itslearning study guide
Flipped learning/ flipped classroom
"Flipping the classroom" is a pedagogical concept that replaces the standard lecture-in-class format with an opportunity to explore concepts and to review materials outside of the classroom. This can happen in many forms, but the underlying premise is that students get direct instruction in their individual learning space, which frees up time in the classroom to discuss concepts and perform other learning activities. Flipped learning models are one way to work with a blended classroom.
What is our product positioning
-Best user experience across devices -Best on-boarding experience -Best reporting and analytics capabilities -Integrated access to important information on smart devices
Universal design for learning/ UDL
-Multiple means of representation to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge
Station Rotation tool
Activity where groups of students move through different activities/tasks on a schedule; activities typically address different learning styles
Vertical alignment
Alignment is typically understood as the agreement between a set of content standards and an assessment used to measure those standards. By establishing content standards, stakeholders in an education system determine what students are expected to know and be able to do at each grade level. Educators are then expected to instruct the students using curricula that follow the academic standards. Ultimately, assessments are used to hold the students and teachers accountable to the standards. Vertical alignment is a concept that entails: standards and assessments represent only one part of an education system. Other parts of the education system include curricula, textbook content, the opinions of stakeholders (such as parents), classroom instruction, and student achievement outcomes. Vertical alignment is the alignment of different parts of an entire education system. Vertical alignment can occur at broad or specific levels of an education system. When standards based accountability tests are established, teachers plan classroom instruction in a way that follows the standards. The standards and assessments themselves must be vertically aligned with one another so that they reflect the logical, consistent order for teaching the content in a subject area from one grade level to the next.
Why do we do what we do?
As class sizes continue to grow, and standards become more rigorous, educators are finding it hard to keep up. Often working in isolation, teachers lack access to the resources and tools needed to successfully develop lessons that engage and help move their students closer to standards mastery. On the curriculum side, it's a daily challenge to make sure that these standards are adequately covered and assessed, and that courses and resources are consistent, aligned and accessible across the district. In addition, teachers, students and parents are overwhelmed by juggling countless user names and passwords to access resources and assignments on a myriad of platforms and websites. Without the right systems and support to help address these issues, curriculum management becomes inefficient, teacher productivity suffers and ultimately, student achievement declines. itslearning helps educators create innovative digital learning environments, to improve retention rates and reduce the cost of instruction.
personalized task/ personalized learning
Being successful with personalized learning in everyday instruction is a major challenge for teachers today. itslearning provides tools to support a variety of teaching strategies, all promoting personalized learning. Additionally, the platform supports assessment for learning, standards-based learning and competency-based learning. With itslearning, teachers can personalize instruction by assigning standards aligned resources from a vast library or use the recommendation engine to give students personalized tasks. Provide personalized feedback through interactive assignment rubrics or allow students to create, peer assess and analyze results. Teachers can also give students an even stronger voice in the classroom through surveys, discussion boards or individual learning plans, and a choice in how they demonstrate understanding of concepts or learning objectives.
attendance tool
Both teachers and mentors are allowed to keep attendance. Teachers keep attendance at course level, while mentors manage attendance for their groups. New reports and day and week overviews facilitate early detection of problems connected to absence. The reports show information such as attendance statistics for individual learners or courses and calculate absence rates. To help reminding the learners of the importance of attendance and participation, we have made it possible for them to follow their attendance across courses under the ePortfolio tab.
Canvas
Competitor LMS
schoology
Competitor LMS
device agnostic
Device agnosticism is the capacity of a computing component to work with various systems without requiring any special adaptations. The term can apply to either hardware or software. Compatible across most common systems
anytime, anywhere access
Digital resources available online break down the four walls of a school building. Materials are engaging and can be personalized to meet the needs of the student.
Google Classroom
Freeby LMS
Choice Board tool
Graphic organizers that provide different activities or projects for students to choose from to complete and show that they have mastered a standard.
