Conovate, a Web-based assessment tool for teachers, now in Beta, is the result of its founder's hope to give teachers a crucial missing tool: the ability to instantly see student progress.
Sylvain Niles, CEO of Conovate, wants to provide a way for teachers to instantly track, analyze, and report on student performance over time by skill and subject. The tool is free (click here to sign up for the Beta version and offer feedback).
The idea is to give teachers, parents, and students access to instant data, enabling educators to respond quickly to each students' strengths and stumbling blocks. Conovate also provides tools for teachers to build quizzes according to state and federal standards and share resources (such as quiz questions) with other teachers. "Our idea is to save as much time as we can," says Niles. "If teachers get maybe five minutes per student, they can spend that entire five minutes on the problems that student is having."
With some exceptions, he adds, "the traditional homework and quiz model is a highly manual process. With more training and time, a teacher might have the luxury to do more advanced analysis of how a student is doing," but most of the time, there just aren't enough hours in the school day to personalize the education process to this extent.