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So many school districts today are faced with the challenge of how to best deliver and manage professional development activities for thousands of teachers each year in order to maximize positive impact on student achievement.
Often the administration of teacher development programs is highly decentralized among schools and districts and tracked with disparate, outmoded systems. The lack of a centralized system for tracking and reporting on professional development for teachers has resulted in undifferentiated teacher development as well as limited accountability for expenditures. Further, there is a growing need to provide high-quality professional development opportunities that are both cost-effective and readily accessible for teachers from various regions within a district.
In short, this area of school administration is perfectly positioned to harness technology in a way that simplifies processes, delivers quality content, increases accountability and reduces costs.
Cornerstone K-12 addresses all of the needs described above and can be rolled out to any or all schools or clusters in a matter of weeks. Cornerstone K-12 delivers:
School principals and administrators can set-up new training activities in minutes and enroll teachers directly into training. By enabling automated registration, the entire registration process is more efficient, cost-effective and immediate.
The system automates the entire scheduling, notification and tracking process. Each teacher is alerted of upcoming training events by email and through a personalized training portal. By streamlining and targeting its training, school systems will offer more relevant and efficient training to teachers based on individual needs.
Cornerstone and Knowledge Delivery Systems (KDS) have partnered to make KDS’ extensive library of online educator development programs available – seamlessly from the Cornerstone K-12 platform. Teachers and other educators can utilize this leading content to enhance development, meet state requirements, and more.
Cornerstone K-12 replaces disparate, manual processes with a single, web-based system that is accessible by administrators, principals and teachers at any time, from any computer. Teacher development activities can be tracked system-wide or by region, cluster, school, grade, individual teacher or virtually any other grouping.
Cornerstone K-12 includes a wide range of standard reports that can be generated at any time. Superintendents, administrators and other key decision-makers can report on all teacher training activities across their respective districts or schools. Principals can run online reports on their teachers to check progress. Additional custom reports can also be developed without custom work or programming knowledge.
In addition to tracking and reporting on teacher professional development sessions, Cornerstone K-12 provides several tools to help schools streamline and focus the development process.
Development Planning: With this feature, principals can work with teachers individually to develop highly specific, targeted development plans for the coming school year or multiple years. The software tracks all development activities and reminds teachers and principals of pending deadlines.
Talent Finder: Principals and administrators can use the Talent Finder to locate specific expertise and talent in specific schools, across entire regions or system-wide. Teachers can be located based on licensure, specific achievements, education, special training, and many other factors.
Best Practices Exchange: This tool lets teachers share best practices (such as lesson plans) through moderated message boards and discussion groups. Teachers can also post questions for responses from subject matter experts across the school system. Clearly, this is a great tool for capturing and redistributing tacit knowledge across the school system.
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