Teachers: if you could have one additional thing to help in your classrooms this school year, what would it be? More technology? Better behaved students? Less paperwork?
How about more TIME?
When all things are equally weighed, you’d probably spring for the time component (even though a few more iPads might be nice). Teachers spend 95 minutes per weekday outside the classroom on preparation and grading and the typical teacher workday is actually 10 hours and 40 minutes according to a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation survey. Early mornings, nights, weekends – you name it, and teachers are working during it. Teachers can’t just show up before the bell and leave when it sounds at the end of the day and expect to succeed. There is a lot of work that happens when students are not in their seats and it’s necessary work to support students.
What if those additional 95 daily minutes of prep and grading could be cut in half? Or even by 75 or 85 percent?
Teacher Prep goes High-Tech
I recently had the chance to demo Ogment, an educational content curation tool that “clips” relevant information online and saves it for teachers to use in lesson planning and execution. Unlike other systems that simply allow you to save links to reference later, Ogment actually “scrapes” the content so you have all the details, including images and videos, when you are ready to piece it together for a lesson. Ogment allows teachers grab content off the web and strip out the extraneous muck, align the content to standards, cite, format and enhance the content with other technology. In short, Ogment makes lesson creation much easier and less time consuming.
Ogment offers The Stream – a treasure trove of content that teachers can search to find materials on the lesson at hand. Teachers can also collaborate inside The Stream and share content. Teachers can even add their own content to complete lesson plans. And all of the organized content is searchable.
Teachers can project the content in their Ogment accounts for students and also manage assignments within the tool. A live curriculum mapping tool keeps both students and teachers on track, too. Customized lesson planning is possible based on student progress tracking within the tool, making it easy to modify lessons for students or student groups.
The technology behind Ogment is so cutting-edge that it actually won a SIIA CODiE award, an AAP Revere award, and three Bessie awards when it was still in pilot program testing. It’s now officially rolled out to the public with the benefit of feedback from actual teachers and administrators in how the platform best works.
Ogment’s Relevancy in Today’s Classrooms
When I was a public teacher, I would have LOVED to have a curation tool like this so I had more time and energy to devote to my actual students. I know the digital native teachers-in-training in our colleges today can make an even bigger impact with the type of technology streaming that Ogment provides, too. By freeing up some of that time traditionally weighed down by research and compilation for lesson planning, teachers have more energy to inject into what actually matters: supporting student progress.
Want to start this school year off with better organization? Try a free 30-day trial with Ogment.
