Vanessa Jimenez
Steubing Ranch Elementary, a K5 public elementary school, wants to change the face of public education by offering a blended, immersive, and technologically advanced online experience. By aligning 21st century skills and technology with researched and current best teaching practices, this school has enabled teachers to digitize homework, design student-led projects, and combine blended learning with immediate teacher-to-student collaboration and feedback.
In addition, the new programs this school is developing directly benefit parents: parents are given a digital portfolio so they have a bird’s-eye view of what is happening in class, and online resources to support further instruction at home.
The Innovative Educator Prize directly supported the school’s dual kindergarten program, enabling them to digitize the curriculum for use at both school and home and thus implement this new, personalized style of blended learning at even the kindergarten level. Kindergarten students now have access to poetry and music, targeted language instruction, and enhanced vocabulary work—and parents have full access to the school’s online resources to support their own child’s learning experience from an early age.
Not only has this school’s model for blended learning, teacher and parent involvement, and use of technology served as a critical component in classroom instruction, but it has also served as an intervention tool: meeting the needs of students on an personalized and highly adaptive base from kindergarten on.