The Edualizer is a new, rich internet application that helps school systems visualize what’s going on in the education place. The current school system has become archaic. It’s designed to provide a lot of structure for learning, get lots of kids into one classroom and teach the same thing to every student and collaborate with all students at the same time.
Today’s education structure puts 34 kids with diversified interests and different social problems in one class, which creates an atmosphere in which teachers become very frustrated as they deal with the students, parents and administration. It seems that the only metrics used to govern teachers are whether they’re tenured or not and how they did on their observations (2-3 per year, 1 unannounced and 2 announced). Using this information, it’s hard to get a quick analysis of the success of an individual teacher. Currently, there are no real time metrics that show how a teacher, student, school, or district is doing. We’re hoping that the Edualizer will be a tool that will help visualize the quality of the education that’s occurring within a group.
The Edualizer is broken up into a couple of different things. It consists of different roles so that you can have different views per role. These views include state, district, school, teacher and student views. We have implemented the concept of a dashboard that provides snapshots of the most pertinent information. School administrators can see the geographic locations of student performance and set flags for when a teacher’s or student’s performance hits a set threshold. Teachers and students can see their individual performance index and compare it with their peers at school, district and state levels. Everyone can look at the radar view of a student’s learning progress and determine respective majors and minors before the student even gets to high school. The Edualizer provides a way to view a detailed analysis of school, teacher and student performance and apply policy changes in real time and monitor the results.
