ISC Research: How Kinteract Enables Schools to Rapidly Respond to COVID-19 Challenges

A recent report released by ISC Research*, reveals that while schools rapidly adopted tools such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams in response to the teaching challenges presented by COVID-19, a number of fundamental teaching and related technology challenges remain unresolved.

Moreover, it is clear that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst, prompting many schools to critically rethink the longer term strategic role that edtech can play in supporting the development of curricula and the new best practices in a post-pandemic world! 

While synchronous communication tools, such as Google, provided an invaluable ‘quick response’ solution, many schools have now subsequently identified obstacles as they evolve towards a distance or blended learning model. These challenges and needs include:

• The need to seamlessly integrate email and SMS messaging capabilities
• The automated management and creation of learning content, assignments and resources– to ensure that students have easy access to the appropriate materials, specific to their needs/goals
• Resources and technology to enable distance-learning attainment to be assessed
• Student data and assessment management– progression of attainment, knowledge gaps and evidence-based learning

The last two points are pivotal, with many schools citing the inability of children and parents to submit learning evidence along with a ‘lack of teacher time' to review and assess learning evidence that had been submitted.

‍Only 10% of the schools surveyed said they had no challenges relating to assessment.

Since the research report was published, other challenges were immediately identified at the start of the new academic year– Local and regional isolation rules alongside individual quarantine requirements, now require schools to simultaneously teach students in the classroom and at home.

When looking at the ‘bigger picture’ of these challenges, we reach the conclusion that schools are facing a series of series of complex and potentially expensive technology integration/development activities.

Supporting blended teaching needs of international schools, academies and tutoring colleges was a core objective of Kinteract’s solution design from the outset– learning both in the classroom and at home is easily adaptable and accessible.

Key features include:

• Aggregated curriculum content and recommendations– suggested to teachers during their class planning or homework setting– saving hours of manual document or link uploads.
• Tracking individual student, group, class or teacher progress through a dedicated observations and assessment dashboard and identify learning gaps, while highlighting strengths.
• Delivering live lessons to individual students or class groups– and post recorded classes to the platform feed for students to rewatch.
• AI integration tools– providing educators with appropriate and actionable next steps– aligned to the school curriculum and standards to drive improvements in student achievement.
  

*A survey of school leaders and technology directors at 82 international schools across 41 countries, re edtech usage during the pandemic

Kinteract’s digital teaching and learning platform, founded in 2016, was designed to address future schools needs– long before the COVID-19 outbreak. We built Kinteract for the now – the tomorrow – and the future. Whatever your school’s teaching model, our platform is designed to be agnostic, enabling directors, principals, teachers and institutions to rapidly evolve their curricula and teaching practices.

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