Why Choose Chronicle Cloud? What Is It’s Purpose?

Aristotle

Sometimes the most obvious solutions are hiding in plain sight! 

And sometimes, best practices are overlooked because they upend decades of conditioning and the so-called “conventional wisdom :)! 

The education industry is rife with such examples. Schools are using the same ancient, moribund, exhausted teaching methods. Except for an online presence with a school website and information on food, transport, and staff, only a few schools use internet technology for lesson content —and, diminutively, classroom management. 

A 14th-century illustration by Laurentius de Voltolina depicts a university lecture in medieval Italy. The scene is easily recognizable because of its parallels to the modern day. The teacher lectures from a podium at the front of the room while the students sit in rows and listen. Some students have books in front of them and appear to follow along. A few look bored. Some are talking to their neighbors. One seems to be sleeping. Classrooms today look similar, though you might find modern students looking at their laptops, tablets, or smartphones instead of books (though probably open to Facebook). 

Educators and teachers are sticking to the age-old, almost moribund pedagogy methods when the education sector is the home to all the world’s innovations! Isn’t that ironic :)?

Why Chronicle Cloud?

I will share the potential Chronicle Cloud has in terms of transforming education. The features of the Chronicle Cloud app are designed to apply even the latest research vis-a-vis data analytics and learning analytics. Technological advances concerning the computing power to manage large volumes of information (known as ‘Big Data’) and data mining allow the opportunities to be explored in education, execution evaluation and administration models. 

Chronicle Cloud, a classroom management system, is powerfully integrated with features critical to achieving learning targets.

Teachers incorporate online content in their lessons for better engagement, but classroom management remains the most elusive despite the education sector being home to most innovations. Most administrators will give you blank looks if you talk about classroom management:). Because teachers and educators conventionally take care of every aspect of their classrooms- from teaching to administrative work-negligible thought has gone into classroom management. 

With almost two decades in school management, I concede that classroom management is the most overlooked aspect of the education sector. Schools and teachers are also oblivious, to a large extent, to the profound significance of efficient classroom management to better pedagogy and learning outcomes. 

The education sector has failed to bring classroom management into perspective the implications of better planning and management to augment student learning outcomes, results, and passion for lifelong learning. Greater academic independence, high-order thinking and reasoning then remain hidden even now.

The primary focus of Chronicle Cloud is to confer notes, execute lesson plans, evaluate individual student learning and program on-time interventions, and store data and records. This includes student information, assessment results, Attendance, and Rubrics reports.

When these documents and records are stored on a centralized system, staff can access them in seconds. 

Classroom Management

Chronicle Cloud and Effective Classroom Management

The structure is the organizational foundation of the Classroom. Many conflicts and behaviour problems are prevented in a well-structured classroom because children know the learning targets. Routines and procedures are vital to classroom structure. Establishing expectations on the first day and beyond is critical. A well-run classroom uses ongoing strategies.

Chronicle Cloud helps teachers organize their classrooms from planning and execution to evaluation. The learning targets are set at every juncture. With the Lesson Plan, the teachers clearly define and write down their expectations from the topic. At the end of the Lesson Plan, teachers evaluate their lesson delivery and see whether they need to work more on the subject or the concept or can move to the next. Features like Note-taking-individual and group notes, Formative Assessments, Attendance, the Gradebook, Rubrics, and others lay the foundation for a clear pedagogical structure. Educators get data insights into students’ work and can set learning targets according to the competencies of individual and group students. 

Storing and managing classroom data can be a tedious administrative process. With Chronicle Cloud, teachers do away with disconnected Excel spreadsheets and emails. Chronicle Cloud allows you to-

  • Mark Attendance
  • Edit, view, and save Attendance
  • generate reports
  • Share with colleagues and administration.

Communication with parents and colleagues via the app is the most convenient way of communicating and collaborating. The data is personalized to every student; teachers and parents do not have to rummage through emails. 

The universal theme of the Chronicle cloud app is data analytics, Learning analytics, Knowledge augmentation, personalized learning experiences, improved engagement, ease of communication, and, most significantly, remote access.

Why is Effective Classroom Management essential

For better learning, effective classroom management is critical and imperative. Technology supports maximum learning these days. Teachers use subject content available on the internet. But there are few and far between apps that will help teachers with real-time classroom management. Real-time classroom management occupies maximum time. Note-taking, for instance, is a challenging task. And conferring notes for a group of students is time and energy-consuming. 

Teachers must save time on mundane, repetitive tasks using Chronicle Cloud. Chronicle Cloud is feature-ready with all the essential classroom management features. Conferring Notes enables teachers to attach multimedia files and write specific notes. The Group Note feature allows teachers to confer notes for the whole group. Likewise, features like Attendance, Formative Assessment, Gradebook, and Rubrics allow teachers to collect data and plan on-time interventions for the individual student and the whole group.

Transferring tasks to the app, teachers have more time to plan better lessons, pay attention to individual learning needs, and collaborate with teachers and parents for better learning outcomes.

