This document proposes a four-year development grant to leverage technology to support personalized and Common Core-aligned writing instruction in high-poverty urban high schools. The project aims to provide teachers training and tools like Doctopus and Goobric within Google Classroom to improve their ability to distribute, collect, and provide rubric-aligned feedback on student writing assignments. By moving writing workflow to the cloud, the project expects to increase differentiated writing tasks, feedback frequency and timeliness, and ultimately improve student writing skills and exam scores. This project would directly impact 5,000 students across 10 pilot schools.

1. Personalization at Scale: Technology Integration to Drive Common Core Writing
Abstract
New Visions for Public Schools, in partnership with the New York City Department of
Education, proposes a four-year i3 development grant that will leverage technology to support
writing instruction that is personalized to student need and aligned with the Common Core State
Standards (Absolute Priority #3). Through our Personalization at Scale project, we will support
high school teachers in high-poverty urban classrooms in establishing a low cost “technology
infrastructure” and adopting digital tools to improve their workflow in distributing, collecting
and grading assignments. We hypothesize that digital course management and rubric-aligned
grading tools built in the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) environment -- New Visions’
Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom -- will facilitate teacher feedback on student
work and support the writing and revision process necessary to improving literacy skills.
Teachers in 10 public high schools who use New Visions’ Global History and English Language
Arts curricula will receive intensive training in this technology and related pedagogy, and their
outcomes will be compared against teachers in 10 schools using the same curricula without
intentional technology integration. We will examine whether moving writing workflow to a
cloud-based environment will increase the number of writing tasks assigned by teachers; the
frequency with which tasks are differentiated; and the amount and timeliness of teacher feedback
on student writing. With these changes in teacher behavior, we will expect to see greater student
writing and revision and improved writing scores on state-mandated exit exams. This project will
directly impact 5,000 students. Since our tools run on Google’s free infrastructure and our
curricula is open source, once piloted and proven, this approach can scale at radically low costs
to schools.