Skalo

Helping teachers in K-12 manage learning diversity & inclusion with customised strategies and tools.

Everyone who was once a student, has faced educational barriers of some type, either emotional or physical, difficulties with a specific subject or a learning diagnosis or a disability. Skalo helps teachers mange learning diversity in K12 by calculating optimal accommodations and strategies for each student and generates data for pedagogical decisions about learning barriers and inclusion.

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HundrED 2024

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Overview

HundrED has selected this innovation to

HundrED Global Collection 2024

Web presence

2021

Established

2.5K

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Students basic

Updated

June 2023

If a child cannot learn in the way we teach, we must teach in a way the child can learn.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

Skalo was built as a solution to the pain I felt in trying to get my son with educational barriers to school. As a parent of a child with cerebral palsy, I experienced the pain of trying to find the right support to facilitate my son's school experience while helping him maximise his abilities. I wanted to use technology to help teachers teach any type of student according to their needs.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

Skalo customises accommodations and aids for various learners. With our algorithm, we have created an effective way to transform academic challenge into the opportunity for developmental achievement. We involve the student's family and the teacher to know the student's strengths and weaknesses. Our algorithm calculates the best accommodations according to the student's abilities and needs, giving the teacher strategies to adapt the way they teach to the way the student learns. Is an easy-to-use tool that encourages teachers, institutions and families to engage in levelling the field for students facing learning barriers. It gives the teacher a "triage" of the classroom's barriers and customised plans to help students who are academically vulnerable, helping the teacher teach a classroom that learns at different paces and ways. Starting from simple barriers caused by Covid-19 - emotional difficulties, lack of motivation, learning diagnosis to disabilities.

How has it been spreading?

Skalo was founded in February 2021, when we entered a pilot stage that was carried out throughout the year with more than 500 students in seven different institutions around Colombia. During this time, we talked to users and we got to know their needs. Thanks to that we were able to make changes to our MVP and build our team. We were accelerated by Latitud and Rockstart. United Way invested in Skalo to impact vulnerable children in Latam. We have 2,500 paid users in 33 institutions after launching in March 2022. We have seven pilots in different secretaries of education in different cities in Colombia. In January 2022 we won the TPrize at the International Congress for Educational Innovation at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico as an innovation to reduce the learning gap in LatAm.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

Skalo is a web based platform. If a school wants to use it, we schedule a demo and create the students so the teachers can use it. We are a SAAS and our model is B2B so the schools could have a tool to manage learning diversity and inclusion inside a classroom.
The contact is: info@skalo.co

Impact & scalability

HundrED Academy Reviews

Skalo allows family to be involved in informing and planning for a child's provision in school on an ongoing basis and eases transition between school years. Alongside a compassionate and flexible approach by teachers this has great impact.

Having knowledge of the barriers is the first step towards effective support. Skalo can prove to be a huge game-changer not just for mainstream schools but also for schools that provide special support to children with diverse needs.

- Academy member

Academy review results

Impact

Scalability

Exceptional

High

Moderate

Limited

Insufficient

Exceptional

High

Moderate

Limited

Insufficient

Implementation steps

Student Selection

The school selects the students that will benefit from using accommodations due to the temporary or permanent learning barriers that they face. The school can include students with disabilities, learning diagnosis, or in the process of a diagnosis, students facing socio-emotional difficulties and students who are academically vulnerable.

Family Input

The student's family fills out a set of questions to give us information about their abilities, areas of improvement, personality traits and expectations as a first input to the algorithm. We need to start with the family's opinion about the student needs and then contrast it with the teacher's opinion.

Pedagogical Assessment

The teacher, without knowing the family's answers, answers a pedagogical assessment of the student that varies depending on the school stage. It has around 90 questions and includes a holistic approach of dimensions such as: memory, attention, executive functions, interaction, reading, cognitive, writing, motor skill, among others. This intelligent assessment takes 15 minutes to complete.

Accommodations Plan

The algorithm calculates an optimal accommodations plan for the student based on the family's opinion and the teacher's pedagogical assessment. The teacher first chooses the objective for the student and then the accommodations to use to get to that objective.
The platform is flexible so the teacher can choose other objectives and accommodations according to their criteria and knowledge of the student's needs that are not on the suggested plan.

Implementation and Monitoring

The teacher starts implementing the classroom accommodations to help the student progress and participate despite the learning barriers faced. The accommodations can happen at different moments of the daily classroom live such as: delivering the instruction, the interaction, the work or the evaluation. After a month of implementing those accommodations the teacher will monitor the effectiveness of the accommodations to determine any changes on the initial plan.

Family Interaction

The family will know the accommodations plan and will have strategies to implement at home. They will also see the progress of those accommodations and the way they change during the school year. This report will complement the academic report of any school, because it will provide insightful information of how the school is customising their teaching to adapt to the student needs.

Data Analysis

With Machine Learning we are able to determine the effectiveness of the accommodations according to different students' needs to establish best practices for learning diversity and inclusion management inside the classroom.

Transition between School Years

Skalo eases the case management of each student by providing data about what has worked with a student during a school year so the next teacher can give continuity to the accommodations for a smooth transition to a new school year.