Nine-year teaching veteran Stacion Dorrant takes advantage of the full range of HotChalk Learning Environment features to save herself five to ten hours a week with her students. She posts class assignments, emails students about upcoming events and quizzes and encourages them to go on HotChalk to keep on top of missing work. “It’s a blessing,” says Dorrant, who uses the application with her ethnically diverse student population at the all-girl Maria High School in Chicago. “Students are always aware of what’s happening in class and can play an active role in their learning.”

The kids also use HotChalk’s safe environment to collaborate and tutor each other around homework and other assignments, emailing each other questions and comments as they complete assignments from home.

Beyond that, Dorrant has harnessed HotChalk’s ability to keep parents in the loop as a means to ensure less organized students don’t fall through the cracks. “I spoke with a parent whose daughter is not doing well and told her how she could log in to HotChalk and see what is going on in class. Now she knows exactly what he daughter needs to turn in.”  To date, Dorrant estimates maybe 50 percent of parents have checked in with HotChalk to monitor their student’s progress.

Dorrant’s favorite things about HotChalk?
First, she says, the ease of access, which allows all stakeholders to quickly see important class information 24 hours a day, seven days a week from any location with Internet access. Her second favorite feature is the gradebook with makes her job easier by scoring, calculating and tabulating grades, “almost like magic.”

“I don’t know why everybody in the universe is not using HotChalk,” says Dorrant. Her advice to those who haven’t: “Just try it!”

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