kite

Here you will find the musings of Kite's founders and advisors relevant to education, technology, or the company itself.

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How Apple’s iOS 6 Guided Access Feature Helps Students Stay on Task

iPhone and iPad users have been waiting patiently for the release of iOS 6 and now they’re happy that it’s finally here. iOS 6 was finally released by Apple on September 19th with new and improved features that are both helpful and pleasing to the eye.

One feature in particular that teachers and parents like the most is it’s newest feature: Guided Access. With Guided Access, teachers and parents can help their students stay on task by locking their iPad into a single app and temporarily disabling controls on certain areas of the device. That way, teaching is made easier and students can focus on learning.

Let’s say you want a student to read from the Kindle app, but don’t want them to click on the controls on the top or bottom of the screen.

To begin using Guided Access on the Kindle app, you first need to enable it in your settings. Go to general and then accessibility, where you should see Guided Access. Touch Guided Access and slide to turn it on.

When you press the home button three times, the screen will show you the Guided Access page and it will tell you to circle areas on the screen you would like to disable. The circles you draw will create a shaded rectangle on the area you want to block out.

You can also disable hardware buttons, like the volume and power button, using options on the lower left corner of the screen. Once you’re satisfied, touch resume and your student is ready to read.

According to Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iPhone Software at Apple, single app mode is being used in more ways than one. During his presentation at the 2012 WWDC event in June, he said that some schools have started adopting iPads and administering tests on them while single app mode.

“Single app mode allows the teacher to lock the iPad into the test so that students can’t look up answers on safari,” he said.

It’s great that Apple is thinking about more than just their tech followers. With features like Guided Access, students with disabilities are able to move forward in their education and grow along with the rest of the community. 

[followkite]

New Reports & Roster Copying

We've launched our new reports to utilize our Standards-Based Gradebook. In addition, our Summary Report uses all the data found in the gradebook (where it previously only utilized the data found in assignments assigned through Kite).

If you have data stored in the gradebook, check out the new reports!

Elementary school teachers can rejoice. Users can now copy the roster from a class you've already created when creating a new class (or editing a class that has no students)!

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Kite's going social! And what's just around the bend, psst! Standards-Based Grading

This is going to be an exciting week. Kite's heading up north next week for another demo day at the Hatchery in San Francisco. A lot has changed since our last demo day and we're excited to share it with everyone!

Kite's going social! We're launching a small update that will promote engagement with your students. Students can create accounts and connect to teachers. They will be able to check their grades online and leave comments on announcements, like them, etc.

We'll be rolling out more features in regards to our social features, such as embedding video, keeping track of resources, and more!

Next week, we will be launching our Standards Based Gradebook. This is a big update, so expect a full write up on the advantages of Standards Based Grading and how to utilize it within Kite.

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New Gradebook Updates

Hey educators! Welcome back to the new school year. We have a few gradebook updates to greet you that we think you'll really enjoy.

Assignment Categories

If you don't want to use assignment categories, you don't have to. This is what the gradebook looks like if you decide not to (nothing has changed).

But let's say Geography is a homework assignment and those weigh a little differently from classwork or tests.  To add the category, click the assignment header like your normally would to edit the assignment.

You'll get a new option labeled Add Category -- it only says this if you haven't created any categories yet. If you click that link, it'll take us to this popup.

And from here, we can just fill out assignment categories and their respective weight percentages. When you close this box, the assignment will automatically gain the ability to modify categories.

Now you can select Homework from the list.

However, be wary. Once you've created categories, all assignments must have categories. Otherwise, your final score cannot be calculated and you get presented with this error!

That's it! We'll be rolling out more features associated with the gradebook in the coming weeks including Rubrics, support for Standards-Based Grading, and Report Card Generation.

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Quick update; minor changes and fixes

We launched a few minor changes today.

When creating students in your class, you may optionally add a student identifier. This will help you keep track of students who have the same name and it will help administrators easily identify students on their end.

You can also edit student names by clicking the edit icon when you hover over them on the Classes page.

Thanks for your continued support!

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Updates for the end of the school year

Hi everyone.

We just pushed out an update (my insomnia is your gain), that allows you to archive your classes. The New Term button (shown below) will archive all your current classes.

Archiving is not permanent! Visit the Archived tab (shown below) to check out the gradebooks for old classes, unarchive, or delete them.

The Market launch has been pushed back one week (boo!) as we decided to prioritize the archive feature for our teachers going into summer school. The Market will be available at the end of this month.

StartEngine's Demo Day is next week (June 21) and it has been a fantastic experience thus far.

A big thanks to all the teachers using Kite and thank you for the continued feedback and support.

Have a great summer!

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How my experience with a former student makes a case both for and against standardized testing

When I was teaching, we had a transfer student whom I will call Sammy. Sammy was a 6th grader who grew up in Indiana and was having trouble with math after moving to California.

