SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 09, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Mission Labs announces its Educational Virtual Assistant (EVA) to help schools unlock the transformational promises of education technology. EVA is the industry’s first bot to unify and streamline compartmentalized information that educators, students, and parents need to enable each other to succeed.
EVA centralizes information across the many databases schools use to track academic records, disciplinary actions, special education requirements, schedules, lesson plans, and student profiles. It then monitors and funnels relevant information educators and families need in order to make informed decisions for a given situation. EVA enables humans to take proactive action by:
- Alerting a teacher to make legally mandated accommodations for special education students prior to major assignments
- Notifying teachers, students, and parents if an upcoming assignment could lead to a significant grade change
- Analyzing performance trends to help educators identify and stem developing issues
- Facilitating follow-up with colleagues, students, and parents on information EVA surfaces
“After retiring from the Marines, my father went into at-risk schools to continue serving his country,” said Danny Lairon, co-founder and CEO of Mission Labs. “Through him, I saw firsthand that giving kids a good education lifts up entire communities. But classroom success requires the right tools. We built EVA to be the missing link between human action and static information strewn across too many databases.”
“Educators are overwhelmed by too many technological silos and too much unorganized bits of data bombarding the classroom,” noted Dr. Jesse Soza, co-founder of Mission Labs and teacher sustainability consultant. “Compounding the problem, educational software is usually built from a technologist’s perspective and provides minimal user training. This produces a clunky user experience, which impedes staff from fully realizing the intended benefits.”
"I’m fascinated with EVA’s potential to help teachers access information they need to guide their instructional practice,” said Linda Murray, former superintendent of San Jose Unified School District (SJUSD). “In my tenure, we struggled to find desktop tools for teachers that provided easy ways for them to query databases and get custom reports that would facilitate their teaching. This solution does just that and holds great promise."
"Centralizing data from multiple sources is valuable to educators who are limited in time and technological competence,” said Michelle Reeves, District Instructional Coach for Elementary Special Education, SJUSD. “Often they become confused about the process of learning a new edtech system or once on-boarded, frustrated with the length of time it takes to access the content and end up avoiding it altogether. As a special education teacher, EVA is also appealing because it enables general education teachers access to my students’ individualized education program (IEP) goals and their applicable accommodations and modifications."
"I'm super excited that EVA responds to voice, which dramatic cuts time spent looking through databases for must-have information,” said Katrina Johnson, Director of Students Services, Ceiba Public Schools. “Our school uses different systems for grades, attendance, behavior, and scheduling on top of calendars, emails and various shared documents and sheets that do not talk with each other. The combination creates ice-cream type headaches. You’re learning to navigate an ever-growing landscape while driving 85 mph."
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About Mission Labs
We harness technology for social good. We incubate mobile, AI, and the best of technology to deliver products that help communities. Mission first, people always.