Claudine Claudio:
Welcome to the Half Geek, Half Human Podcast, where we explore the intersections of technology, business, business, and life. This podcast is powered by Atiba, a custom software and It services company in Nashville, Tennessee. Now to your hosts anna Kate Ross and Joey Baggott.
Annakate Ross:
Hey, everybody. Today we’re joined by client and friend of Atiba, Katie Ritter. Katie serves as Chief learning officer at Forward Edge and oversees the badges program based in Cincinnati.edu. Badges is a micro credentialing platform to.
Katie Ritter :
Teach tech to teachers.
Annakate Ross:
On the show, we’ll get into how the program helps students, teachers, and districts, how the COVID year changed everything, and what’s next for the platform. Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie Ritter :
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here with you both.
Annakate Ross:
We are so glad to have you as Katie Forward Edge and is a client of Atiba, but also I have been the project manager on Katie’s project most recently, so we speak all the time, but not in this capacity. So I’m very looking forward to kind of talking a little bigger picture and about the platform as opposed to kind of the task oriented what’s next for the platform approach, which is our typical conversation.
Katie Ritter :
I know I’m used to seeing you from Shoulders Up, but we’re not normally all mic’d up when we check in. Exactly. Yes.
Annakate Ross:
Well, Katie, tell us first, in your own words, what is.edu how does it work when you meet someone for the first time? How do you describe it?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, so for folks who aren’t familiar with the term micro Credential, I kind of explain it. If you think back to, like, Girl Scout or Boy Scout days when you had to learn a skill, prove you could perform the skill by actually doing it, and then you earned a badge that you sewed on your sash or your vest to signal to the world that you did, in fact, actually have this skill set. So this is really the digital version of that. So we have over 250 individual micro credentials. That’s where the term comes from. They’re like super mini courses, and so they’re all on various ed tech tools or instructional strategies that utilize technology in the classroom. And so a teacher or an educator will come. They will learn the badge based on the screencast and the information that our team has presented.
Katie Ritter :
Then there’s a use it section. So that’s where they actually have to go back and use the skill with their students or their respective stakeholder group, and then they submit evidence to us. So either a screenshot of what they created or what their students created, or a video, a reflection, a link directly to the tool. So that varies, but they submit some sort of evidence to us, and then we have a review team that reviews every single badge, provides feedback if needed to help the educator if they’ve missed the mark just a little bit. And then ultimately they earn this digital badge to signal that they do in fact have this new skill. And then they also get points associated with each badge that they earned based on their time, which is really big for our user group because educator certifications, depending on what your certification is, they’re required to get a certain amount of PD hours or graduate credit to renew their certification every few years. So our program helps them earn those hours.
Joey Baggott:
What are some of the examples? Because when I was looking through the website and through some of the videos I saw that there’s a lot of alliteration within the achievements you can get. So what are some examples of maybe some of these credentials that the teachers could earn?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, we really run the gamut from a teacher’s skill set and comfortability in terms of where they’re at with technology. So we literally have a badge on how do you take a screenshot on a computer, which is probably our most popular badge. And it’s something that when I tell people that, they’re a little shocked that how many people don’t know, how many educators don’t have any idea how to do that until they come to our program. So we have things as basic skills as taking a screenshot to various ed tech tools. So some that some listeners might be familiar with just based on having maybe children in schools there’s. One that’s really popular with educators is Cahoot. It’s a review game that teachers will play in the classroom. So how do you set that up and actually do it with students to how do you use Google Classroom or Schoology or Canvas, which are all really popular learning management systems.
Katie Ritter :
So we teach them how to set up their courses and actually utilize the different features there all the way to more instructional strategies. So when I say that for any non educator listening, we have a badge on how do you offer voice and choice in the classroom to students? Through using different technologies so that students have more choice in how they’re learning material or how they’re showing their learning. We have a number of social emotional learning badges, which is really big in terms of mental health in supporting students in the classroom. So what are some different technology strategies that come into play to support our students social emotional learning and their mental health? We have badges on how do you take the Google out of your assessment? So how are you creating assessments for students that they can’t just Google the answer and spit back out to you? So all sorts of it really, truly runs the gamut and a number of certifications out there for teachers. So more of like your high flyers, your more advanced teachers that are super tech savvy. We have a number of badges and things to cater to that audience as well too. So there’s really something to kind of meet everybody no matter where they’re at. Coming into the program.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, I have so many questions just related to the program and all the different I mean, the evolution of it all. But before we get too deep into the program, I don’t know the origin story of how did this all come to pass in the first place.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, so when I first joined Forward Edge, a little over eight years ago at this point, so I actually came from the classroom. I actually served as a technology coach prior to joining Forward Edge and then even after joining Forward Edge. So that is important to the origin story. So for anyone who doesn’t know what a technology coach is in schools, you can kind of think of like an athletic coach. But this is someone who has teaching experience and they work with educators, primarily classroom teachers, to help them use all sorts of technology, whether it’s like the AV equipment to software programs, to all of the tools that we have in our program and how do they actually use that for teaching and learning. And so they really help them understand lesson plan, implement top to bottom, and kind of everything in between. So that’s what I did prior to joining Forward Edge. Here at Forward Edge, I oversee a team of 17 instructional technology coaches that service a number of districts.
