digiCOACH

digiCOACH has been enhancing walks since 2012 and the digiCOACH team works hard to bring your walkthorugh plan to life.

I have been using DigiCOACH for my classroom observations and it has been effective in identifying instructional needs of teachers when it it used routinely altogether baseline data. I must say sometimes I am scared of doing an observation because the application might crash and all the work I put into the observation gets lost. Hopefully they update the application soon. Overall, it is a really good application for quality data collection for assessing teacher needs within instruction. Only thing I really wish could happen is that the program be free to use year after year once it is purchased. It is only available for use for the school year and has to be rebought every year. It is pretty pricy for a while school to buy and trot that, it should be paid for once and be used without limit. I guarantee that more schools will use this software more if it is not subscription based.

With Explicit Direct Instruction taking the reigns on education, digiCoach is an excellent instrument to provide teachers with productive feedback. Our school is implementing TAPPLE assessment strategies within all of its classrooms and this app is a great way for administrators to ensure that their teachers are applying EDI in a way which best benefits students. As a department chair, I'm held to making sure that the teachers within my department are incorporating EDI through TAPPLE strategies...this app is perfect for that! With our WASC accreditation review coming up in March of 2013, I can see digiCoach being used proactively by administrators (as opposed to putting pressure on teachers) and allowing for better classroom instruction...leading to better results. Two of our Assistant principals gave up on Walkthrough SE since it is very limited...I'm convinced that they'll be using digiCoach to assist them in their classroom walkthroughs before long.