Toronto's Edusight launches K-12 education platform in three Ontario districts

Toronto-based Edusight has launched Edusight Magic, a collaborative and customizable analytics tool aimed at K-12 school districts to enable them to leverage insights using data gleaned by teachers in the classroom to understand and inform how students learn.
The new platform is being launched in partnership with three school districts in Ontario, including the District School Board of Niagara in September 2016.
Each school district gets a dedicated Edusight Advisor, a data analyst whose job it is to analyze and interpret data gathered by teachers using the platform after identifying the district’s needs at the beginning of the program’s implementation.
“We’re excited about the launch of Edusight Magic. The use of real-time data provides early indicators that can improve our understanding of our students’ performance,” said Dino Miele, Chief Information and Innovation Officer for the District School Board of Niagara. “Data products we use today involve a lot of work from our administrative team before we get value. Edusight Magic provides us with a dedicated advisor who knows our needs and can give us answers in real-time, and this hands-on approach is something other platforms don’t offer.”
Edusight, an education technology platforms for students, teachers and administrators, is a graduate of the Y Combinator/Imagine K12 incubator in Silicon Valley, and has helped more than 6,500 K-12 teachers document how more than 100,000 students learn through a web-based gradebook and portfolio tool, also available for iOS.
“We built a comprehensive product to help individual teachers make changes in the classroom, and through beta testing saw an opportunity to extend this to decision makers. Edusight Magic allows us to leverage the real-time insights we’re gathering at the classroom level to address these systemic challenges and serve school district needs,” said Edusight co-founder and CEO Vikram Somasundaram. “Finding answers in data that’s out-of-date and scattered across multiple sources is a nightmare for school district administrators. We find these answers for administrators so they can focus on improving student learning.”
Edusight’s Classroom tool lets teachers capture data using notes, photos, audio and videos in the classroom, capturing data and tracking student growth while de-emphasizing the narrow focus on grades.
Whereas most dashboards used in EdTech introduce a form of rigid standardization and involve an interface that many teachers find overly cluttered, Magic emphasizes a hands-on experience that also allows school districts to identify systemic challenges while tailoring a more personalized application of data to real-world classroom learning.
Rather than relying on a dashboard or cluttered interface, Edusight presents key results with recommendations that are tailored to administrators, based on their priorities and objectives.
Edusight’s free Notes app allows teachers to capture data about how their students learn in real time, moving them away from dashboards and the possibly out-of-date information contained in reports.
Reports generated by Magic contain regularly updated metrics, with the platform integrated into each Student Information System (SIS) and Edusight’s Classroom tool.
Founded in 2014 by Qiming Weng, Garros Li, and Vikram Somasundaram, Edusight has raised over $1.2 million in investment. The company’s platform is currently being used in over 2,300 schools and 800 districts.