Katie Ritter :
But when I first started and I was still actively coaching in districts, I was constantly getting asked how to do the same basic thing over and over. How do I take a screenshot? Right, for example, just over and over skills that our teachers really should have. These tools that they were using in the classroom that really fundamentally change the experience for make the teacher more productive, make them more efficient, provide feedback faster. And then, obviously, all of the learning opportunities for the students that are just fundamentally changed and they just didn’t know how to use these things. So my time was really being taken up answering very basic questions, and we were never getting into the deep transformational use of technology that ultimately is what we want to do when we’re using technology for our students. So I was answering the same question over and over, very basic. Even when you lead professional development in group settings, there’s so little of that time in schools because schools are forced to cover all of these state mandates and whatever initiative they have going on. And certain teachers, content teachers, like all of the math teachers get pulled.
Katie Ritter :
All of the English teachers get pulled. So you very rarely not very rarely, you never have enough time to actually do group PD on these things. And even when you do have the time, so many people are pulled. So it’s so fragmented.
Annakate Ross:
So that’s why group professional development yes, sorry.
Katie Ritter :
Yes, thank you. So that’s where it comes in, where you’re just constantly asking the same thing over and over. And then even if you had all the time in the world, people need support when they actually go back to their classroom setting and actually go back to build it. And when there’s only one of you to service an entire school district, you can’t possibly be there for everyone. So you have to think of a way to kind of duplicate yourself and help teachers continue to move along when you can’t physically be there with them to help them. So that was kind of like from an instructional coach perspective, need. And then there was also from my years of coaching prior to joining Forward Edge. And at Forward Edge, teachers would always complain to me about how you’ve given us this tech, but no one’s training us on how to use it.
Katie Ritter :
So then I trained them and then it was great, you’re training us, but you’re never giving us time to actually develop the resources to implement it. So now we’re expected to go do this on our own time. So that’s also part of the origin story was how can we give teachers the training and give them back for their time that they spend creating these materials? How do we prove the return on the investment? Right? So you could have the best speaker in the world. Schools pay lots of money to have speakers come in and present to their teachers. There’s no guarantee that any teacher is actually going back and implementing those skills. So how do we ensure that the time and money we’re investing in the teacher training is actually translating to student learning? So that was also part of the puzzle pieces that came into this. And then finally micro credentials. I was really kind of starting to see a trend across the country just in the rise of micro credentials, particularly at higher ed, but kind of seeing that that might be the way of the future of education as we move along.
Katie Ritter :
And teachers need a choice too. That was huge. They get funneled into so much professional development that is completely irrelevant to them just in terms of compliance. So that was kind of the final piece. So kind of throw in all of these things. And then I was having a conversation with a couple of instructional technology coaches in another state and they talked about how they implemented this badge program. Their teachers loved it, responded really well, but they couldn’t keep up with the time to create new badges to provide the feedback, to update the badges when all these different websites change their interfaces every two to three months and add new features. And so it kind of fell flat because they just couldn’t keep up with it.
Katie Ritter :
So that was kind of like the final piece that made this AHA moment come together for me of we at Forward Edge provide multiple coaches to a number of school districts. We could create this program, manage it, run it, keep it up to date, divide and conquer the labor on the back end because it is a lot of labor on the back end. And then our schools that we service could benefit from it. They get access to the learning, they get the benefit of the hours towards their contact renewal. Our districts get to see the ROI. And it was just kind of this, like, light bulb AHA that originally started as it would only be a service provided where we provide a coach, and it has since then. Education is such a small world. And so one district may not have had a forward edge coach, but they met with a curriculum director at another district at some offsite meeting and learned about the Edgy badges program that their district is using.
