Tue 16 June

What if someone wanted to really personalise education? REALLY personalise it? Where would you start?

Altschool is a school in the San Francisco area (and soon Palo Alto CA and Brooklyn NY) which was started by former Head of Personalisation at Google, Max Ventilla. He sought a better school for his own children and was prepared to design it from the ground up. We met today with Carolyn Wilson, Director of Education at Altschool, and were provided with an very in-depth session on the rationale of the school.

It’s an independent school, with staff as shareholders. Other investors include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and other venture capital providers. The school is actually a collection of microschools with a couple of larger campuses, largely because SF real estate is not easy to find and the school thus leases existing buildings that have been gyms, restaurants, etc. The Folsom St campus sits between a metal fabrication workshop and a gym, in a neighbourhood that Carolyn describes as “gritty”. This is not a negative – the school believes education should take place in the real world.

To develop the tools to support education, a team of developers is employed by the school and works onsite with educators via intermediaries. The software is thus developed to do what the school wants, not what a software company wants. This has resulted in the “Sorting Hat” admissions tool and more importantly a student-centred teaching and learning application that links tasks and activities with standards and assessment. This gives students a “playlist” of designed activities that they follow (these are by no means necessarily online activities) and student work is recorded (by them) and assessed. Parents have access to the assessments online and via weekly meetings.

Lessons are recorded with a series of classroom cameras so that teachers can analyse the lesson and look at individual sections to improve their practice. a watch device will allow them to bookmark moments of note so they can find them easily later. Teachers who don’t want lessons recorded simply don’t work at altschool – and they have thousands of enquiries for jobs.