Elevate Traditional Classroom Learning

The world will be complex in the 21 century, with blended learning shepherding toward personalized learning. Education will move from academic-specific years to life-long learning. Data analytics will make learning more focused and fulfilling for individual students. AI will storm every sector, including education, albeit in a potent form. AR/VR are already in use. Pedagogy is moving toward experiential and immersive styles for enriching the learning process. Competency-based education problem-solving will be at the core of learning critical thinking required in STEM. Education will significantly shift from classroom teaching to classroom management because technology will handle most tasks. Keeping the future in mind, Chronicle Cloud helps teachers manage their classrooms most efficiently. 

 Chronicle Cloud help you

  • As a teacher, Chronicle Cloud helps you plan your lessons, confer Notes to monitor and track learning progress and inform immediate intervention. Plan quick Formatives, check student Attendance history, monitor your lesson activities and evaluate your students with Grading and Rubrics. Chronicle Cloud makes sharing information with colleagues and parents very easy.
  • As a parent, Chronicle Cloud keeps you updated on your child’s academic progress daily so that you may plan interventions immediately and not wait for the annual report.

Based on research and best practices and aligned with MTSS, and SEL models in elementary education, Chronicle Cloud has a unique way of gathering data keeping the child’s emotional intelligence in focus.

The most beneficial aspect of the Chronicle Cloud app is identifying challenges and giving real-time data to teachers and parents to intervene before a problem becomes severe. In that, Chronicle Cloud helps you-

  • Create a Data-Driven Decision-Making Culture – With Chronicle Cloud, there’s no need to rely on blind faith. You’ll have numbers and statistics to back up your decisions, which can lead to more successful outcomes.
  • Access Data Easier – Chronicle Cloud depends on the same technological infrastructure to capture, store and organize information, so it’s easy to find what you need. Chronicle Cloud app makes sharing data and content with your colleagues easy. 
  • Find Information More Quickly – Since your data lives in one place, there’s no need to search through dozens of files and folders to find one report, making the process much quicker.

Chronicle Cloud is a well-thought-over, one-stop-shop digital classroom management system tool your school must have.

Classes

 The simple navigation will facilitate you with creating single and multiple classes with a few clicks of a button. 

Note-taking- Little things matter-

Teachers confer the minutest details of the learning journey of every individual student. Teachers can attach multimedia files and mark relevant notes as artifacts. They can download relevant Notes for future use and share and collaborate with colleagues and parents to augment learning.

Group Notes: The Group Notes feature allows teachers to create groups according to individual student competencies. 

With features like the Lesson Plan, Attendance, Note-taking, Formative Assessment, Gradebook, Rubrics, etc, on the Chronicle Cloud app, teachers can:

  • Track and evaluate student performance.
  • Have better control of teaching.
  • Transparency 
  • Organized information for colleagues, administration, and parents.
  • Reduced/ negligible paperwork
  • Time and cost saving
  • Improved communication and collaboration
  • Secure platform to capture data and keep records.

Beginning with K–12 education, most state educational systems use products from multiple vendors, and each district deploys their systems independently. Historically, these applications have used limited (or no) underlying data standards. Instead, most employ internal data models, and integration across systems requires a patchwork of connections at the state and local levels. Consequently, there are gaps in the integration among disparate applications, and many systems are not interoperable. 

An integrated classroom management tool must be user-friendly. According to TechRepublic, ten things make software user-friendly:

  • Simple to install
  • Easy to update
  • Intuitive
  • Efficient
  • Pleasant, easy-to-navigate GUI
  • Easy to remove
  • Doesn’t need third-party software
  • Easy to troubleshoot
  • Adheres to standards
  • Effective error handling

Systems Thinking in Education and Chronicle Cloud

 A system is “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something”, and systems thinking is a “way of understanding these elements to achieve a desired result”. Briefly, Systems Thinking is the understanding of interrelated and interdependent networks.

Systems Thinking in education has the potential to transform the Classroom into a space of observing, theorizing, discovering, and analyzing, thus linking academic learning to the real world. Systems are a network of relationships (Capra and Luisi) with feedback loops in which a system can adjust and respond accordingly. Systems thinkers may communicate their understanding of a specific system using causal and feedback loops to identify points of influence and leverage. 

It describes the evolution of pedagogy and learning from a traditional, individualistic, and linear approach into a more holistic and non-linear way of understanding the world. This framework encompasses other emerging educational theories, including systems thinking—the second framework—that capture the multiple, interconnecting, and interdisciplinary systems that are interdependent and inform one another.

In a learning organization, individuals can locate their reality and projections of power that interrupt, disrupt, or alter a system.

Systems thinking demands understanding the “big picture” to leverage change in social, economic, cultural, cognitive, and emotional states for a thriving twenty-first-century existence. 

In the classroom management context, this would mean that educators loop together every aspect of Classroom and remote learning to create an individualized feedback loop and personalize instruction. 

Chronicle Cloud users applied Systems Thinking to the second-grade curriculum to investigate water use and take actions to raise conservation awareness in their community. Teachers conferred notes, made groups according to the competencies, planned, evaluated and executed with minimum fuss. Teachers used Formative assessments and Rubrics to give clinical feedback to students and plan interventions. Systems Thinking integrates all features of Classroom Management on the Chronicle Cloud app.