Craft Category: Artifacts

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation, Jill Tew, shares how understanding of instructional needs drive technology adoption.

Transcript: Jill Tew: What we try to do and what I’m very kind of vocal about is never just adopting an app because it’s a bright new, shiny thing. It needs to fit somewhere in our list of priorities for instruction. So, is there a gap. So, to give an example, at the beginning of this year, we started off on the kind of literacy and reading side of the digital curriculum with a couple of apps that were more digital library focused, so things that we’re going to work on fluency, that we’re going to read a book aloud to a scholar and kind of have them follow along – maybe read it by themselves at home, or later in the week, digital apps that would have an offline mode to download digital books they could actually access at home, which is really important to us, too. We also had some apps that were free that were great that were kind of helping scholars just learn letter recognition or sight word recognition – that sort of thing. What we did not have at the time – and what became apparent as we went through the school year – was that we didn’t have an app that really did a good job of instructing scholars on reading strategies – so segmenting words, like learning blends, that sort of thing. We had some great in-person instruction for that, but as we kind of went through and saw scholars spending their time doing more of the digital library activities, we realized they’re getting a lot of this, but not a lot of at-bats at really learning reading strategies when they’re in the iPad Center. And so, we did some asking around to schools that we were close with and trusted, and got a recommendation for an app called Lexia Core 5 that we rolled out a pilot for in April, and it’s been going really, really well. But it’s a good example of now we know that all the different parts of reading instruction that are taught by a teacher could have their equivalents on the digital curriculum side, and should we be looking for apps that fill specific gaps as opposed to just “Hey, I’ve heard of this. This app is cool.” So, it’s always with a bench towards, “Do we need an app to make this better right now? Is this an instructional focus for us?” If the answer is no, probably wait and look for it later… And on the teacher’s side, the same is also true teachers are closer to the gaps than we are. So, if a teacher comes to me and says, “I don’t feel like the two math apps that we’re using this year are really addressing this objective or this focus for me that’s going to be really important for us as we expand to second and third grade,” I have time to do some research and ask around and get some pilots established or some demos that we can to and poke around and see if it’s a good fit for the need we’re trying to fill.

Roots Director of Operations and Innovation, Jill Tew, shares the team’s philosophy for understanding technology needs, doing diligence on existing products, and developing tools to fill gaps.

Transcript: Jill Tew: Whole process, we were thinking about kind of backwards mapping from the model that we wanted and what it was going to look like for scholars to experience this and we were working with the DPS Imaginarium had a great kind of series of full-day sessions because different schools were thinking about either creating a brand new model like we were, or shifting from a more traditional program to piloting some ideas that are kind of pushing the limits of personalization. So, John and I had a lot of time together just kind of thinking and blue-skying and trying to envision what this is going to look like, and when we finally got to the technology behind that, we were like, “Okay, there’s organizations out there and companies out there like Amplify who build scheduling solutions and there’s a lot of master schedule apps out there – they’re all more kind of middle school or high school oriented and they don’t really allow for the dynamism that we need out of this solution.” But we did some research – again, getting to my earlier point – we don’t need to recreate something that’s already out there. So, first let me go do a thorough kind of market overview of what’s already out there. What can we use – maybe build onto? And, unfortunately, came back with very little. Because our model is different, right? And there’s going to be parts of it that we’re going to have to do in-house because nobody does this yet, and that’s not a reason for us to stop or kind of shift to fit the box that already exists out there. So, Jon and I were sitting, thinking about, “Okay, well, if we build this custom – getting quotes from people, it might be like ten or $15,000.00 – really expensive. It’s definitely not in our budget for Year One, so what can we do?” And like sitting there thinking, “Well, we use a calendar app to tell us where to go, and what to do, and who we’re going to be doing it with, if we’re going to meetings,” that sort of thing. And me, kind of thinking to my former product manager days, just trying not to reinvent a wheel that already exists. Google is a very open organization and they have APIs for pretty much everything that they roll out. So, why don’t we look at Google calendars API to see what information it would pass to us and then think about what it needs to look like for our scholars and for our teachers? So, that was kind of the beginning of it. Knowing that we weren’t going to do anything– that was too kind of development-intensive, because we were going to use this API – I bet a lot of junior developers and more seasoned developers, too, but a lot of junior developers – a lot of what they’re doing when they’re first learning how to develop is playing with APIs and making different things talk to each other in cool and new ways. I did some thinking about who could be out there to kind of help us with this initial prototype and so in the Denver Boulder area, there’s a number of –kind of developer boot camps that are teaching complete novices how to be junior developers. And so, got in touch with a couple of them and was able to post a job description for what we were looking for for some temporary work, and found a fantastic junior developer, Laura, who was great to work with and very receptive to taking on this challenge and saying, “Okay, you need it to do X, Y, Z – I never heard of a school that does that, but sure. Let’s go for it” with no program to show her because this was Year Zero and we had no model for it. But she was great and with very detailed kind of specs on what we were looking for, she rolled out a couple of different versions of it that I then began to take to ECE programs and preschool programs at schools we were close with to test this out on four year olds and say, “Hey, if I show you this on an iPad, or I show it to you on a piece of paper, can you tell me where you’re going? Can you use the color coding to say, ‘The green thing on this piece of paper means I’m going to the green station where I’m going to play with blocks.’” All of those assumptions that we’re kind of vetting over the course of the development process – both on the tech side and the human systems side – really work hand-in-hand to create the tool that we have today.