Passaic County Technical Vocational Schools are preparing students for the future. With more than 14 academies ranging from biotechnology to welding and applied engineering, they are building the skills and pathways for every student to become lifelong learners.
The Challenge
On their mission to support students, Passaic County TechnicalVocational Schools (PCTVS) needed to bring everyone together. To ensure a more cohesive learning experience, educators should be able to guide students in selecting a core set of platforms that offer consistency and compatibility across the educational journey.
“We needed technology that would unite everyone and prepare students for post-secondary and college education,” Julissa Rodriguez, Instructional Technology Coach, said. “Originally, we switched from Blackboard, and now all our courses are hosted in Canvas LMS.”
Ted Szczawinski, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, elaborated:
“When students come to us, we don’t know the exact skills they bring. We needed tools and data showing us how to meet their needs.”
Adopting a new tool can be challenging. The team rallied together to ensure everyone was successful. After finding that essential tool to unite teaching and learning in their LMS, they needed to bring assessment into the fold with an integrated, rigorous, and data-driven tool.
“We explored another assessment platform but didn’t want to add technology that didn’t easily integrate into our existing environment and overload students with one more thing,” Rodriguez said.
Key Insights
Instructure provides technology that enables career & college readiness at PCTVS.
Mastery Connect and Canvas LMS allow educators and administrators to connect teaching, learning, and assessment seamlessly.
PCTVS used course blueprints to scale Canvas implementation effectively.
The Solution
PCTVS added Mastery Connect to provide an integrated assessment experience with Canvas LMS. An LMS & AMS paint a more holistic picture of student learning.
Teachers like having data they can use. Mastery Connect provides thatjustin-time data we need to make instructional decisions.
Ted Szczawinski,
Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction
With Canvas LMS and Mastery Connect, we have built a one-stop shop for our students to go to so they can focus on knowing where they are now and where they wantto go next.
Julissa Rodriguez,
Instructional Technology Coach at PCTVS
Building Blueprints & Data-driven Core Subjects
Rodriguez supported teachers through help sessions and content that guided them every step of the way.
“Our PLCs worked together to build accurate blueprints. It gave us a picture of where our focus should be,” Rodriguez said.
Szczawinski and Rodriguez explained how they used blueprint courses for Canvas LMS to scale implementation. They created high-quality, standards aligned content once and reused it across multiple classes.
Data from Mastery Connect also gives granular insights into where students needed more support.
“If we don’t know where students are, how can we help them grow? Especially in Math, Science, and Language Arts, we needed to be able to see where our deficits were. With Mastery Connect, we can look at formative and summative assessment data throughout the school year to know how to help students improve,” Szczawinski said.
Szczawinkski also mentioned that accessible data helps him better prepare to present to the school board and paint an accurate picture of student learning.
The Just-right Features For Admin & Teachers
According to Rodriguez, administrators at PCTVS take advantage of Global Announcements within Canvas LMS to push out essential communications that keep everyone informed on back-to-school night and throughout the school year
Teachers find Modules the most intuitive way to organize their course content and keep students focused. Teachers can access a digital library of high-quality learning resources with Canvas Commons to ease the burden of creating course content. In addition, they use Mastery Paths within Canvas LMS to customize activities and materials for every student’s needs.
Szczawinski says that the ability to time-lock content in Canvas LMS keeps students focused on the suitable material at the right time and provides a curated learning experience.
The Results
The right technology should meet every student, teacher, and administrator where they are. Passaic County Technical Vocational Schools work together as a team to empower its students; Canvas LMS and Mastery Connect work together toward that goal.
“Instructure is our partner in providing our students with career and college readiness. Canvas LMS allows us to provide personalized, standards-aligned instruction, and Mastery Connect gives us the data to gauge where students are and where we need to meet them,” Szczawinski said.
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