Common Good
Learning Tools
Creating better digital learning experiences.
What we do
Our mission is stated in our company name: we build learning tools for the common good. We currently offer three products: Satchel, a competency (e.g. learning standard) management tool; Sparkl, a digital teaching and learning tool; and Cureum, an educational resource curation and distribution tool. Most of our partners are public K-12 agencies, but we work with ed-tech companies and higher education institutions too. We are a registered Public Benefit Corporation and operate on a not-for-profit basis: we have no investors, no debt, no sales or marketing team, and we charge our public agency partners only what we need to pay our staff, cover our expenses, and maximize our impact by improving education for the greatest number of students we can reach.
Our Tools
Satchel: competency management
Standards Satchel is a web application that allows competency frameworks (e.g. sets of learning standards) to be published and maintained by issuing agencies (e.g. state DOEs) in 1EdTech’s CASE® format, then consumed by other agencies (e.g. school districts) and ed-tech suppliers using the CASE API protocol. CGLT also operates CASE Network, where we collect standards published around the country and around the world on a single Satchel instance so that agencies and suppliers can access CASE® data from a single API location. And Satchel includes resource alignment and crosswalking services for use by both public agencies and ed-tech companies.
Sparkl: digital teaching and learning
Sparkl is a digital learning tool for K-12 teachers and students. It offers a new approach for lesson design that takes full advantage of the digital medium to engage students with the content they are asked to learn, and is built to be flexible for teachers to use, easy to integrate with other digital systems, and content agnostic. Sparkl activities can be distributed and deployed via whatever system a teacher happens to be using (e.g. Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, or LOR, or CMS).
Cureum: resource curation
The primary goal of Cureum is to simplify the digital lives of teachers: it allows an agency (e.g. a state DOE or district) to curate digital resources culled from diverse systems (e.g. textbooks, assessment systems, Google docs, OER repositories) into collections that are organized in ways the agency’s teachers will instantly understand and be able to find the resource they in the moment its needed. All resources can be tagged to relevant standards via Satchel, which is included in every Cureum installation. Over the 5 years we have been developing Cureum with district and state partners, the system has evolved to allow teachers to revise and remix agency-provided resources into their own collections, lesson plans, and Sparkl activities; to distribute and track completion of professional development activities; to allow teacher to assign and track student progress on classwork; and more.
