Empowering Teachers with Technology : Phase One - The Key

What is the problem?

Teachers are required to adhere to multiple state and federal standards (hundreds of standards per subject per grade) for each grade level and subject course taught.  Teachers are required to indicate the standard(s) that each lesson is tied to because they must justify why they are teaching a lesson and how it connects to a required state or federal standard. Teachers are also required to submit these lessons and standards to administrators in order to maintain accountability. This is why it is important for teachers to have a way to look up and track standards.  Creating lesson plans and manually linking them to standards or creating a lesson plan around a required standard is a time consuming and tedious process which needs to be steam-lined and automated, so that teachers can focus on creating quality lesson plans.

What is the solution?

The Key will include a standards look-up and tracker. The look-up feature will assist teachers in linking standards to their lessons or creating lessons around a standard. The look-up will be simple to use and intuitive because is searched by key words which are essentially the subject of the lesson. We already possess a database that matches key words to standards (the necessary “smart data set”). The standards tracker will also keep track of any standards that teachers use so that teachers can easily provide evidence and documentation that they have utilized all the required standards for their grade level and subject course. The time saved by this function alone will justify The Desk because teachers will have a way to easily maintain their accountability to administrators, something teachers must do already.