The company’s Impero Classroom tool, which launched today, offers classroom device monitoring, browser controls and the ability to share and broadcast presentations, among other things. The company’s news release said it’s designed to give K-12 teachers a real-time window into what their students are doing and keep them focused on the task at hand, whether in the classroom or remotely as part of hybrid learning, on a multitude of web-based operating systems or applications.
“We’ve seen many schools still struggling with children in school and out of school,” Impero Software CEO Justin Reilly told Government Technology. “We wanted to challenge some of those difficulties that teachers are currently facing, and to support them with the core principles of classroom management.”
As part of the tool, teachers can prevent students from visiting certain websites, or direct students to websites to help nudge them in the right direction. Teachers also can share the screen of a student to showcase a presentation to the class, or send each student’s browser to a particular website to speed along a lesson, the release said. The tool itself can work in a single classroom or district-wide, and can function with multiple staff members at the same time.
“Teachers can monitor all the students’ screens like a CCTV and see what’s going on, to see who’s on task,” Impero Software Vice President of Product Sam Heiney told Government Technology. “It’s really designed to allow the teacher to manage, monitor and engage their students in this new environment of using lots of different devices and operating systems.”
Kaitlin Trujillo, Impero’s key account manager, said that if Impero Classroom is implemented correctly by teachers, it has the potential to improve student focus.
“The software allows the teachers to be able to monitor and respond to student behavior,” she said. “It’s about being able to respond to off-topic behavior, and then be able to proactively manage that behavior moving forward using the software.”
Heiney said Impero Classroom can potentially add minutes of instructional time to a teacher’s day because of its efficiency, and it runs on the open source Backdrop CMS, so it can integrate with several student information systems and access a plethora of student data. He said that the tool can generate a full profile for each student, with details such as whether a student has a sibling in the school, or if there has been a recent death in the family.
“The real power of Impero Classroom is that integration, that suite of products that we bring to bear, because what Backdrop provides is a view of student profiles with information that can help a teacher guide student interactions on the devices in the most appropriate way,” he said. “It allows teachers to create individualized learning plans, classroom environments that are truly engaging, and that modify and monitor and manage behavior, not just computer use.”
Reilly said the company wanted to focus on supporting teachers’ need to reach students in the classroom or from afar.
“The first principal piece here is learners being better learners. If you can educate children to be better learners, that really is fantastic, but to do that, you’ve got to create a really productive and safe environment,” he said.
