Get rid of iReady - it is useless.

The following is a email I sent to the Miami Dade School district people in charge of electronic education efforts today. Personally I've already told my kid's teachers that they are free to do whatever they want during school hours, but we won't be doing iReady at home.

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Great! Thank you so much.

Basically my theme is that I'm trying to find a way for Miami-Dade to switch from iReady to one of the other leading electronic learning providers. I did a lot of home schooling for my kids before they went to public school and so I tried them out lot and read up on the latest science for how kids learn phonics and such and so I was surprised to see us all standardized on iReady, which as anyone can tell within a few minutes of watching their kids use it, is sub-par.

For example, I noticed a few weeks ago it tried to teach my Kindergartner "Octopus" as a sight word. My 4th grader has similarly useless experiences with it.

However, there ARE good solutions out there and I wanted to see if we could push those in our schools. In particular I've had amazing success with HeadSprout (and the science is obviously much better). Likewise, Khan Academy (once kids can read) is great for Math and Social Studies, and Rosetta Stone is already offering quite amazing discounts for Miami-Dade (I talked to their sales team), but none of our schools seem to be taking advantage of it!

So my goal is to modernize our use of electronic learning - from iReady to a package of software that actually works. I'm of course happy to discuss the details behind why iReady is inferior, based on my experiences with more advanced software. :)

Thanks!