LearnZillion Beefs up District Focus

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/18/16

An education technology company that provides free digital lessons aligned to the Common Core has restructured its site to better address the unique needs of its two constituents: teachers and districts. LearnZillion, which features a thousand-plus lessons, videos, practice sheets and quizzes for math and English language arts, has built out the components to support districts specifically.

While the teacher resources still exist, the redesign of the site is intended to bring district-oriented features to the forefront, including:

• Curriculum Manager, to allow district personnel to create, edit, customize and curate instructional resources and share them through a learning management system;
• Digital assessment capabilities that enable the district to gain a classroom or school view set of results for measuring broader trends; and
• Professional development resources for teacher training in person and online.

Earlier this year the company introduced a new "dream team" of facilitators and coaches to deliver blended professional development to educators. (The company already uses the dream team moniker to describe the teachers that have developed much of its digital content.) The new dream team facilitators will focus on running onsite workshops for districts over the course of the school year; coaches will support teams of teachers online and in person.

"Schools all want to provide students with a rigorous, supportive environment. The day-to-day learning experiences we're giving students to meet that goal, however, are different," said CEO and Co-founder, Eric Westendorf, in a prepared statement. "LearnZillion is providing both the digital curriculum as well as the tools and guidance a district needs to empower their teachers to orchestrate the learning experiences they want to give kids."