Personalized Learning for Every Student with Highlight

Highlight from Education Elements is a cloud based personalized learning platform (PLP) being used in over 100 schools across the country serving more than 60,000 students.

So what makes a PLP different than an LMS? Anthony Kim had this to say on the Education Elements blog about the job of the PLP: “a) to help students access & discover learning resources from a variety of different sources; b) to support teachers in collecting and analyzing the significant amount of information required to personalize learning for students every day.” Ed Elements has set out to help make data actionable for educators and unlock the potential of any teacher to personalize learning for every student.

Highlight solves three problems for school districts:

1. Students and teachers can now log in to multiple digital content providers from one place with one username and password. All rosters are managed through the Highlight identity management application to ensure clean and unique identities.
2. Teachers no longer have to access multiple reports from different systems to get basic information about activity in their class. In fact, teachers no longer need to analyze the data themselves. Highlight automatically analyzes key data elements and identifies recurring patterns in the data, and delivers those Insights to teachers in plain language.
3. Administrators can see across schools which products are working well, with detailed information information the quality of implementation.

Teachers appreciate the ability to manage multiple digital content resources and introduce new content to students through the Launchpad. Students will see the changes to their available digital resources when they log in.

The teacher experience of Highlight recently got a complete re-design, making it easier for teachers to view student and class progress in a feed format. In addition, data patterns are represented in natural language so it’s easy for any teacher to act on.

It’s a simple way to consume data points and get a pulse check on their classrooms. The insights feed does not aim to replace reporting from other programs, but complement those detailed reports with a quick overview. Insights are powered by custom algorithms that automatically recognize patterns in student performance. The insights feed has been built for daily use by teachers, whereas the classes tab is something a teacher may access weekly to plan and assess their classrooms.

In addition to viewing class progress overall, teachers are able to drill down and see an individual student view. From each insight, teachers are able to: assign content, email the student, adjust the algorithm thresholds, and view historical trends, with just one click.

In working with hundreds of schools and administrators, Education Elements has also identified that in many districts leaders do not know which products are being utilized, how they are being utilized and what is working. So for this back-to-school, Highlight has some completely new features which address this problem.

The administrator view provides key data points across multiple content providers by school or teacher. This allows an administrator to observe what has been implemented and how frequently the products are being utilized.

Teachers also have access to these level of data across their courses to understand patterns and trends between their courses and content providers.

Highlight is currently partnered with digital content providers such as DreamBox Learning, ST Math, Achieve 3000 and Power School. For a complete list of the partners see their site, which also lists the available integrations such as OpenEd and LearnZillion.

This blog is part of the Learning Platforms Series brought to you by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more, stay tuned in for the final published project, Getting Smart on Next-Gen Learning Platforms and check out additional posts in the series:

• Beyond the LMS: What Next-Gen Learning Platforms Should Do
• Impact at Scale: The Learning Platform Series

DreamBox Learning, ST Math and OpenEd are Getting Smart Advocacy Partners.