EIU is considered a “Teachers School” because each year we graduate hundreds of new teachers ready to go out in the world and teach the youth of the world. The final step for these soon-to-be teachers is spend a semester ‘student teaching’ in a school. They have a full-time teacher who is their ‘cooperating teacher, ‘ and they work with the student teacher to give them some real classroom experience.
So finding placements for 500 student-teachers each semester is a crazy big task – and until I created this online system – was completed with lots of paper.
Now the student logs-in to the system, completes all the tasks they need to (they are given a ‘check-off’ list to make it easy). Once they complete the tasks, then they can progress through the system and be assigned a placement.
The entire process now takes a fraction of the time (which is important because EIU is competing with the rest of the Colleges/Universities in the state to place their student-teachers) – and also saves about 12,000 sheets of paper per semester.