ChalkTalk: Demonstrating Student Impact

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Discussion with ChalkTalk's Eddie Vaisman on the impact of a partnership with Instructure on students.

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Video Transcript
My name is Eddie Weissman, and I'm the COO here at Chalk Talk. The problem that our solution is solving is giving teachers everything they need to teach the classroom all in one place. We really consolidate everything so that the teacher doesn't need to grab different sources for different types of activities from different, providers or platforms or finding their own resources online. So we make sure that everyone has access across the entire district to the same equitable resources. Not only that, but we make sure that teachers are able to both preserve the human touch while giving them the ability to do differentiation. So rather than focusing solely on student led activities and video playlists and, question banks, we put the teacher at the front of the instruction, and we give her and the students the resources to be able to differentiate instruction.

Partnering with Instructure has been super helpful. One of the things that we've done from the beginning as a company is really focus on evidence based research. And so from our very earliest single school implementations, we've been making impact studies at the end of those implementations showing what quantitative impact we've been able to achieve. With Instructure, we're taking that to the next level and getting an SS certification to be able to show that this is third party verified, that this works as a program for students achieving their goals. We've been looking at different studies different ways of getting third party as a certification.

And up until now, it's basically been working with the university and doing a, you know, long, very expensive study. And learn platform has been able to automate a lot of that process so that we can do it much faster at a much more affordable price. And that's one of the reasons why we were really excited to partner with Instructure on this. Today, evidence based research is becoming more and more of a requirement. And while we've been focused in doing these sort of studies internally and sharing them with our customers, partnering with Instructure allows us to give a new level of credibility, a new level of academic rigor to those impact studies.

And that's really exciting for a lot of our customers. One of the reasons we've been able to get the traction that we've been able to get with some of the largest districts in the country, including Miami Dade Public School District, is because we've been able to provide impact studies. And now with Instructure providing those impact studies, we're even more excited to be able to get very rigorous about those types of measurements. One of the really exciting things about partnering with Instructure is that you get an entire organization working for you. So I've been on a call with up to four people with advanced degrees, thinking about my data and the problems that we're trying to solve and how to properly represent, the data to in a study, and that's really exciting.

That's a lot of, hiring and management overhead that we wouldn't be able to afford. So partnering with Instructure just takes away a lot of overhead in that sense. So we're really reducing the iteration time here, the feedback loop to teachers and educators on efficacy from decades to days. The value of getting ESSA validation is taking things to a level of peer review and of academic rigor that a private company by itself cannot do. Partnering with and renewing some of the largest districts in the country is something we've been able to do because of the focus on evidence based research, because we're able to tie impact directly to platform usage.

What I'm most excited about for the future of Chalk Talk is enabling teachers, enabling educators to do less of the work that code and computers and robots do really well and do more of that irreplaceable work that is the human connection. Because we believe that education is human. That the teachers in the classroom are not something to be automated. That they're a core value of the education system. And we're here to make their lives easier so that they can do what they're already there to do, which is make students' lives better. I'm really excited about the focus both of learning platform and Instructure, and Choctaw on bringing a new level of academic rigor to the education space that's also focused on real world impact.
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