The winners of the 2014 eSchool News Readers’ Choice Awards have been released and PR with Panache! is thrilled to announce that three members of our client family have been honored

This past spring more than 1,300 K-12 educators and administrators nominated their favorite ed-tech products and services for consideration. When submitting nominations, educators were asked to describe how they were using the product to improve teaching and learning in their schools and districts.

myON, observe4succes and Odysseyware were honored among the resulting list of 50 winners.  See what the nominating educators had to say about our clients below!

myON

myON is a personalized digital literacy platform that offers unlimited access to more than 7,000 enhanced digital books, with multimedia supports, real-time assessments, and close reading tools. “We use myON to provide access to digital content for readers at their interest and reading level,” said Cindy Roberts, director of curriculum for the Emmett School District in Idaho. “Each student is able to create an individualized profile based on their interests and have access to a list of recommended books. Teachers can create customized book lists for students, groups, or classes related to projects or units of content. We are also finding that the text-to-speech feature along with the graphic novel layout is encouraging reluctant readers to spend more time interacting with texts.”

observe4success

observe4success is a web-based tool that administrators can use to observe, record, and analyze instructional practices to support high-quality teaching. The product “allows administrators to take notes and rate instructional practices via an iPad or notebook computer. skills and standards in the program are customizable to the individual school, and immediate teacher feedback is possible,” said Jaime Christensen, director of schools for Spectrum Academy in Utah. “It also allows [administrators] to upload videos of teachers delivering lessons, so that the teacher [can] review and note strengths and weaknesses.”

Odysseyware

Odysseyware delivers fully online courses and online content for blended learning classrooms, enhanced with tools for note-taking, translation, and other supports. “Odysseyware provides many options for school districts,” said Steve Carney, executive director of career and alternative education services for California’s Madera County Office of Education. “They have a great selection of core academic classes, as well as elective classes. Their products have helped hundreds of our students recover credits, and in many cases [students] have caught up to their class and graduated with a diploma. … Before switching to Odysseyware, we used a competitor’s product. While the product was good, it did not measure up to the built-in security that Odysseyware has to keep students from cheating. Our teachers and staff love the product and have found it very user friendly.”

To read more about this year’s award winners and honorable mentions, please visit http://www.eschoolnews.com/rca.