Katie Ritter :
And so the word just kind of grew locally first, and people wanted access to the program, but maybe couldn’t afford a forward edge coach. So we were forced to kind of go to the drawing board and figure out, how do we support this program when we don’t have a physical person in place? And then the original idea when we created it was 2017. And fast forward to today, 2023, and now it’s a multistate national program.
Joey Baggott:
I love the Micro Credentialing, and I’ll be 100% honest here, so a little bit of my background for you, Katie, is like, I’m in sales here, and we work a lot with a CRM platform called HubSpot, and HubSpot is really good with micro Credentialing. And so I just didn’t know that’s what it was called. But you’ve added this whole Gamification side of it, too, which I think is really interesting because I think even as we get older in life, we don’t realize we still like to play the games and we still like to have the scores and to know that we can beat other people in the same district. I guess my question is, what made you decide to do the Gamification piece and actually give people scores to let them compete against each other?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, so it was all around when we thought about how do we motivate teachers to actually utilize this platform? We are constantly putting our heads together around how do we keep people motivated to use the platform and coming back. So we knew inherently, you’d have a good chunk of teachers who were just going to be intrinsically motivated to get better. They wanted to understand they would want access. So that’s great. You’d have a small chunk. Then we’d have a chunk of teachers who, depending on where they fall with their Licensure renewal, they would be motivated by the fact that this was a way that they could get their contact hours to put toward their Licensure renewal. So great, they’re going to be motivated by that. But then you have this other good chunk of people who we thought they might be grandfathered in, where they don’t need contact hours to renew their license.
Katie Ritter :
So they’re not going to be motivated by that. And they may not understand the point of using technology necessarily, because, again, this was all pre COVID, right? So they may not see value in where technology fits in education. So we had to just kind of think about what’s another way that we might be able to pull in a segment of our audience to motivate them. And exactly what you said, Joey. People are motivated by games, they’re motivated by competition. We get PE teachers who are in there earning a bunch of badges because they want to be at the top of the leaderboard, because they’re very competitive. So the points that they get that equate to their contact hours at the carrot at the very end of the stick, those are the same points that allow them to climb up the leaderboard. They move through different levels.
Katie Ritter :
So once they get a certain number of points, they’re automatically kind of awarded this new badge, this new level of like, hey, I’m moved from an initiator to an engager now. So it’s kind of to help with progress along the way, additional kind of milestones help as well with those points. But that leaderboard, man, that really motivates a good chunk of teachers who a little bit to my dismay, I’m like, okay, but you still need to know why you’re earning and using these badges with your students. Not just like, using them to climb up the leaderboard, but yeah, they enjoy it. They’re competitive.
Annakate Ross:
Yes, I guess it’s a win in the end, but connecting it to the original mission is still important. Well, so how often are you adding new badges? I know you said that you’ve got lots of instructional coaches working to not only help in the classroom, but I’m sure also develop some of these badges. And I know we’ve talked about that separately on our project, but how often are you having to update badges, look at new badges to add? What does that process look like? It seems like it would need to happen quite a bit.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, the short answer is constantly, but our commitment to our users is that we publish at least two new badges every month. Earlier in the program, it was four badges every month, but at this point, we have such a huge library, and once we grew to the number of badges we have, the content updating actually takes up more of the time now. So we had to scale back on brand new badges. But that is important, right? Because there’s new tools developed all the time, there’s new features to these tools pushed out every time. AI has fundamentally changed so many things that we’ve had to create a series of badges for. So it is important that we’re putting new content out there. So two new badges every month at this point, and then we are also reviewing two to four badges every month, like going back through just kind of any we have a list of our oldest or most frequent or I guess least long ago updated badge. I didn’t say that very eloquently, but whatever is the oldest badge that we have in the queue that’s kind of front of the line to be updated.
Joey Baggott:
It’S kind of recycling and make sure they’re constantly being updated and fresh.
Katie Ritter :
Yes. And then anything that we know of, like, for instance, Flipgrid is a really popular tool. If you have kids, your kids have probably used it, they create the video responses, and they can respond with video to each other. So that’s a super easy tool for people using the classroom. Super popular badge because of that. And so they completely changed their name and their logo last year. And so we had to redo all of our badges because the entire interface was different. So when big things like that happen, we also kind of jumped them to the front of the line, too.
