Grant-led Swivl Initiatives

There is never a shortage of funding requests for major initiatives to promote student achievement and professional development for faculty. Grant funding can truly change the landscape of any organization and provide incredible opportunities for Admins, teachers, and students alike. But how do you measure a program’s efficacy to understand if the grant opportunity was truly successful? Enter Swivl. Swivl’s video-based platform provides explicit evidence of practice for instructional coaching, new teacher induction, research, student engagement and so much more. It’s also ridiculously easy to use and educators love harnessing the power of video for their professional growth!

Take Union County Public Schools in NC, where this district was awarded a three-year $27 million grant from USDoE’s Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program. They used part of their funds to support and develop Master Teachers across the district with Swivl. Master Teachers collect video of their exemplar practices to share with new or struggling teachers, creating a unique pathway for professional development to be shared among colleagues, instead of top-down from the district only.

Next, explore Waltham Senior High School’s Changemaker Academy in MA which grew out of a Barr Foundation grant awarded to the district back in December 2018 for $300,000. The Changemaker Academy is a project-based learning program for ninth graders to teach essential skills such as leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving. Changemaker leaders use Swivl to record snippets of these classes to share with the greater school community, increasing transparency for stakeholders as well as providing an outlet for students to take ownership over their own growth through video self-reflection.

On the smaller scale is the DaVinci Academy in UT, a three-school system consisting of elementary, secondary, and distance programs. Their acquisition of Swivl through Utah’s STEM Action Center’s Professional Learning Grant allows teachers to collaborate on best practices and get feedback from colleagues. They use time-stamped annotations in Swivl because it saves time meeting face-to-face for debriefs and allows both the owner and reviewer to each self-reflect with their own annotations before contributing to the thread, creating a safe and positive environment for all. 

Each program leader above (and the thousands more who have chosen Swivl), agree that Swivl was easy to adopt and creates a positive learning environment for both educators and their students. The fact that the data one can collect is steeped in video-based evidence just makes justifying the grant that much easier.