ExitTicket started as a ‘back of the envelope’ idea between a handful of teachers and administrators at Leadership Public Schools in early 2011. Since our schools are located in the harshest of urban neighborhoods, most of our students come to us well below grade level. Many teachers and institutions classify these high school students as “too hard to teach and too late to help.”
That just didn’t sit well with our small band of data nerds, tech geeks and instructional strategists. We had other ideas. So we sat down to create a system made by teachers for teachers to rapidly engage students.
In the Spring of 2011 we’d been piloting “Clickers” or polling devices in the classroom with some decent results. But we took it up a notch and created a “Clicker on Steroids” or a first version of a home brewed application that ran on a smart phone. We hacked together a prototype and launched “ExitTicket” in one classroom at Leadership Public Schools Richmond Campus. We went head to head with the traditional paper based exit ticket currently being used. At first, we were getting our hat handed to us, as we didn’t expect all the extra issues facing schools that are seriously under-funded and without decent technology infrastructure. But we diligently sat in the classroom with the kids, every day for four periods a day for six weeks. Our battle cry was “Is it working yet?!”
In a short 1 month of rapid 24/7 development, we had our little app cranking away, and soon we had kids completely and utterly engaged. Lots of fist pumping, exclamations and involvement whenever ExitTicket rolled. Suddenly a raucous class of 9th graders became seriously focused. That was the day paper tickets were retired.
But not only did we retire paper tickets, but we also stepped out of the “clicker and polling apps” arena all together and created a whole new next generation of student response systems. Most polling apps are simply ‘consensus’ and anonymous based, focusing on the ‘right’ answer. We found that most of these apps, students could hide, not answer, or guess, and the teacher couldn’t ever tell who was answering the wrong answers. ExitTicket changed all that, we created “Intervention Hotlists” and data displays that tells the teacher immediately in real time who they need to focus on and intervene. We stepped up the rigor with adding ‘Free Response’ questions, and the teacher gets a real time view of every response from each student.
ExitTicket continued to grow in features and before we knew it, we had teachers and administrators visiting our classroom to see what was going on. Grade were going up, kids were more involved. Soon we rolled ExitTicket out to another teacher, then another. Then to one of our other schools in Hayward. Immediately we on boarded 3 more teachers. By the end of the school semester, we were creating almost 250,000 assessment artifacts every week, and our students had MAP gains of 2.6 year.
Eureka! We had our app. So we went back to the drawing board and came up with ExitTicket Version 2. In August 2012 we launched with 10 teachers in all four campuses, and doubled that by the winter break. ExitTicket v2 is considered a ‘big data’ enterprise application as now we collect about 250,000 artifacts every day and it keeps growing exponentially. The true power of ExitTicket comes from the innovative fresh and new ways we present meaningful, real time data to teachers. Teachers now have a deeper understanding of their students’ comprehension like never before.
We are extremely excited to now share ExitTicket with other schools and institutions, and hope you have as much success and impact as we do.
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