Annakate Ross:
Got you. Okay, so the platform started in some form or fashion in 2017. The idea had been trickling along for a while. You were using a website, you had a WordPress site that you were starting to add badges to managing users. Things are chugging right along. 2018, 2019, and then 2020 hits. And what happened?
Katie Ritter :
Well, I’m starting to twitch and have just like, terrible flashbacks. But I started twitching just when you said the word press site. Because Anna Kate, you know firsthand. Just like how bad a shape we were in with that bad boy by the time 2020 came around. When schools closed. Because pre 2020, by that time, a number of schools were they would claim to be one to one. And they were, in fact, one device to one student.
Annakate Ross:
Okay?
Katie Ritter :
But so many teachers really weren’t. So many schools had a learning management system, like a Google classroom, a schoology, a canvas, a blackboard of whatever, but teachers weren’t necessarily using it, and they weren’t using it well, and they were using the bare minimum features. So there were still so many teachers who just really weren’t using technology. And when schools closed, that exacerbated the divide between students who were getting an educational experience with teachers who understood how to use technology effectively and students who weren’t. And in the education space, we call that the digital use divide, right? It used to be like, who has a device? Who has the Internet at home? The digital divide. COVID also made us realize that although we thought we were a lot further, we still weren’t quite as far along with Internet access at home for kiddos and a lot of teachers in rural areas as well. But COVID just exacerbated that digital use divide and the teachers who know how to use technology and who don’t, which then sent a lot of administrators into just complete panics, right? You still have to educate the kids at home, and our teachers don’t know how to do that. So what do we do now? So people were scrambling all over teachers themselves who realized, how am I going to meet the needs of my kids right now? Administrators recognizing that and our solution was a great solution, right? It’s all online.
Katie Ritter :
They can do it anytime, anywhere. We didn’t have to recreate the wheel. It was already accessible online from anywhere. So it was a flood of users to use this program as a response to get teachers up to speed really quickly, to be able to serve students for the remainder of the school year.
Annakate Ross:
I imagine let’s just say it was March, but let’s just say you guys are probably figuring out for your own team, are we going into the office? Are we not? You have conferences coming out, I’m sure, thinking about your own day to day lives. There was so much fear and panic at that time. But then was it administrators emailing you, reaching out, maybe existing customers, new customers, trying to sort out how do we use this platform? Were the teachers or were the teachers they understood that this platform could help them. Oh my gosh, I’ve been meaning to do this badge. Now’s the time I’ve got to do it. How did the flood start to happen? Probably different ways, but speak a little bit about that.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit different ways. But I would say in 2020, we were really only just starting to go national. So Forward Edge traditionally is pretty regional to know we’re in Cincinnati. So kind of that circle there within a couple hours radius. So at that point, the program was primarily used by schools in Ohio. We had a couple districts outside Ohio, but again, we sort of as a response, have grown nationally because of COVID That helped with the national growth, for sure. But so the floodgates really happened from our sales team and our partner districts that we work with.
Katie Ritter :
So we work with about somewhere between like 120 to 150, given the various scope of what we do, but a little over 100 school districts that we work with here at Forward Edge across all of our services. So our sales guys had had a number of conversations, introduced Edgy badges to a number of districts, but many of them had, again, not really seen why they would maybe need it just yet. So those districts that really flooded in realized we had kind of put. They may or may not have already heard about it from the sales guys, but we certainly pushed it with all of our districts. Once COVID happened as a way to, hey, your teachers are going to need support. So that was really primarily where that initial flood came from. It also led to some partnerships.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, like the folks that the sales team were reaching out to, they didn’t necessarily know that Edgy was a solution to all the problems they were having right now. But one silver lining of this whole, like, oh my gosh, we’re all virtual is. We actually have this tool that is helpful. Here you go. And people are like, oh my gosh, I do need that.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah. And we also sped up the badges that we were creating in our current iteration. They’re called curated collections. So it’s essentially like a group of badges that does a task that’s very familiar to educators. So, for instance, like, giving feedback and assessing students, right? That’s a curated collection of badges that help teachers provide feedback or assess their students. So we actually created a collection for distance learning. And then we already had, obviously, a number of badges that support distance learning when they’re tech tools. But we created a number of badges specifically geared with this mindset of, I’m now teaching from home, all of my students are home.
