Twin River Case Study
Twin River Public Schools are located in Genoa, Nebraska. Math teacher Sam Robb teaches Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus, Calculus, and has been in the district for eight years.
The high school was supplying a note-taking app on iPad to students to do their homework, however, after switching to Chromebooks this app was no longer available. This left a need for a solution to annotate PDFs and take notes on a students’ Chromebook device.
Having students do their work on a device is great for the teacher. It makes things more organized and reduces paperwork. Students have all of their work for the entire year in one place and don’t have to carry around books. They can also email their work easily if they are in a different location. Not being able to perform their work on the Chromebooks took all of these benefits away.
The solution that Sam initially tried didn’t meet the requirements of the students. The performance was choppy and, on many occasions, students would do their work only to have it not save, which the solution was supposed to do automatically. After using the free trial on one of his smaller classes, Sam really liked the features that MetaMoJi Classroom provided and found that the experience for capturing content was much smoother than the other options considered. Classroom was also reliable and saved work automatically as expected. The ability to look at the work the students had done before they even turn it in was another ability that Sam liked.
“I really liked the features that Classroom provides and the annotating was much smoother than the other options I considered.”
The Classroom application has proven useful in the situations we currently find ourselves living in, namely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sam’s classes needed to move to a remote learning model during the initial COVID outbreak and Classroom works remotely as well as face-to-face. While students were working from home Sam was able to look at what they were doing, as they were doing it, and quickly see and correct mistakes. This flexibility is just as relevant for other situations where students need to be taught remotely. A situation where the town flooded and took out the bridge connecting communities occurred a couple of years before Sam was using Classroom. He was able to adapt to this by teaching one group of students in town and the others over Zoom. Sam said, “I can only imagine how much Classroom would have helped in those times.”
One of the greatest benefits described by Sam is that he is able to hold students more accountable for their homework. Many lessons cover multiple days, so students can share their work as they progress, even if an assignment isn’t ready to be turned in. Checking on progress this way helps the students earlier.
