In the summer of 2019, we at Formative journeyed to North Carolina Virtual Academy to speak with Sonimar Villegas, NCVA Academic Administrator to document how they were using Formative to redesign the way they taught their students.

The team at Formative loved NCVA's student-driven approach. Efficiency is key in teaching virtually. Like other online schools, NCVA sees increasing students, standards, and studies, so even one struggling child, or one ineffective platform, can upend schedules and learning.

As such, when NCVA dug into its process of moving student work from paper, to Dropbox, to Gradebook, the cracks started to appear: Existing systems weren’t user-friendly for teachers, necessitating time-intensive and repetitive feedback.

I’d heard from many teachers that they wanted to look at their data differently. We could see overall results but had a hard time digging into the whys,

explains Sonimar Villegas, NCVA Academic Administrator.

Parents complained about having to work across too many platforms, so we knew we needed something more functional and effective and allowed for more consistency across the board.

The final list of requirements that NCAA we're looking to solve for by combining tools from multiple vendors were the following:

• Include everything on a single platform.
• Student-friendly set-up (single join code).
• Show your work options (drawn in-app, upload images, video & audio).
• Data retrieval (for teachers and admins).
• Immediate feedback (as students are typing, feedback can be sent).
• Tracking tools (ability to gauge success over time)