Katie Ritter :
How do I actually develop my LMS and organize it in a way that makes sense when I’m not there to physically point things out to students on a screen, right. Or how am I engaging students in this online digital meeting space? What are some strategies? So we created a number of badges specific to that which ultimately helped for our current users which then ultimately helped our sales team really point as not only just hey, you have to pick and choose and find a badge that supports you right now in this crazy time. But we streamlined the process for our users of these are the badges you need right now to support your students in the situation that you’re in.
Joey Baggott:
Now, I guess. How has that reach been affected since the shift from the COVID the big C word that we don’t like to talk? So you talked about being very regional to the Ohio, the Indiana area. So I imagine that your sales team was very focused on the districts within your radius at first, but now you’re a nationwide platform now. So I guess how has that affected the way that Ford Edge does business, knowing that now you’ve quickly shifted and not just like over a span of years, but quickly shifted to a nationwide platform?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, so I think first and foremost, I’m probably starting to get some grays, so gray hairs with the Quick shift, but that’s something I’m dealing with personally. But it also led to partnerships on a national level for the same reasons that our local school districts were seeing value in the program. It allowed us kind of at the same time to dedicate new sales reps solely to Edgy badges because we were seeing like, there is a use case. We’ve already proved it pre COVID, and now COVID is just like hammering it home even more. So we invested in sales reps that were only focused on growing Edgy badges nationally, and then we were able to develop some partnerships. So one of our big partnerships is actually with McCall. That’s the acronym in Michigan. They are like the Edtech professional organization for educators in Michigan.
Katie Ritter :
Certain states have really specific requirements on where their teachers can earn those hours for their licensure renewal and it has to be like a state department approved sanctioned organization that can issue hours. So for that reason that creates a roadblock for us because that’s a big carrot at the end of the stick to make people want to purchase our program for their teachers. So for Michigan, Michigan is one of those they have to have very specific state approved hours. So we then reached out, long story short, partnered with McCall and now McCall essentially issues Michigan educators their hours on our behalf so that the state will accept them for renewal. So for the same reasons that our district saw value in the program, when we engaged in that conversation with McCall, they knew that their educators across the state of Michigan were in the same exact place that our teachers were here in Ohio and everywhere across the world and so they saw value in it. So that’s a big way that has helped us grow on a national level is those partnerships. Another thing that we invested in, and I believe it was either at the end of 2019 and so we got it right before schools closed in 2020 or it was right around that time. But anyway, really the go to organization in the US.
Katie Ritter :
Nationally and pretty internationally too is called ISTI, the International Society for Technology and Education and they are really the go to professional ed tech organization for education all the way through higher ed. And they have a set of standards for students, educators, instructional technology coaches, education leaders and computer science teachers. So with those set of standards they have a rigorous evaluation process for software programs, training programs, whether it’s used for students or educators or any of the stakeholder groups. And so we applied and went through the very rigorous process for badges where a committee from ISTI reviewed every single badge that we had at the time and they ultimately deemed it that if you are trying to help your educators achieve these ISTI educator standards, which is really just like good teaching, where we’re at right now utilizes technology effectively for instruction. And so we ultimately were awarded the seal of alignment for the Educator standards and we have since then gotten it renewed and there’s even further alignment with their standards now. And so that was also really huge for us know, to the exact point of whose little forward edge this regional Cincinnati company, we didn’t have any name recognition nationally. So that was really important to me that we achieved that seal of alignment because it really added this national immediately recognizable with the name iste credibility and name recognition to our program. So that was also really big in supporting our growth.
Katie Ritter :
And then we’ve been doing a lot of traveling with conferences once they kicked back up in person as well.
Annakate Ross:
Too.
Katie Ritter :
So that’s helped tremendously as well.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, you guys have come so far. I mean, I knew some of this origin story, but just to connect it with the work we’ve done for you guys, moving from the WordPress site to a custom software application, like hearing how you’ve grown and bloomed and expanded and the number of users in there now, it all makes so much more sense. I mean, you needed that. This WordPress site was very impressive. I mean, I’ve got to say, for what it was doing, for all the bells and whistles that were kind of tacked on and bolted on to make all this work, you guys were doing a lot.
Katie Ritter :
I appreciate that. I did a lot of the WordPress site, but I also have to give a ton of credit to my colleague Michael Rausch, who really helped with a lot of the WordPress coding. But, yeah, I mean, between myself and Michael, we pretty much built that bad boy and know, we pieced it together. It was held together with Band AIDS by the time we came to you all with the I mean, I can’t say enough about Atiba and just the work that y’all have done with us from the very beginning, supporting WordPress to ultimately moving forward to developing this new platform. You all have just been absolutely wonderful.