Horizontal alignment
Horizontal alignment is the degree to which an assessment matches the corresponding content standards for a subject area at a particular grade level. Assessments must match the breadth and depth of the standards to be considered strongly aligned. There are many reasons for ensuring horizontal alignment. When strongly aligned, standards and assessments bring clarity to the education system by providing a coherent set of expectations for students and educators. The assessments concretely represent the standards, providing a target upon which teachers can focus their instruction and students can focus their studies. Using classroom instruction that follows the standards, teachers can effectively prepare their students for the accountability assessments.
Note feature
Itslearning feature that allows the user to type information (directions, links to websites, notes) on a blank screen; one can also embed a video in this feature.
LTI and LTI compliant
Learning Tool Interoperability. It is nearly impossible for a single vendor to provide all of the tools that schools and organizations need. However, the ability to integrate multiple tools from different vendors is essential for learning systems. itslearning does just this, by using the LTI integration to connect to a number of exciting tools. Though, itslearning does not supply these apps, but is merely facilitating their use in the platform. Examples of tools include YouTube and Khan Academy tutorials. The Edu Apps site has a lot of free apps to choose from - and it takes only a few minutes to make them work in itslearning. LTI tools are added from the Add menu in courses by clicking the Add LTI tool link. We ARE lti compliant
Strategic leadership and Professional development
Learning platforms allow administrators to set up professional learning communities and increase communication with all involved.
Playlists tool
List of learning resources (files, links, videos) that are available to students in order to learn about a topic or idea.
Planner
Location in itslearning where teacher posts lessons for the students
Content Library
Location within itslearning where teachers can search for resources shared by other teachers or added by gooru
Flipped Classroom concept
Model in which the typical lecture and homework elements of a course are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions.
operating budget
Most purchases from districts or schools will be made from their operating budget for the fiscal year unless funded by a grant or initiative
service and project management team
One of our greatest prides is our fantastic service and project management team. They provide training for faculty and staff and admin.
open educational resource OER
Our LMS includes two million amazing open educational resources (OER). And dozens of full courses are available too. This vast and varied library creates infinite ways to engage students in their learning. The resources are carefully curated and aligned to standards. And, since they are fully tagged, resources are easy to discover and use. Teachers can quickly find safe and effective content and directly add it to courses and personalized lessons. itslearning has partnered with Gooru to offer educators a unique advantage: access to the world's best OERs directly within the learning management system. Only the best resources make the cut such as the smithsonian, khan academy, library of congress, nasa, wolfram math world, and PBS learning media.
What is our role in the classroom?
Our role is to help teachers teach. That matters. Your ideas and efforts can bring about new heights of teaching excelence that inspires millions of young people around the world. Our personalized platform helps teachers create lessons and resounces that engage our students. It automates routine tasks so they have more time to work with individuals, and enables them to easily collaborate with other teachers, students and parents. Ultimately this leads to better education, but it will only work if teachers succeed with itslearning. That's why we continually seek to improve their experience with the platform and why we support and value their work.
Recommendation search engine
Recommends resources from our library automatically in relation to a particular student's learning style or the subject matter of the assignment
Project Based Learning/ PBL
Students working together towards a common goal teaches them better, our platform helps facilitate this.
Course Dashboard
The first page the displays when one opens an itslearning course
personal recommendation engine
The recommendation engine selects the best resource available in 'Library' for a specific student, on the basis of preferences and relevance. It allows teachers to assign personalized content to one or more students with a few clicks of the mouse - for example, if some are struggling with a particular learning objective. In the future, it will be possible to recommend content directly to students.
test mode browser
The test mode browser allows teachers to make it so certain assessments are not able to be exited once started. This is an additional fee.
rich text editor tool
This is a tool that allows users to integrate media into their lectures, assignments, submissions, etc...
Custom Activity tool
This item is used when a teacher wants to provide digital feedback on an assessment which didn't require students to submit work online (ie: grading presentations, labs, performances, or projects physically turned in).
Page tool
This itslearning resource is a collection of content blocks usually about the same topic. The content blocks can contain files, web links, images, text, embedded videos, or poll questions. This allows teachers to place all resources in one location for their students.
