWEA MAP mathematics test, a nationally normed assessment, than their lower- using classmates and peers nationwide. In the first year of the study, students in the high-usage group outperformed their low-usage and national peers across the board, with the largest gains coming from students who started out in the lower quartiles. High-using students who started out at or below the 25th per- centile, for example, gained an average of 19.3 percentile points compared to their national peers. Comparatively, low- using students only gained 9.1 percentile points. Two years later, students showed increases in percentile rank across the board, with high Reflex users substantial- ly outperforming lower users and their national peers. Percentile rank gains were again highest in the lower quartiles. ExploreLearning (Cont'd. from p. 1) High-using students that started in the lowest 25 percent of students nation- ally gained 31 percentile points, with 79 percent moving out of the lowest quartile and over 30 percent moving into the upper half of students nationally on the NWEA MAP test. In the third part of the study, 5th and 6th grade students who used Reflex over the course of the two-year study period had either maintained or improved on these NWEA MAP test gains one year later. Students who started out in the low- est quartile nationally (mean percentile rank: 13.1) in year one continually improved upon their gains, achieving a mean percentile rank of 41.4, up from 35.7 the year before. Students in each of the upper three starting quartiles main- tained their gains from the previous year. These results suggest that math fact automaticity can have a lasting positive effect on a student's trajectory as a math student. For more on this study and other Reflex results, go to www.reflexmath.com/results. Visit ExploreLearning at booth #3041 to find out more about Reflex and Gizmos. MEANINGFUL ASSESSMENTS, DATA RIGHT FROM YOUR GRADEBOOK Focus School Software offers educa- tors the tools necessary to design meaningful assessments and to better capture and analyze data. Integrated into the Teacher Gradebook, the Focus Assessments Component gives teach- ers the ability to create a test in the same way that they add assignments. Focus' Create a Test feature is easy to use and offers a multitude of test ques- tion types, such as multiple choice, true and false, fill in the blank, passages and more. Teachers can create new ques- tions, pull questions from the question bank and even import ExamView tests. Additionally, the Focus Adaptive Test Feature allows for teachers to select benchmarks instead of questions to cre- ate tests. When students take tests in Focus, there are a number of resources that teachers can activate, like scratch pads, calculators and time clocks. In addition, videos, images, audio record- ings, tables and other multimedia files can be imported directly into the ques- tions. The tests can be administered either online in Focus or printed and scanned back into Focus after completion. When the tests are taken online, the scores and grades automatically populate the Gradebook. Focus understands that there is sometimes a lack of quality resources avail- able to teachers, so hav- ing the ability to share these resources is important. Teachers often collaborate on lessons, activities and tests, within both school and district wide, to improve the quality of their teaching, and easily create more thorough course instruction. With Focus, teachers and district-level administrators can share test questions and lessons with each other. This improves the quality of work in the classroom, easily allows for more standardized lessons, tests and assessments across schools and districts, and offers teachers a larger pool of test questions for faster test creation. Once the tests are created, taken and graded, teachers and school administra- tors need an assessment tool that allows them to make informed deci- sions based on accurate student performance data. Focus provides several tools and reports for teachers and administrators to analyze student performance. Item analy- sis is available for individual test ques- tions, and the Standard Test Report and Analyze Test features provide an overview of student performance on tests. Teachers and administrators can also analyze student proficiency in spe- cific standards. From test creation to student per- formance reporting, the Focus Assessment Component is the solution to meet your districts' needs. For more information, go to www.focus schoolsoftware.com.