Allow me to rephrase: Sammy did not know math. Outside of doing simple addition and subtraction, he had nearly no understanding of any concepts a 6th grader should know at that point. Anything studied in class was lost on him, understandably.

Over the course of that year, Sammy did extremely poorly on homework, quizzes, and tests. On paper, he proved to be an awful student, but Sammy far exceeded my expectations: he worked hard.

Very hard.

He really, really wanted to learn and improve. We had one-on-one sessions during breaks. I sat and watched him battle tears in front of the whiteboard. He volunteered to take on extra assignments. He came to me with questions over and over, sometimes the same ones. But he learned and I watched him grow tremendously.

By the end of the year, Sammy had become proficient in math and the following school year, he passed math with flying colors.

I'm telling this story for two reasons. Though Kite officially has no position on standardized testing, I think this story kind of makes a case for both sides.

Sammy did extremely poorly on paper, he did not measure up to the 6th grade math standards, but as a student, he excelled. Sammy will have the lessons he learned (both math and what can be obtained from hard work) for the rest of his life. It's a shame that only half of those lessons are accounted for in a standardized test.

Sammy proved to everybody that he could do the work. That all he needed was guidance. The problem standardized testing hopes to address is that there are no "serious" repercussions to letting someone like Sammy slide by 5 years without learning any math. Other than love for the profession itself (which, most of the time, I imagine is enough), teachers have little at stake.

Whether or not standardized testing for accountability properly addresses that issue is a discussion in itself. Ideally, we have teachers who have the drive to make every single one of his or her students a better person (and in more ways than what can be measured on a test).

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Updates abound! Here's what's new

We're launching our new assignments page. The assignments page comes with several usability changes that were confusing some of our users.

We've removed the distinction between an assigned assignment and an available assignment. When you assign an assignment, a progress bar and print icon will become available.

We've changed the way adding questions works. When you add a question, a form will drop inline the assignment for you to fill out.

We've changed the way you apply standards to questions and create custom standards. Finding your standard can be done by both drilling down through our advanced options or searching for keywords.

Tags (previously custom standards) can be created by just typing the tag you want and clicking "Create and add new tag." Tags can also be searched for in this way.

We've made some smaller changes as well.

The gradebook now allows decimal values.

The gradebook allows non-zero values.

We fixed a bug causing students to display multiple times on the assignment review page.

We're working hard to launch our marketplace, currently planned to be populated with ExamGen's content.

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100,000 questions aligned to state standards

We're excited to announce that Kite will be partnering with Examgen to bring our users their 100,000 item question bank in the following weeks. For 21 years, Examgen has been the leading publisher of classroom test-item databases for grades K-12.

You will be able to select from tens of thousands of questions aligned to Math, Science, and Social Studies. Additionally, their content is aligned to the California, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida's state standards, along with Common Core.

All of their content is compatible with our application's features: our assignment builder, analytics and reporting, fax-to-grade technology, and gradebook.

We will be launching their content available for subscription alongside our new assignments update. Schools and districts may be eligible for special pricing, contact us for details.

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Usability problems in content creation

Hey everyone! We've noticed users have been discouraged by our content creation tool; we get it, it's a bulky tool and unpleasant to use. So, we're announcing some upcoming changes.

An overhaul of the content creation and assignments pages. We're improving the usability in creating assignments, questions, and assigning work for your students. We're removing the distinction between an "assigned assignment" and an "available assignment."

We're working on a small question bank for anybody to use for free! This question bank will be comprised of a few hundred questions in varying grade levels for math and English.

We're working with a content partner to bring you their huge database of content available for cost. This content is aligned to both state standards and common core.

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New features have launched and what's to come

After a week into our open beta, we have launched several usability updates and pushed our new gradebook feature live!

The gradebook aligns to all assignments you administer to your students through Kite. Additionally, teachers can keep track of assignments that are not created in our application with the gradebook.

We've designed this feature to be useful even by a teacher who is not leveraging all (or any) of Kite's capabilities.

So, what's next?

We're currently building out a small set of assignments and question banks for our teachers to use. These assignments and question banks will be free to use (albeit small).

Also a big thanks to the users who are using Kite and providing feedback. It's really helping us build a great product for teachers everywhere to enjoy.

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Just some thoughts on the state of education

I’m in my last semester of grad school—or school, period—and I’ve been asked to write, “the paper [I’ve] always wanted to write.” The course title is The Economics of Inequality, so being both an education nut and native Californian, I thought I’d do something about the re-segregation of schools in San Francisco. I spent about five hours on the subject before realizing, it was boring me to death. My chosen topic? The relationship between athletic participation and academic success—evidence suggests one exists.

The exact details of my paper still have to be worked out, but the subject got me thinking about educational innovation and the innovation that has already occurred. Most people think about education in the classroom, but so much learning occurs outside the classroom, it’s important to think through the influence of external factors on motivation in the classroom.