Discussion boards tool
This itslearning tool allows for an online "conversation" between students and teachers and center around questions involving opinions and ideas, not questions with concrete answers.
Assignment tool
Tool in itslearning that allows students to digitally submit their work to their teacher.
Blended Learning
Using different mediums of delivery in the classroom when teaching students such as games, technology, etc...
Curriculum solutions
What we provide.
Student Information system/ SIS
Where teachers put grades
webinar
a seminar conducted over the internet
How does itslearning support flipped learning/flipped classroom?
all videos can be integrated into the course itself so its easy for students to know what to do and where to access it. itslearning doesn't just provide a list of videos for the student to watch but also allows students the opportunity to reflect on what they have seen in a variety of ways. Then they are able to work together back in the classroom to apply what they have learned or online through a built in discussion board when face to face discussions are not the best choice. With itslearning its super easy for teachers to record their own videos or to embed existing ones using the rich text editor. Teachers can embed videos into pages with accompanying polls so the students can give their teachers a clear direction of their understanding and the next steps needed or simply voice their opinions for a later discussion. Additionally teachers can embed videos into assignments so that the students can submit their reflections or questions directly back to the teacher. Teachers can also view who clicked on their video rich resources through the personal and summary reports in the followup and reports part of the course
student planner tool
allows students to give themselves feedback about assignments as well as lectures. These notes can be viewed by the instructor and the instructor can give individualized feedback about these notes. This is one way we can individualize learning in the classroom. Operates on a mentor/mentee basis.
API
application program interface. An API specifies how software components should interact. Additionally, APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.
Personalized learning
assignments, modes of delivery and ways for students to submit assignments are personalized to the student's best learning style
Multiple means of engagement
buzz phrase
Virtual learning environment
buzz phrase
Individualized learning
buzz word
instant messaging tool
can give personal messages as well as group or community messages
Behavior tracking tool
can make visible to students or parents or both. records date of incident and what happened.
Technology landscape
device ratio, use of technology in the classroom, and also what programs they may be using with their devices. Mostly pertaining to hardware though.
esc
educational service center. We work with some throughout the US.
The concept of open education
is the simple and powerful idea that the world's knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge
Alignment to standards
itslearning allows every facet of the educational process to operate more transparently. Administrators can implement professional development courses as well as monitor the course material that their teachers are teaching so they can assure that there is a high degree of standards alignment. Though we don't come pre-populated with professional development courses, we do have them for an extra fee.
Student achievement
itslearning provides a wealth of tools to monitor student achievement via personal dashboards.
Integration with 3rd party content
itslearning provides integration with a lot of widely used 3rd party content providers such as brain pop, nasa, wolfram existing educational content and resources, data etc...
pedagogy
itslearning provides tools to support a variety of teaching strategies, including: backward design, Universal Design for Learning, project-based learning, flipped learning and blended learning. The platform also supports assessment for learning, standards-based learning and competency-based learning.
OER
open educational resource. OERs are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge
3rd party content
our platform allows for integration with 3rd party content through the rich text editor as well as full integration through the plug-in tool as embedded content within the itslearning platform.
Student-Facing vs Teacher-facing
our platform is both
Alignment of standards
our resource library can be aligned to standards set fourth by the state or organization
gooru scholars (who are they? what do they do?)
prevetted and curated
RFI
request for information. If a district is looking for information on LMS'
RFP
request for proposal. More of a bidding process.
e-portfolio
the itslearning e-portfolio is a tool that enables users of the platform to essentially create their own fully customization online blog with achievements, opinions, assignments, or whatever they want to put on it. Helsinki students using our platform have been using the itslearning e-portfolio as a resume of sorts. They include their education and work experience in their e-portfolio and include it in their job applications.
differentiation
using different approaches to teaching so that all student learning styles are accommodated.
Learning management system/ LMS
what we are
ease of positive reinforcement
with itslearnings social media esque platform we make it easy for teachers to reach out to their students in a variety of ways. They are able to comment under submitted assignments, comment under group messages, also they can make their messages private or public to the class or the parent.
