Acellus Success Zone

Dr. Roger Billings – White Paper

Published in the Journal of Science

Motivating teachers is one of the great challenges in education. There are many different thoughts and philosophies around how to evaluate teacher effectiveness in a way that is motivational. One thing that everyone seems to agree on is that when performance is monitored, it improves. Effective and timely feedback is critical for motivating teaching staff. However, close monitoring of a teacher can often result in lowered morale.

The traditional and commonly used instruments of teacher evaluation were reviewed: test scores, standardized tests, homework, quizzes, and end of unit exams. From an analysis of this feedback, it is evident that traditional teacher evaluation models are constructed on the philosophy that if the students all score well, the teacher is high-performing. A conclusion of this review of evidence shows that this method cannot be used to effectively monitor and inspire teachers. This legacy approach has been shown to be ineffective. What is needed is a new rubric for monitoring and evaluating teacher performance.

The student “Success Zone” model is focused on evaluating teacher performance in a way that does not discourage teachers. To create the Success Zone tools, technology, blended learning classrooms, and the power within teachers to inspire and motivate their students were studied.

Teachers are on the front-line and have the most influence and knowledge about how to motivate students in a way that results in success in the here, in the now, today, and in every classroom across the country. Teachers must be motivated to motivate students in the classroom. The ground-breaking impact of Success Zone is that timely feedback is provided in real-time to the teachers, administrators, and board members at the flashpoint when teaching improvement must occur.

 Dr. Billings

Read the full Article:

Journal of Science, Success Zone – Dr. Roger Billings

New Acellus Feature – Teacher Messaging to an Entire Class

Acellus teachers can now send a group message to all of the students in a class. Some teachers have explained that such a feature would greatly improve their efficiency in administrating classes and save them a lot of time. The old feature of being able to send a message to an individual student has also been retained.

To try it out, go into the teacher interface to the screen where you normally send messages to students. I think the rest is very intuitive.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please advise.

 Good messaging!

 - DrB

New Acellus Feature - Tablets Auto Assigned to Student

Now Live in Acellus

With schools now making large deployments of Acellus tablet computers, it has become time consuming to assign and log which tablets are issued to each student.

This new feature allows a school to hand out a table to a student and then ask the student to sign into their Acellus account. For schools that have imported single-sign-in passwords, the students can use their already familiar credentials to get in. 

During the first sign-in, the system assigns the tablet to that student and makes a record of the assignment in the online database.

In the event that the tablet needs to be reassigned, the teacher can unlock and delete the assignment. In that case, the unit will be reassigned to the next student to sign in.

 For help using this feature or to answer any questions, please contact your Acellus coordinator.