Abbas Manjee, Chief Academic Officer
Can you tell us about the mission at Kiddom?
Kiddom’s mission is to build technology that unlocks potential for all teachers and learners.
Through the alignment of core curricula and dynamic digital resources, Kiddom provides the foundation for equitable learning outcomes – ensuring that all students get the most out of their education. At the heart, we supply the digital counterpart of the highest quality instructional materials available on the market and use the power of the Kiddom platform to propel them to the next level. We build in functionality that is critical to moving districts and schools forward, like curriculum customizations, instructional management, and data insights for multiple levels of the educational ecosystem, from teacher to district administrator.
How do schools utilize the Kiddom platform?
Both schools and districts use Kiddom to align curriculum and dynamic digital resources to provide the foundation for learning outcomes.
Kiddom starts with high-quality curricula and assessments and turns them into engaging, insightful digital learning experiences. From there, Kiddom’s technology helps educators understand, implement, and measure the impact of core curriculum using simple, adaptable technology.
In preparation for teaching, educators are able to view and plan their lessons in one location, without juggling multiple teacher editions. They can edit digital student activities to easily differentiate for the needs of students in their classes and use premade, engaging lesson presentations that save valuable prep time. Built-in organizational features help tee up all of the instructional materials teachers need for optimal delivery during the day.
During class, teachers use Kiddom to deliver high-quality content, conduct lessons, and push activities digitally to students for synchronous instruction. As students complete assignments, they get real-time feedback on their understanding of concepts, enabling teachers to make impactful instructional adjustments on the fly.
For districts and schools who are truly invested in being data-driven – instruction, daily activities, and curricular assessments are coupled with valid, reliable interim assessments, like those offered through our partnership with Center Point. These powerful curriculum-aligned interim assessments match the instructional sequence of units giving teachers and leaders deeper insights into knowledge and skill gaps.
After class, Kiddom’s data tools provide intuitive reports on everything from individual student understanding to overall district progress – allowing for easy measurement and monitoring of curriculum implementation success at a multitude of levels, as well as, in-depth information on skill and standards mastery to guide instructional decisions and professional learning.
All of this comes together to ensure that students meet goals at every level while ensuring the curriculum usage is maximized and teacher lives are made easier.
At CenterPoint, we’re known for high-quality assessments. Can you expand on the importance of access to high-quality learning materials? How is Kiddom helping to close this gap?
In general, the K-12 education space has invested a massive amount of resources into outputs (like assessment performance) without investing into the inputs (curriculum). Kiddom provides a unified space to host both high-quality curriculum and assessments to give districts power, visibility, and agility.
Kiddom exclusively works with the highest-quality curricula currently available, such as those certified as “all-green” by EdReports, and are vetted for rigor, coherence, and accessibility. We work with (and distribute content from) publishers and authors like Open Up Resources, Kendall Hunt, EL Education, Illustrative Mathematics, Odell Education, OpenSciEd, and OpenStax.
We then work to maximize the impact of these curricula within the Kiddom platform, with features like…
- Kiddom exclusive, expertly-crafted instructional resources, such as lesson presentations, which reduce planning time and increase the effectiveness
- Third-party assessment data through Kiddom partnerships for 3x per year interim assessments to ensure the curriculum is positively increasing student performance and to allow for real-time adjustments
- Full cycle teaching resources in one place, planning through assessment/reporting, so that every teacher has everything they need to help their students succeed
- Strong implementation support with PD, coaching, and usage data
- Prep for high-stakes digital assessments
What do you see as some of the most pressing issues currently facing the K-12 space?
Due to a lack of professional development and support in general, long working hours, burnout, and undervaluation, teachers are walking away in droves. Further, we still face the aforementioned dearth of high quality curriculum adopted by districts. That has a trickle-down effect where teachers must make up for poor curriculum by supplementing with third-party resources, extended teaching time, and more work in general.
To make up for a lack of teachers, states have already begun to roll back on restrictions and certifications needed for teaching, which means less-qualified teachers in public schools. Combine that with insufficient learning and support, as well as poor-quality curriculum, and we are looking at the recipe for failure of public education.
This is why we are using technology to not only make teachers’ lives easier but to provide equal access to the best curriculum.
Districts and schools need a way to retain their best teachers while simultaneously making new educators more effective. Kiddom does this by reducing the amount of work teachers have to do and simplifying what’s left so they can focus on their students.
When it comes to student performance, we provide real data instead of guesswork. This means that everyone has a real-time understanding of student performance. But even better, we also have the ability to improve comprehension Thanks to curriculum editing, proper adjustments can be made to content at any level and instantly delivered to students.
All of this combines to create an effective, equitable, and transparent learning environment that maximizes curriculum effectiveness and student performance.
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