Metryx eyes expansion of mobile evaluation tool

NEW APPROACH: Metryx CEO Shawn Rubin, center, holding tablet, with, from left: Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Castilla, platform architect J.P. Camara and Chief Technology Officer Jake Camara. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS
NEW APPROACH: Metryx CEO Shawn Rubin, center, holding tablet, with, from left: Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Castilla, platform architect J.P. Camara and Chief Technology Officer Jake Camara. / PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS

Metryx, a social-venture project hoping to change education via use of a mobile assessment platform, says it is making great strides toward making the application available in a schoolwide format next fall.
“We’re just where we want to be,” Shawn Rubin, Metryx CEO, said recently. “Our ultimate vision is … to have a more formative assessment method and more students getting incredibly personalized instruction. We believe through the metrics we’re making it easier for teachers to do so, so it’s happening more often.”
Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island, a social-venture incubator, in mid-April gave Metryx a $20,000 loan that the company will used to expand its software into a schoolwide enterprise version.
“They are a viable tech business but they also serve a really interesting local social mission in two ways,” said Diane Lynch, a partner at Social Ventures. “They are part of the Highlander Charter School, so when they’re successful, some of that will flow back and the other way is the tool is being developed in a low-income classroom.”
Nearly two-year-old Metryx was first developed when Rubin, now director of technology integration at the Highlander Institute, was a kindergarten teacher.
He and Stephanie Castilla, an industrial designer, wanted to develop a Web-based alternative to the traditional teacher clipboard in order to monitor student progress in real time.
The duo went to work with a seed grant from the Highlander Institute and developed the application, which can track student progress from any mobile device.
Rubin and Castilla were entered in SVPRI’s 2011 Change Accelerator program. The incubator helped the duo create their business plan and launch Metryx as a for-profit social venture.
In 2011, Metryx was a finalist for a Providence Business News Innovation Award via Highlander Charter for developing and piloting the application.
According to its website, Metryx was founded on the belief that the best teaching is done by meeting each student’s personalized needs. Metryx allows teachers to track both accelerated and struggling students at the same time and to intervene appropriately by collecting and analyzing classroom data.
The software groups students automatically by mastery score and separates them in performance-based groups, so teachers can developed lessons based on those results.
The software is free in its basic version.
Rubin said the tool is being used by several Rhode Island classroom teachers.
Two schools, including the Providence Career Technical School, have purchased contracts with Metryx to receive hands-on support and more customized metric measurements.
Rubin said the application “probably” works best in grades kindergarten through five, where standards are more specific yes or no than in higher-level grades.
“[But] we’ve got middle school and high school teachers because they want to control their own diagnostic assessment,” Rubin said. “We’ve got folks using it up all the way to the university level and to evaluate other teachers.”
Next up is using the Social Venture Partners Rhode Island loan to roll out a schoolwide version of the application for the start of the 2013-2014 academic school year.
SVPRI said in a press release the loan was given to allow Metryx “to transform classroom and school-wide instruction by putting real time analytics in the hands of teachers and administrators.”
Rubin said building that version simply involves taking the existing model and networking it between multiple users.
That version will have a cost attached.
“It has increased features and is going to allow teachers to share student [information],” Rubin said. “A student’s skills are being tracked across school, across grade level, in which the principal can see it. They can keep it in real time and be able to take what is already happening in a classroom level and expand it to a school.” •

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