Naiku Announces First Round of Innovative Educator Grant Recipients

MINNEAPOLIS - March 30, 2015 - PRLog -- Next-generation assessment provider to award grants valued at $250,000 to support innovation in learner-centric strategies by individual educators and schools

Now more than ever it is imperative that innovation in education is recognized and shared across the industry. Naiku (http://www.naiku.net), a leading provider of next-generation student assessment solutions, is thrilled to award its first two Teacher Team School Grants (http://www.naiku.net/grants) to educators at West Gate Elementary School in Prince William County in Virginia and Pine City High School in Pine City Public Schools located in Minnesota. Naiku awarded grants to these teams to further the innovative work they are doing around differentiated instruction and personalized learning.

Mr. Patrick Heath, instructional technology coach at West Gate Elementary commented: “We are extremely fortunate to receive this grant from Naiku. We feel that the use of learner-centric assessment will benefit our students and teachers in our effort to increase achievement scores for all students, with an emphasis on our ELL and disabled student populations. Historically, these groups of students have not scored as well on state assessments. With the support of Naiku’s Innovative Teacher Team Grant, we will see improvement in our assessment results and long term positive benefits for our students.”

Naiku began accepting and reviewing applications for the school-wide team grants earlier this year and will continue doing so through April 30, 2015. Each grant awarded will support the individual or team of educators through June 2016.

With 28 school-wide team grants remaining (http://www.naiku.net/grants), and approximately 10 individual educator (http://www.naiku.net/grants) grants awarded continuously every month, plenty of opportunity remains for qualified educators.  Educators can find more information, including application requirements, at http://www.naiku.net/grants/.

Pine City High School Tech Integration Specialist Dihanna Fedder said: “I think Naiku is amazing and am so pleased to have won an Innovative Teacher Team Grant! Our students and staff will benefit from seeing progress on standards, the support and flexibility of the software, and the opportunity to use assessment artifacts that are already prepared and available through our curriculum. We look forward to being able to align our assessments and provide students the opportunity for remediation and feedback throughout the assessment process.”

“Each of our Innovative Educator Grants are geared towards supporting a team or teams within a school in the practice of forward-thinking strategies around differentiation, personalized learning and creating learner-centric classrooms,” stated Naiku CEO Greg Wright. “We believe that the combination of award-winning software tools and expert psychometrician-led professional development provides the schools the necessary support to enable the innovation that they are seeking to achieve. We are excited about both of our first school grant winners and are looking forward to supporting their success in the classroom.”

For more information about Naiku visit www.naiku.net.

About Naiku:

Naiku is devoted to improving K-12 learning by providing next generation classroom assessment solutions on an open, SaaS based platform. Naiku provides educators the ability to readily measure and monitor student progress using any web enabled device and engage students more deeply through unique teacher-student interactive feedback tools. Naiku allows educators to create, share, import and deliver standards aligned quizzes and tests in any subject area. With automated scoring and built-in reports, teachers can inform and differentiate their instruction and data can be shared across the school and district to enhance best practices. With Naiku, Better Assessment leads to Better Learning. For more information, visit www.naiku.net/.