Company Integration Milestones: How Our Work Behind the Scenes is Focusing on Teaching and Learning

At Illuminate, we bring teachable moments to light. That’s a lofty goal. So, how does our work of integrating a range of platforms and software capabilities actually impact teachers and students? Let’s explore what it means through two examples.

Personalized Review Assignments (PRA)

As with any review of assessment data, teachers are faced with the question: “Now what?” While it’s important to have insight into the unique needs of students, it can be a challenge to understand precisely how to meet those needs when faced with many students and only a limited time to plan for them. With that in mind, Dr. Pepper Williams, a cognitive psychologist from Yale University and Director of Research & Learning at Illuminate, has spent many years researching and developing Personalized Review Assignments (PRA). This new feature is integrated into Illuminate’s Data & Assessment (DnA) platform.

PRA allows assessment authors to specify review and “challenge” activities for each covered learning standard in the final stage of assessment setup. As students complete the assessment, they are automatically given a personalized set of assignments tailored to their pattern of assessment results across standards.

It’s important to us that teachers have tools that strike a balance between easy and powerful. We have to deliver a solution that is easy to navigate, but powerful enough to have real meaning for educators. PRA and its integration into Illuminate’s DnA platform has accomplished exactly that.

You can learn more about PRA at the annual Illuminate Education User Conference (IEUC) in San Diego this week, or by attending one of our regional meetings in your region.

Data Integration Milestones

Another important milestone for Illuminate is the fact that we have developed a data exchange to automate the data flow between our platforms, including DnA to eduCLIMBER. As noted above, DnA focuses on enabling teachers and students to use assessment outcomes in a meaningful way. eduCLIMBER is a data platform to aggregate, visualize, and analyze academic and behavioral data, support MTSS/PBIS and RtI strategies, and collaborate with data faster and more easily—all in one place.

With our integration, we’re combining some of the most powerful tools in all of education and putting them into the hands of educators. This is an exciting outcome of Illuminate’s 2018 merger with IO Education and SchoolCity: we are bringing together best-in-class solutions and making them easy, accessible, and actionable for our school partners.

“Illuminate is committed to addressing the challenges around data interoperability in education,” said Mark Walls, leader of our data operations practice. “Over the past two months, we’ve increased our data services team by over 30 percent to meet the growing demand in education. We are also working closely with open standards in the education space to lessen the burden on schools. We’re inspired by the teachers we work with and this integration reflects our daily commitment to harness the power of our many platforms on their behalf.”

Looking Ahead

These are just two examples of the continued innovation we are driving to make teaching easier through data. There is more to come as the power of our merged capabilities continues to expand. With the ever-increasing demand for meaningful, actionable data that informs instruction, we recognize the need to bring our “best of” from every corner of the Illuminate universe. Whether that means integrating data workflow or developing new tools for personalization, our commitment to serving teachers and students is steadfast.

In 2018, Illuminate brought together the best-in-class solutions in assessment and personalization. In 2019, we’re integrating them to make sure that all of our school partners have the data, insight, and tools they need to be successful.

*****

Illuminate Education is a provider of educational technology and services offering innovative data, assessment and student information solutions. Serving K-12 schools, our cloud-based software and services currently assist more than 2,000 school districts in promoting student achievement and success.

Ready to discover your one-stop shop for your district’s educational needs? Let’s talk.