schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[David Welsh <rdavidw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tom and the SchoolTool Team (Mark, Jeff, Alan, Douglas, Ignas, et al)  --

Yes indeed, you have captured the broad strokes of the excellent
SchoolTool/CanDo news coming out of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  The NOVA
project aims to couple SchoolTool/CanDo with Student Portfolios using
TaskStream (www.taskstream.com) in the area of Automotive Technology to
demonstrate the power of standards-based evaluation and reporting.  They
have a significant grant and their goal is lofty:  To build a demonstration
project that can be replicated in many other places.  It is a very
significant project.

The number of School Districts (each containing multiple schools) reporting
interest in implementing SchoolTool/CanDo NEXT YEAR in the Virginia
Commonwealth now totals 38 -- an almost overwhelming response that shows
that SchoolTool/CanDo is hitting critical mass, and that the feedback from
our second year of piloting across Virginia must be quite positive.

And yes, SchoolTool was nominated by my district -- the Arlington Public
Schools -- as our top business-industry partnership from this past year, and
subsequently was recognized among all projects submitted as the top
business-industry partnership in the Commonwealth, earning you a "2010
Creating Excellence in Career & Technical Education Award" (banquet in June
with VA Governor attending/presenting).

My sincere congratulations to Tom Hoffman, Mark Shuttleworth, Jeff Elkner
and the entire team.  These evolutions and recognitions of our work are the
result of multiple years of effort, creativity, collaboration, passion and
innovation... in other words, we're really in a pickle now!!!

--David Welsh

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Got a phone call from David Welsh yesterday with three pieces of good news.
>
> 1) The Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) which collaborates
> extensively with the Arlington Career Center through their Governor's
> Academy, and is the second largest community college in the US with
> over 72,000 (!?!) students, is going to start using CanDo as part of a
> new initiative in career and technical education.
>
> 2) After this year's deployment of CanDo in Virginia Career and Tech
> Centers in five counties, thirty eight sites have requested using
> CanDo next year.  I think we have a little unit mismatch
> counties/sites, but regardless, it is a lot more, and clearly the
> schools who are using CanDo are talking to the ones who aren't, and it
> is growing.
>
> 3) SchoolTool and CanDo have won a statewide award for educational
> partnerships in Virginia, out of, iirc, seven regional nominees.
>
> Now I just have to get David to fill in and write down a few more
> details about some of this so I can get ready to have some excellent
> PR to flog going forward.
>
> --Tom
>