I realize that you may already have prior commitments, but I still wanted to send you this reminder for today. Because of your interest in education innovation, I would like to invite you to join me on two site visits to Utah schools effectively deploying digital learning tools.

The first is a site visit of Juan Diego HS on the 13th of May at 10:00am to see an alternative to Utah Future's digital college and career ready system that is being effectively deployed. The purpose of this site visit is to learn about Juan Diego's use of a technology platform called Naviance. Juan Diego is using the platform to help students take ownership over the planning of their Career, College, and Academics. This platform empowers students and families, while providing schools and districts with the data they need to help students prepare for the future. Also, it creates a plan for the student's future by allowing them to discover their individual strengths and learning styles and explore college and career options based on their results.
 
This platform presents a viable and effective alternative to the current Utah Futures system. Additionally, with the rich data that is being collected by the system, the State will be able to use the platform as a data conduit for the Utah Data Alliance longitudinal data system. Hobsons, the provider of Naviance, is successfully providing similar services in Texas, Minnesota, and Colorado. 
 
Nationally, the platform is being used in over 7,000 schools by 6.1 million students, resulting in 700 million page content views. Also, at these schools they are experiencing good results, including "sticky" usage statistics outside of the normal school day. Please find a few of these examples listed below: 
 
During the Summer of 2013 (June 1st-August 15th) the entire platform experienced the following engagement from students -
·       Over 3 million log-ins in total
·       43,100,709 content page views
·       Students averaged 9 minutes and 42 seconds logged into the system at a time. 
·       Increase of 33.81% in new users

After visiting Juan Diego, I would like you to join me in visiting Hawthorne Academy at 11:30 am to see one of the math softwares selected by the STEM Action Center following their successful pilot program. ALEKS math software is currently being used by middle school students in dozens of schools across the state.
You can find the results of student use of ALEKS software along with the rest of the piloted programs at this link: STEM Pilot Results.

I hope that you can join me on these visits. 


Sincerely,