Happy Beta Birthday!

On November 5th, 2013, the Edcite team released our website for Beta testing. It’s been a crazy and exciting year, filled with lots of change and growth. After taking a moment to step back and observe, we realize we have lots and lots to celebrate.

Our growing teacher community:

Over 14,000 teachers and about 34,000 students have signed up for Edcite in the last year! With the help of teachers around the country, and around the world, our assignments library has grown to include close to 4,000 assignments, with 2,000 assignments aligned to the Common Core, 50 assignments to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and almost 40 assignments aligned to the NCCA standards in Ireland.

Our Junior CEOs: 

Edcite’s motto is “empowering teachers, engaging students”. But it’s ever important to us to ensure we are doing a good job. To that end, we started working with students and teachers at Katherine Smith Elementary School. This summer, we led the first-of-its-kind elementary school internship whereby 15 students examined Edcite and education technology through a lense of design thinking, and gave us tons of feedback on how to make Edcite a more appealing site for students. Read about this awesome program in this Edsurge article!

Empowering Teachers:

Edcite is first and foremost a site for teachers — a site to provide teachers with quality digital resources, to help teachers collaborate, and to save teachers time on grading and planning. We know that there are a lot of transitions for teachers with new standards and a shifting focus to technology. To help teachers prepare, the Edcite team has led professional development sessions in New Jersey, Ohio, California, Mississippi, and Dublin, Ireland. We hope to host many more in-person or virtual PD sessions in the future!

Where We’ve Been:

You’ve given us feedback, and we’ve listened to you! Over the past few months alone, we have added tons of new features to our site, including question by question grading, rubric-enabled grading capabilities, easy multimedia uploads, and new question types. Our site looks completely different from how it did last year!

Where We’re Going:

Over the next months, you will see more PARCC item types and PARCC-specific assignments being created on Edcite. We will also be adding features such as folders, standard-by-standard reports, and more tools to enable teacher to teacher collaboration. Get Edcited!

If you want to help us celebrate all these accomplishments and more, share your kind words or your favorite assignment on social media and use the hashtag #betabirthday! With the help and feedback from teachers like you, we can hardly wait to see what year 2 has in store for us!