Author: charles

BCS uses digital portfolio technology to improve communication

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Bullis Charter School fifth-grader Anna Morokutti takes a photo of a document to upload to her FreshGrade account.

Bullis Charter School fifth-grader Anna Morokutti takes a photo of a document to upload to her FreshGrade account.

Parents are not always in the classroom to see their children nail an oral presentation or smile in accomplishment after receiving a high mark on an assignment.

Thanks to a new digital tool implemented at Bullis Charter School, that experience gap is closing for parents.

Before winter break, Bullis Charter School introduced FreshGrade, a high-tech tool that enables students to document and upload their work and achievements to an online portfolio viewable by teachers and parents.

The ePortfolios serve as a window into the classroom and help create an open dialogue so that everyone knows how students’ work is developing. FreshGrade supports Bullis Charter School in tracking a student’s progress and measuring the elements of learning not normally accessible to those outside the classroom, especially parents, allowing focus on advancement and not just the final outcome.

“I feel more connected with what is going on inside the classroom,” said parent Evan Parker, whose children attend Bullis Charter School. “Due to a new job, I’m not able to volunteer in class as much this year as I would like. The photos the teachers post give me a visual into what is going on in the classroom.”

Tracking goals

FreshGrade tracks each student’s Focused Learning Goals (FLGs). Each year students set FLGs based on their unique needs, with goals ranging from academic achievements to developing social and organizational skills.

“At Bullis Charter School, parent engagement is a critical component of the school’s success and a fundamental part of our educational model,” said Wanny Hersey, founding superintendent and principal. “Implementing FreshGrade was the obvious next step for us as we continue to build upon our strong foundation of parent-teacher communication, and strengthen parent involvement to improve student achievement.”

Fifth-grade teacher Jessica Morgan said she uses the system to document students’ progress on their FLGs and provide feedback. According to Morgan, FreshGrade doesn’t replace any of the school’s other grading systems, but rather serves as a complement and provides a digital timeline of progress.

Once a week in Morgan’s class students select some of their work, usually connected to their goals, to upload to their digital accounts. Parents can then view the work and initiate a dialogue among student, parent and teacher.

“I open FreshGrade together with the girls to look through the photos of classroom activity along with the teachers’ comments,” Parker said. “They use the FreshGrade content as prompts to go into more detail on the things they’re working on in school.”

Instead of receiving the usual shrug when parents ask how a student’s day went or what they accomplished, parents now can view a visual database of accomplishments and progress toward specific goals. And students get to tailor what they upload to the account, encouraging them to be active participants in meeting their goals.

“FreshGrade is really easy to use and follow,” said Emily, a Bullis Charter School eighth-grader. “On FreshGrade, I upload information about my personal FLGs and then my parents are able to work with me on these goals, providing encouragement, making comments on my goals and getting me the materials I need to complete my projects.”

Parker said he likes that the teachers frequently update the portfolios and that the system facilitates students’ accomplishing their goals. He added that the system is “intuitive and purpose-built for the audience.” While the primary interface for the program is via Web browser, users can also access the accounts through phones and tablets.

For more information, visit FreshGrade.com.

BCS Wins Crayola Grant

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Crayola and the National Association of Elementary School Principals recently selected Bullis Charter School as one of 20 elementary and middle schools to receive a Champion Creatively Alive Children grant.

The organizations also recognized Wanny Hersey, superintendent and founding principal of Bullis Charter School, for fostering critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication skills at the school.

Champion Creatively Alive Children grants are aimed at helping schools build creative capacity, nurture children’s creativity and inspire other schools to do the same. Bullis received a $2,500 grant and $1,000 worth of Crayola products to assist with the school’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) program.

The charter school and the Santa Clara County Office of Education partner to offer a yearlong professional development experience highlighting the STEAM program, a collaboration that will also benefit from the grant.

“Art is infused in every aspect of our curriculum here at Bullis Charter School,” Hersey said. “We are excited to use this grant to further student learning and innovation.”

Hersey will share outcomes from the program via the National Association of Elementary School Principals’ website and a special Principal Magazine Supplement to help other principals develop practices related to arts education.

The Champion Creatively Alive Children grant program encourages principals to implement arts-based learning in schools and rely more on project-based assessment rather than standardized tests. The organizations judged grant entries on innovation, collaboration and sustainability.

“Crayola believes that for students to reach their full potential and grow into self-motivated learners, their creativity and critical-thinking skills must be nurtured,” said Smith Holland, Crayola president and CEO. “We believe children develop these 21st-century skills when educators ignite their imaginations through art-infused education.”

For more information on the grant, visit naesp.org/creativity.

Bullis pulls ahead with top test scores

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Average test scores put Los Altos charter school at No. 1 in the state

 
by Kevin Forestieri / Mountain View Voice

For many charter schools in Santa Clara County, the results of the first Common Core-aligned standardized tests were a wake-up call as many students fell behind their public school peers.

But Bullis Charter School in Los Altos appears to be bucking the trend in a big way. One analysis of the test scores indicates that the charter school is not only outperforming nearby schools it’s now the top school in the state.

The school ranking website Schooldigger looked at over 5,500 schools in California and ranked the schools based on average test scores, rather than the percentage of students proficient in English language arts and math. The results show Bullis Charter School had the top average score in the state, followed closely by William Faria Elementary in Cupertino. Almost all of the top 10 school were located in the Bay Area.

