Press Release - June 27, 2005
Vantage Learning Launches MY Access!™ 6.0 with Significant New Enhancements to Help Students Improve Writing Skills
New functionalities offer educators the ability to fully integrate MY Access! instructional writing tool into their language arts curriculum, provide concise and timely data, and allow students to conduct peer reviews
Philadelphia, PA, June 27, 2005 - Today Vantage Learning, the world's leading provider of online assessment tools announced the release of the latest version of MY Access!™, an innovative instructional writing tool that allows students to practice and revise their assigned essays online, both in the classroom and at home. Version 6.0 will be available to educators beginning mid-summer 2005. The announcement was made today at a private briefing during the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), being held in Philadelphia, PA.Vantage Learning's release of MY Access! 6.0 comes on the heels of being named "Best Secondary Education Instructional Solution: Language Arts/English" and "Best Instructional Solution for English Language Learners" by the Software & Information Industry (SIIA) at the 20th Annual Codie Awards last month.
MY Access! provides immediate feedback, specific to the student's writing style, using Vantage's IntelliMetric® essay scoring technology, and engages students in the writing process by encouraging them to revise their essays based on this individualized instruction. The latest version incorporates a number of exciting new enhancements, including:
- MY Vocabulary™, which lets teachers add new vocabulary words and lists to writing assignments so students can practice using new words and phrases they have studied in class.
- Approximator™, which provides an immediate general holistic writing score for any response submitted by students to teacher and pilot prompts. This powerful immediate scoring engine, Unimetric™ sits side-by-side with IntelliMetric, the most accurate essay scoring engine in the industry with research-proven statistical accuracy equal to expert human scorers.
- Violert™, which flags student responses for violence or intent to hurt self or others, with teacher notification and a flag for teacher attention.
- Interactive activities that guide students through the writing process step-by-step, from pre-writing to drafting their essay.
- MY Peer Review™, a peer review feature, where students can review and critique each other's essays either anonymously or by assignment.
- Writer's Companion™, a writing portal with links to additional content, activities, lesson plans, and tools for teachers and students. This is intended to be the richest writing support website available to K-12 educators.
- MY Tutor™ enhancements, which automatically analyze writers' responses and links directly to developmentally appropriate MY Tutor instructional content. This allows students, whose reading and/or writing is at a lower level than their actual grade level, to receive feedback that is within their zone of proximal development.
- Weekly progress updates automatically emailed to district administrators informing them of their schools' and classrooms' current writing performance.
"In the last 12 months, we've undertaken extensive measures to closely align MY Access! to both popular core reading programs as well as to state standards of writing so educators can fully integrate MY Access! into their language arts curriculum," says Harry Barfoot, VP of Sales of Marketings of Vantage Learning. "We've heard over and over that in addition to using MY Access! to prepare students for statewide writing assessments and college placement exams, educators use MY Access! to fully integrate writing and reading in their classrooms. The feedback from key customers and educators is that MY Access! is critical to their success in the classroom and the newest version of MY Access! hits a home run . We've added substantial functionality to an already classroom proven, research based, award-winning writing program."
School districts throughout the country that utilize the program in their classroom have found increased enthusiasm from students for the writing process, which in turn has translated into improved writing skills both in the classroom and on high stakes writing assessments that are part of the mandated requirements for many states. "MY Access! is the best writing tool I've seen in 22 years of teaching," says Lani Beechen, a language arts teacher at Lake Weir Middle School in Marion County, Florida. "Students who were having trouble writing short sentences are now producing multiple-paragraph, long-form essays."
About Vantage Learning
Vantage Learning (www.VantageLearning.com), an affiliate of Vantage Laboratories and the leading provider of online assessment and automated essay scoring, developed IntelliMetric® to meet the needs of business, education, and government agencies needing a comprehensive Internet-based test authoring, delivery, scoring and reporting platform. IntelliMetric administers and scores responses to open-ended questions over the Internet using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. An individual can enter a response to a question posed, submit the response, and receive an immediate score with feedback within seconds.
Eduventures has selected Vantage Learning as one of the eight most innovative educational technology companies. MY Access!, Vantage's instructional writing program that utilizes IntelliMetric essay-scoring, earned a 2003 District Administration Top 100 Award and was included in Technology and Learning Magazine's Top 10 Smart Technologies for Schools. A Codie Awards finalist three years in a row, MY Access! recently won the 2005 Codie Award in two categories, "Best Secondary Education Instructional Solution: Language Arts/English" and "Best Instructional Solution for English Language Learners". In addition, MY Access! was awarded the 2004 Award of Excellence from Technology and Learning Magazine.
Vantage Learning provides services in all 50 states directly to end-user clients and provides services to educational leaders such as The College Board, ACT, Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB/McGraw Hill and Thomson Learning.