Change Education with Edmentum: Plato Courseware

Andrew Plackner, Senior Product Manager at Edmentum,  continues our series ”Change  Education with Edmentum” by introducing Edmentum’s standards based and award winning product, Plato Courseware.

During one of the last courses I took before completing graduate school I was introduced to the term “ground truthing.”  Ground truthing is most commonly associated in the field of remote sensing and it refers to information collected at a specific location.  To ground truth something means to relate real features on the ground with those that have been observed from afar, i.e. remotely.  To perform it, technicians go to the field to observe, complement, and confirm the data that has been sensed remotely.  Without this important step, data are considered hypothetical and even conjectural in nature.  Ever since stepping into the “real world” years ago I’ve never forgotten the importance of this concept.

Plato Courseware is enhanced when we combine our theories with real world practices.   Identifying problems first hand allows us to create solutions for students and educators.  Today, Plato Courseware is used in districts far and wide to effectively address many of today’s pressing problems.  We provide students with an alternate experience that helps them recover credit on time thereby helping them avoid failing class and dropping out, we offer personalized instruction that accommodates the three-tiered Response to Intervention (RTI) model, and much more.  Aligned to state and Common Core standards, our courseware solutions provide focused instruction to support educators as they implement the standards in their classrooms.  Indeed, Plato Courseware’s engaging and comprehensive solution offers tremendous advantages: 

• The robust flexibility of our courseware solutions allow you to customize curriculum to meet your students’ unique needs.
• Proven by third-party research and studies to increase student achievement, our standards-based content is designed to build the knowledge, skills, and competencies students need to succeed.
• Exemptive pretests precisely identify the gaps on which each learner must focus and prescribe personalized learning paths.
• Our diverse course library offers a wide range of core subjects, electives, global languages, honors, and Advanced Placement®* offerings.

I am very passionate about our products and the impact they have in helping educators drive change in the 21^st century classroom. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many educators who have shared their success stories making what I do every day truly gratifying.  But it’s in those very classrooms where I’m reminded there’s so much work that still needs to be done.  Identifying challenges first hand is a critical step in creating new solutions for today’s educators.

I’ve learned a great deal by visiting classrooms across the country to observe, ask questions, and to confirm assumptions.  This ground truthing has been critical to not only confirm our own hypotheses, but is essential in helping us identify new challenges and trends in order to build upon the great solutions in place today and provide even better ones in the future.

*Advanced Placement® is a trademark registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved with the production of, and does not endorse, this product.