Wanny Hersey, principal of Bullis Charter School, said the school embraced a curriculum where students explain their answers and solve problems using different methodologies long before such practices became hallmarks of Common Core. In math, for example, Hersey said it’s not uncommon for students to solve problems without actually knowing how or why they ended up with the answer — something the school has worked hard to overcome

“Kids can get the average (number), but they don’t (normally) know what an average is,” she said.

Despite the top-tier performance, Hersey insisted that Bullis does not teach to the test. The school has spent years developing its “focused learning goals” program, a holistic approach to tracking student performance that has space for personal, or “passion” goals that the student hopes to achieve in a given school year.

Rather than lug around a filing cabinet of individual student goals to track progress year to year, teachers at the school adopted a new program this year called FreshGrade, which has digital profiles of all students and their grades on assignments and tests.

Charter schools performed slightly better overall compared to public schools in California, according to the California Charter School Association. Charter school students outperformed their public school peers by 4.4 percent in English language arts and 1.3 percent in math, according to the association’s website.

Emily Bertelli, a spokeswoman for the association, said charter schools have an edge in adopting the new Common Core curriculum because they have more freedom and flexibility than public schools to change academic standards on the fly.

“The added flexibility means charter schools are able to be more nimble in adopting new academic programs to meet the individualized needs of their students,” Bertelli told the VOice via email.

But other charter schools in Santa Clara County, for the most part, didn’t see the same level of success. A majority of the charter schools, many of them located in San Jose, saw student proficiency in both subjects fall short of the county-wide average, including many of the Rocketship Education charter schools that teach mostly low-income students. At Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep School in San Jose, for example, only 35 percent of students met the state standards for English language arts, compared to the county-wide average of 58 percent. For many of the Rocketship schools, those numbers remain below the average even when specifically looking at the scores of low-income and minority students.

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Summit charter schools performed slightly better, but many of the schools also had proficiency levels below the county-wide average.

Charter schools remains a hot issue in the Bay Area, as Rocketship Education and other organizations seek to expand the number of charter schools in Santa Clara County. Rocketship’s recent plans to open another 20 charter schools, which was approved by the Santa Clara County Board of Education, suffered setbacks this year when it had to pare back the list to just seven. The withdrawal came after four school districts in the South County filed lawsuits against the board of education for unilaterally accepting the proposed schools.

The U.S. Department of Education, under Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has also been trying to expand the use of charter schools throughout the country, spending $3 billion over the last decade through its Charter Schools Program. On Monday, the department announced an additional $157 million to create and expand public charter schools across the nation.

Why Teachers Are Ditching Report Cards

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Lane Merrifield vividly recalls the stress his young son felt when he got his first “C” on a report card.

What made it worse was learning later that the teacher had made a mistake.

“His teacher had accidentally switched his grade with another student’s. My son had one of the highest grades in his class,” he said.

This one incident drove Merrifield to launch FreshGrade with the goal of reinventing report cards.

“It’s an archaic system that no one has thought about changing for decades,” said Merrifield.

FreshGrade lets K-12 teachers upload audio files of students reading, video clips of presentations, student photos, test results, grades and comments.

It essentially creates a private virtual report card for each student, which teachers update throughout the year.

“We’ve made it as easy to use as Facebook (FB, Tech30) and Twitter (TWTR, Tech30),” said Merrifield.

It’s an immediate window into the classroom for parents, who are alerted when anything is added to their child’s digital portfolio and can directly communicate with teachers. It also allows students to view their portfolios and add comments and photos.

“This isn’t about posting random things but really documenting each student’s learning moments,” said Merrifield

The FreshGrade platform rolled into schools in 2014. It’s free for teachers, and there’s a paid version with additional data and analysis for school administrators.

Merrifield said FreshGrade already has half a million student portfolios and is being used by over 20,000 teachers around the world (20% of whom use the paid version).

Darren Massa, a middle school science teacher in Chico, California, started using FreshGrade this year.

He loves it.

“When parents ask us how their kids are doing in school, teachers are trained to answer using a letter or number grade,” said Massa. “But a child’s progress is a much more complicated narrative than a single grade on a report card.”

With the digital portfolio, he hopes to have more meaningful conversations with parents.

“At the end of the term, I can pull up each student’s portfolio and go through this body of evidence with the parents,” he said.

Massa acknowledged that it is more work for teachers to maintain digital portfolios versus report cards that are handed out just a few times a year.

“But it’s important work,” he said. “Teaching itself isn’t easy. There’s a growing realization among us that if we’re not fully dedicated to our students, then this isn’t the career path to follow.”

Merrifield’s own mother was a teacher and he recalls the significant amount of paperwork she had to deal with to prepare annual report cards.

“We weren’t allowed on the kitchen table because she would spread out all the paperwork on it,” he said. “[Teachers] shouldn’t be teaching by day and data entry monkeys by night.”

While many teachers are using FreshGrade to supplement traditional report cards, some schools are completely eliminating them.

The Bullis Charter School in Los Altos, California, is one of them. The school is in the process of rolling out FreshGrade portfolios for all of its 740 students in grades K-8, said Wanny Hersey, the superintendent.

To ease the transition, Hersey said teachers have been given laptops and classrooms are getting iPod touches so students can add photos and other elements throughout the year.

Hersey said parents are excited about the change.

“It’s an opportunity for parents to understand throughout the year how their kids are learning,” said Hersey. “We can capture and show them if their child is more confident, is developing leadership skills, or has overcome a specific challenge.”

bullis charter school

Students at Bullis Charter School using iPod Touches to capture their schoolwork for their digital portfolios.