Features:

 

Teacher Ease is a web base instructional management system. The features allow users to manage all aspects of instruction, particularly at the K-12 grade levels.  There are online tools to accomplish a variety of tasks. These include tools for curriculum mapping, lesson planning connected to national, state, and district standards, a gradebook with parent and student access, and tools to format both standards based report cards and grade based report cards.

 

Strengths:

 

Ø       Standards based curriculum maps can be created and distributed.

Ø       Enhanced cross-curricular integration

Ø       Lesson plan database

Ø       Enhanced home/school communication-Parents are better informed and better able to support learning.

Ø       Students increase motivation by accessing grades

Ø       Teachers save time writing lesson plans, creating report cards, and accessing gradebook

Ø       Secure login-Parent account must be set up by teacher or school administrator

Ø       Real-time data-as grades are entered in gradebook they are available to students/parents

Ø       Easy to generate reports on student performance- honor rolls, warning lists, etc

Ø       Hosted service that handles technical details

 

Challenges:

 

*         Teachers or administrators must have some technological skills to create parent accounts.

*         Pricing may prohibit individual teachers from using the service- Yearly subscription is based on the number of teachers in a school who subscribe.  For 1-19 teachers the cost is $90 and that fee decreases in increments to $65 for 50-100 teachers.  There is a trial subscription that is free to the first three teachers from a school for one year and then for three months to additional teachers from the same school.  Individual teachers can purchase by the month and subscriptions include parent and student accounts. Incentives are provided for teachers who refer others.

*         Subscriptions run over the summer without interruption.

Rationale for using Teacher Ease in this course:

 

There are two major components to balanced literacy, the reading workshop and the writing workshop.  In order for summative assessment to occur in this course  it  is necessary to use a tool that can address these concepts on the higher levels contained within Bloom’s taxonomy of evaluation, analysis, and synthesis.  These are the levels that are much less conducive to plagiarism because the student is required to create a new unit for a particular teaching situation after analyzing and evaluating other lessons.  The standards and lessons within the unit plan must be synthesized and developed in a logical sequence, again reducing the possibility of plagiarism. Teacher Ease has easy to access tools that can address standards for literacy as well as the specific elements contained within individual lessons.  Therefore the students can create a unit plan which may be very practical for a course they are currently teaching or will soon teach.  The opportunity to explore this management system also gives students a chance to explore the tool itself. As teachers each students just might find that the features contained in Teacher Ease make their jobs a little easier.  For me as the instructor, Teacher Ease provides one platform for a summative assessment of the student’s grasp of the critical elements of balanced literacy and the student’s preparedness to use those elements in his/her own class.

 

 

 

 

Teacher Ease

 

 

 

 

Patricia Hutton