The Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Legacy Foundation have become the latest organizations to make use of BloomBoard’s data collection and training software platform for Colorado’s upcoming teacher and principal evaluation pilot.

Such evaluations have long been a source of frustration and apprehension for teachers and administrators because they haven’t provided meaningful feedback or professional development options that suit each individual’s unique needs. Further, most tech tools currently available to help schools manage evaluations cost millions of dollars to implement — and don’t support continuing education.

BloomBoard provides school districts with tools to collect data on educator effectiveness and recommend personalized training for each teacher based on their individual development needs. BloomBoard customizes its tools to the organization so that schools can continue to use pre-existing instructional frameworks and processes. BloomBoard provides these tools, a platform and customization at no charge to the district, school or state.

Katy Anthes, Executive Director of Educator Effectiveness with the Colorado Department of Education, praised the decision to use BloomBoard stating “BloomBoard offers a free, simple, scalable way for Colorado districts to manage our educator evaluation pilot. BloomBoard also provides options for individualized teacher support based on the observation data collected. Our districts have been asking for technology such as this and we are excited to provide the BloomBoard platform for our pilot districts.”

The Colorado pilot will cover 6,000 educators in 300 schools across 27 districts during the 2012-13 school year. It is the result of a recent legislative mandate to implement a new educator evaluation before the 2014-15 school year.

BloomBoard CEO and Co-Founder Jason Lange echoes those sentiments “Our goal is to transform teacher evaluations from a process that is viewed as punitive, to one that is supportive and can give teachers control of their own personal and professional development.”

In addition to the free platform and customization, BloomBoard does offer premium features for purchase. These include software that allows districts to host and manage their own professional development content and workshops, third party professional development, and visualization tools which enable the customer to track gathered data in real time.

The Colorado Legacy Foundation is an independent 501 (c ) (3) that serves as a critical friend and partner to the Colorado Department of Education in the effective implementation of good public policy. They identify promising practices, recommend policy, and share findings with all Colorado school districts and schools.

BloomBoard is already working with the Oakland Unified School District, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and the Urban Teacher Center for the upcoming school year.