In the inaugural meeting of the Young Educational Professionals of NYC last month, I had the opportunity to speak to and learn about a multitude of organizations working toward helping children succeed academically, developing programs outside the typical scope of education. From long-term mentoring programs that paired mentors and mentees for years, to educating private sector heavyweights on the realities of NYC public education, these organizations are fostering change in public education and student achievement through unconventional avenues.

By no means am I suggesting these programs are the solution to all the problems in public education and student attainment, but they have begun uniting the public and private sectors for that explicit goal. Remember the African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child?” It takes a village to educate one too.

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Do you remember how you learned to read?

My education professor looked around the classroom and asked us this question. A basic, fundamental skill, instrumental to my academic success, and I could not remember how I acquired it. Without a clear, successful model to replicate, I suddenly realized the incredible challenge of teaching.

In my third year of college I became a BruinCorps member at UCLA. I had heard my friends complain about LAUSD's Open Court curriculum, but being assigned to an after-school program meant I functioned outside the control of standardized curriculum. That is until one of my tutees brought me a black and white, xeroxed "book" to read. He read the "book" well. The problem? He hated reading.

After a year I could not get the kid to love reading, but I got him reading. "A success!" I thought... until I administered him BruinCorps' end-of-year assessment and he wrote his "e" backwards. Upon finishing the assessment, he promptly ran outside to play with the other kids, and I sat in the classroom, near tears, pondering my failure.

Five years later, I still think about those kids. Time—almost two degrees later—has given me the opportunity to examine my experiences and appreciate the complexities of teaching. Among memories and pictures, the experience gave me insight into the problems of standardized curriculum. The "book" complied with the phonics-based Open Court curriculum, but did so at the expense of plot and a congruous storyline. It may have gotten my students to read through repetition, but it didn’t get them to learn to read.

My point is not to argue for the abolition of phonics-based curriculum—there is extensive evidence of its success—but to articulate more of the same is not the answer. A K-12 education is more important than ever. Students are no longer competing solely against their American peers for jobs; they are competing against their contemporaries in every country. To meet this challenge, schools need to innovate.

Educators and policymakers need to begin looking for better alternatives. I don't mean replicating the Finnish school system or the Harlem Children Zone. I mean truly innovating, understanding that the best educational system for the United States may currently be nothing more than an undeveloped idea. Or perhaps that there may not even be a one-size-fits-all system for the U.S.

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Our response to "why education?"

Jeff and I ventured into Westwood yesterday. It's not everyday we decide to drive through an hour and a half of traffic into one of my top 3 worst cities to be inside a vehicle, but today was the day Start Engine asked Kite to come down for an interview.

Now, I'm paraphrasing, but we were asked something to the tune of, "Education is notorious for being a difficult industry, why did you guys pick it?"

Well first of all, education is very difficult. It's slow. It's outdated. There's bureaucracy. And as everybody knows, there's no money. Education stands for everything the startup world is not.

But education, despite all of that, is important.

We could spend our time making it easier to upload photos to Facebook or letting the world know you're about to eat a burrito, but those aren't problems we're interested in solving. We've chosen education, because while difficult, it has the capacity to make a significant impact on our society.

And we think that's pretty cool.

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Our public offer to LA Unified

We just read about LA Unified's preliminary worst-case budget. Yeah, not looking good. So we've decided to publicly make an offer to LA Unified.

We realize that this is worst-case, but we'd like to help. Kite is two weeks from entering into private beta. We'd like to offer LA Unified immediate and guaranteed access to our beta for all teachers as soon as we launch. Further, because we're local, we can work closely with them over the next few months to fine tune our product to match their needs.

Kite is progress tracking and analytics for teachers and districts. We offer assignment building features, collaboration tools, and powerful reporting for free. Additionally, our store features question banks that align to California's state standards.

Kite is designed to introduce a high-tech system into schools with any budget. LA Unified will not need to purchase any new hardware to scan student responses into our servers for grading (we can accept our custom scan pages via fax).

I can be reached by email or by phone at [phone].

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Education meets its knight in shining armor

Earlier this month, my co-founder (Jeffrey Chu) and I left our full-time positions to pursue a future in educational software. Having both invested several years into the industry, it was only natural that we began development on an application now dubbed Kite.

Kite is an online resource for districts, teachers, home-schoolers, or even self-studiers to continuously monitor and assess their progress. For districts, this means an extensive database of questions and assignments tagged appropriately to their state's standards. Teachers get state-of-the-art tools for assessment, teaching, and grading. Self-studiers get a wide array of studying materials provided by our large publisher network. All of which are tied closely to our advanced reporting system.

We're currently still in development, but plan to begin accepting users for a private beta in early 2012. If you're interested in seeing what we can do for your district or school, please contact us here.

Oh, did I mention? It's free.