Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC
Developing Smart EdTech Solutions

Today, there are hundreds of EdTech solutions that jockey to serve educators in a K-12 setting. Oftentimes, a particular school may use a dozen of them or more. This makes data retrieval cumbersome and switching costs high. Enter Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC. The company focuses on “the centralization of meaningful educator and student data so that educators can save time and make meaningful decisions,” says Mike Roll, Chief Operating Officer at Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC.

Through its platform, Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC facilitates data-driven decision-making by combining intuitive data insights with a low-barrier user interface. This propels educator and student growth by providing objective educator and student data in a centralized dashboard, along with targeted prompts that direct users to related applications that enable growth-focused activities and workflows. Further, Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC’s applications work together in a continuously cyclical way. One application enables the seamless collection of educator observation data, which allows for a starting point for the rest of the application suite.

“Based on observation data, growth areas are identified, and educators begin a cycle of goal planning and execution, wherein they connect with instructional coaches and other support team members,” Roll adds. Along the way, as goal planning and execution data are collected, an educator’s support team offers helpful interventions, and the application serves up targeted real-time professional learning resources. All of these applications are connected to a powerful dashboard that displays the most salient data points in easy-to-consume widgets so an educator—be they a school leader, an instructional coach, or a teacher—can confidently decide on where to focus his/her time. Additionally, a set of connected communication tools allow users to interact with colleagues, coaches, and leaders as they progress on their individual growth journeys.

One of Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC’s most exciting recent projects was a partnership with a major research university looking to help local educators better connect with instructional coaches and college staff asynchronously.

The goals of the partnership were to increase transparency and engagement for the participants of this particular program. Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC worked with subject matter experts from the university’s College of Education to design a digital platform (i.e., an app) to facilitate and track every step of an educator’s coaching process, including planning, meeting, documenting, and debriefing goals. The accessibility of the app and the communication channels that it opened enabled the university partner to achieve the transparency and engagement they were looking for. The key was to make an educator’s results visible to a support team that could quickly intervene when needed. As a result, Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC empowered more meaningful coaching engagements for educators. Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC has garnered success over the years by partnering with clients and their stakeholders to identify the processes and products that will serve them best. This often equates to more touchpoints during development and implementation to establish what is most important to each partner, and that sets the tone and establishes trust through delivery and end-user support.

Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC empowered more meaningful coaching engagements for educators

For the future, Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC will be extending the premise of empowering data-driven decision-making for educators by recommending actions in its software applications that will move the needle on educator and student growth. The company has tackled a number of areas of opportunity in the K-12 space, but there are many more challenges that they want to address. “We continue to work tirelessly to connect educators with the right growth strategies to improve student outcomes, and we are now extending that service model to connect the right educators with the right students, and vice versa. We continue to evolve our platform as we imagine bigger and better ways to serve communities with our educational technology solutions,” concludes Roll