Annakate Ross:
Well, thank you. It’s been super fun to see the trajectory and the evolution of it all because you weren’t a particularly old platform when we started working with you. So now to see where you guys are now and I did want to take it back to the platform began with a great origin story, Humble Beginnings, helping teachers with technology in the classroom so they can do more with less time. Do you have any anecdotes of specific stories from teachers of things that they’ve learned that help them? Like some feel good stories, kind of like, you started small, you’ve gotten big, you’ve achieved all these standards, now you’re in multistates. But how is it helping teachers in the classroom on a day to day basis? You know, kind of like, right at the bottom.
Katie Ritter :
I know I love these stories, and I’m always trying to pull them out of teachers because when they submit their evidence so frequently, they’ll submit they’ll type something about, like, thank you so much. This was amazing for my students. But a lot of times it’s fairly generic. They don’t get necessarily super specific with it with us, but a few that I do know first, I’ll give a shout out to Jill Du Bois. Jill actually works for us full time now for the Edgy badges program, reviewing badges and providing feedback. But she actually started she lives in Florida, so she was a teacher with our first school in Florida that came on board, and she had been teaching for 20 years, second grade, and she was not a tech savvy person. I mean, to this day, she’ll still tell you she is not a tech savvy person. She’s a great troubleshooter and problem solver because she figures it out at this point.
Katie Ritter :
But when she first started in the program, she was not really using technology very much with her second graders. And it just fundamentally and completely changed her teaching her last couple of years before she ultimately decided to leave teaching. And she joined.edu badges full time now. But one of the great things that she did that she learned from the program is a tool called Book Creator. And essentially, long story short, you create digital books, and you can embed multimedia video, text, images, audio, all sorts of stuff into Book Creator, and they’re digital books that you can share. And so she did Book Creator learned about it and did it with her students as a kind of all group activity and then ultimately grew into that was what she started using for her students when they would be done with whatever their center, their station, or their work, it was okay. Book Creator was one of ultimately many choices she gave them that were different tech things she had learned in the program. But Book Creator was one of those choices that she gave her second graders.
Katie Ritter :
Like, when you finish your work, you can go work on your book creators. And the students got to just they got to make up their own books. Right? It wasn’t like we’re all creating books on the water cycle. It was you get to create a book on whatever you’re passionate about, whatever you’re interested in. That was school appropriate, of course, but second graders generally aren’t too inappropriate, generally speaking. Yeah, generally speaking. And she noticed one day that her library was full because these kids were working and creating so many books, not only in class when they were done, but they started working on them from home. So that was just like, kind of this amazing thing to hear about, just sparking all of this joy for learning and creating in these students.
Katie Ritter :
And they were doing research on their topics that they were creating. And one little kiddo made a book all about the ocean. He was fascinated with the ocean, so he was doing research on the ocean. So that was really awesome. Less, like, feel good because it’s not second graders, but still a really cool story. We had a high school teacher who did the very basic Google Drive badge, which covers a lot of just organization and kind of quick navigation tips in Google Drive. And a big misconception is that young people, whether it’s teachers entering the profession or our students, are super tech savvy. They’ve grown up with technology, so they’re super tech savvy.
Katie Ritter :
And the misconception is, like, yes, they pick it up quickly, and they might know how to look on social media or watch a YouTube video, but they don’t know how to use technology for academic and professional purposes. So that’s where these high school kids were, is that everything’s in Google Drive, but they don’t know how to organize it, how to navigate it, how to find things quickly. So it sort of just kind of put a magnifying glass on their already not so great organizational skills as many high schoolers have not yet developed. But so this teacher learned the Google Drive badge, realized our kids need this information, and the counselors ended up having him teach that information that he learned from our badge to every single kid in the high school, rounding them through. Yeah, and bringing them through. So that impacted that one super basic badge, impacted an entire building of high school students, which was pretty awesome.
Annakate Ross:
That is really cool. And actually, this is a great time to plug the podcast that you guys have.
Katie Ritter :
Thanks.
Annakate Ross:
So this is the Restart Recharge Podcast, which is a podcast for educational coaches. By educational coaches, right?
Katie Ritter :
Yes.
