With more people upgrading to Windows 8 every day, organizations like The Studer Group are making their applications available on the new touch-enabled platform. The latest Windows 8 app developed by Bit-Wizards, iLessonReady™, is a lesson development solution for teachers to engage students in learning while aligning lessons to the Common Core Standards.
The Common Core Standards are fully integrated using a dropdown selection process. The iLessonReady™ app guides teachers to create learning targets, learning tasks and feedback strategies (formative assessments) that help students achieve one learning target at a time until students achieve a learning goal aligned to the Common Core Standards.
The tool is developed to align to long standing, research-based practices identifying the most effective variables that influence student achievement and engage students in the learning process.
“The collaboration between Studer Education and Bit-Wizards to update iLessonReady™ for iOS and design for Windows 8 delivery focused on the end goal of creating an app to help teachers develop lessons that engage students,” says Janet Pilcher, Senior Leader of Studer Education. “Bit-Wizards director of technology and research, Bryan Soltis, and software engineers Kyle Sell and David Perkins, actively engaged in communication with the Studer Education team during the design and development process to ensure that bugs were worked out and specific lesson planning needs, including a dropdown menu to select Common Core Standards and the ability to share plans via email or the Cloud and SkyDrive, were integrated into the app’s functionality.”
iLessonReady™ features include:
- Dropdown menu selection of Common Core Standards for English and Mathematics
- Two navigational features (an outline and a “at a glance” feature) teachers can use to design and edit lessons
- An end product in a PDF that can be emailed and saved
- Syncs to SkyDrive to store lessons
- Print feature
- Home page of posted lessons by title and date
- FAQs-based guide to assist teachers with the lesson planning process
Screen Shots
The app was developed by Bryan Soltis using C# / XAML and incorporates SkyDrive integration capabilities that allow users to store lesson plans in the Cloud. All the graphics were designed by J.D. Compton.