Pros
Living and experiencing accelerating learning for all. Take aways from my experiences at Renaissance: Student excitement is contagious. We are mission critical software for students, teachers, schools and districts. They all rely on being able to work – everyday, accurate, reliable. Small schools and districts have resource/technical constraints. My experience at Renaissance and at a school using our products… Our family felt very fortunate to have the option of choosing my daughters school when I first started at RLI. Our selection criteria was low cost or free, personal, and had a culture that valued and enabled learning. At our new school parental volunteering was encouraged and my background enabled me to volunteer adding both a technical background and personal interest. I have spent hours volunteering to assist K and 1 grade students quizzing in AR and STAR and labeling books with readability and AR information. I became responsible (as a volunteer) for the maintenance of an old ring based network at the school, that was constantly getting disconnected when desks got moved in the classes. A short time later I lead the installation of a more robust (10baseT) network to replace their old, aging and fragile school network. I shared first-hand the success of students with early reading and the disappointment of computers or networks not being available to use both in a local school and a few schools across the country. My experiences were amazingly the same - the learning cultures were very similar! I have stood in the back of a class – where it was announced that I could not fix the network today and the kids all let out gasps of exasperation when they could not take their AR quizzes! I have never been happier to work myself out of job – when a month after the new network was in – I did not have any urgent calls to fix the network on my lunch break. I know first-hand the incredible reading community that can be built at schools and that leads to very successful students! I have had the opportunity to visit whole districts where students line the halls waiting to take STAR or AR quizzes. Where students fervently try to beat the clock in MathFacts, where they run to the printer to get their results and show others, and where students skip recess to work on AM assignments. It’s very gratifying to know that the work I do is the very thing students across the country depend upon.
Cons
So many opportunities Old products end-of-life is hard for us Timelines are aggressive We are very similar to many companies in these issues