Annakate Ross:
And I just listened to your tech with littles episode, and that was such a prime. So much of that episode was talking about how we just assume these kids, quote unquote kids, they know so much about technology, you don’t have to teach them anything. But, like, what you’re saying with Google Drive, with these high school students, if you don’t know about kind of these basics, fundamentals, you can’t really do. And in that episode, I thought it was so interesting how you were talking know, these kids, they don’t know their letters. They can’t you they can’t log. Like, how do you turn the thing on and how do you start from the beginning? And I think as people not working in the Ed tech space, it’s really easy to overlook all of that. And I just found that episode really interesting to kind of see it from your guys point of view. And it really plays in with what you’re saying now with these high school kids.
Joey Baggott:
Yeah. And also, I think that you look at job applications and job requirements today for when kids are getting out of school and talking more to, obviously, the older kids and high school kids. But a lot of these job applications, you see that, like, hey, proficiency in Google or Microsoft and things that you’re able to get badges on. Now, I saw a lot on Adobe products, which is really cool because a lot of jobs require some at least knowledge of. So, you know what? What you guys are doing are really shaping this fundamental learning that we have as adults that we don’t realize we could have used back in high school. So I love it. I love the story about the second graders and the digital books. I’ve got my son, he sits in front of Alexa asking her questions all day long about animals and about different creatures in the it’s just it’s really neat the way that kids can use so to move on.
Joey Baggott:
I guess we talked a little bit about your podcast and to wrap things up, or at least start wrapping things up, I guess. What surprised you in your years working with Ford Edge and then Edgy badges after that?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, a lot. On which day? But I think what surprised me in the context of Edgy badges is how much it is impacting teachers in schools. It just warms my heart. I’m a Sappy person, so I cry pretty easy, but I cry sometimes when I hear these stories and see this unsolicited feedback that our users send us about how much it is they’ve been teaching for over 20 years. And we’re making them feel relevant again and supported, and we’re re energizing them and making them excited about what they can do with their kids again and how we’re finally making PD relevant to them and through giving them choice and just how many opportunities we’re opening for their students. Because they never would have known about it if it weren’t for our program. So that in and of itself just kind of surprises me about how much it is helping, especially because I think when you’re not in education, we think so easily because to your point, Joey, of all these tech skills we need in jobs. So when you’re working a job outside of education, like you’re using technology so much, you don’t realize how disconnected educators still are sometimes because they haven’t had the training.
Katie Ritter :
No one’s showing them at anywhere near as fast a pace as the technology is coming out. So that has been surprising. But the biggest thing over the years that has surprised me is just the platform’s ability to live on its own outside of one of our coaches being there. Because again, I was pretty adamant about that at the beginning. Like, no, we have to have a coach with this program for it to do as well as it has. So that has been a surprising in a really good way about how we went back to the drawing board and figured out how this program can live and breathe without a Forward Edge coach present in the district.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, that seems like a neat milestone once you realized that probably was a really neat place to start and you were getting a lot of great feedback, but once the platform was really up and running, you could kind of take it from there.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah.
Annakate Ross:
So what is next for forward? Edge and edgeu. What do you see for the platform coming down the pike in this next year?
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, it’s just been so crazy to see it grow. So in particular, we have a couple of universities who are using the program for their student, the university students who are in teacher prep programs. So colleges of education and when they get ready to student teach universities are pretty hamstrung on how much technology most teacher prep programs, they have one tech course for the teachers, which is nowhere near enough for them to actually know what they’re doing. So that’s a big market. So I’m hoping to grow more there to help more teachers who are coming into the field be more prepared to utilize technology. So looking for more university partnerships. So that’s kind of a focus. More partnerships with organizations like McCall in other states where we may not have any customers yet for the barrier of the credit hours has to be approved by an organization.
Katie Ritter :
So that’s exciting. And then at a larger forward edge scale, our team of coaches is doing a lot of work of training and supporting other instructional coaches across the country. So those programs have just been growing pretty quickly. And we’ve seen that this badge program supports coaches really well because they learn the tools and then they go back to support their teachers with it.
Annakate Ross:
Yeah, kind of a whole other subset of a different target audience for you guys, but to still distill your mission. Down well, Katie, this has been so wonderful. I feel like we could go on and on, but at this point, I think we’ve covered the basics. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Katie Ritter :
Yeah, thank you so much.
Claudine Claudio:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Half Geek, half Human Podcast. Make sure to follow the half geek, half human podcast on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We’ll see you next time.
Joey Baggott:
You’ve been listening to half geek, half human.