BloomBoard is the place where educators come to grow. Specific learning plans, free observations, and evaluation of tools needed for growth are provided for educators to improve themselves. Skills are described in detail so that each skill an educator learns is purposeful. Micro-credentials are awarded after mastery of each skill, and these serve as certification for course completion.

Website: https://bloomboard.com/

What Users Love About the App

“Teacher vetted resources are a plus! On the evaluation side, BloomBoard has user-friendly graphs, helpful reminders, and many tools that help the evaluator/observer manage tasks.”

“It eliminates a lot of the searching that goes into finding individualized PD resources for staff. It also helps administrators track which staff member is working with what resources.”

“Easy to use. It offers a great breadth of training. It makes it easy to assign subject-specific training.”

“This product is visually appealing. The overall organization of BloomBoard reminds me a lot of Google Classroom. In this way, navigating the site was very intuitive. The modular design of the site makes it easy to find what you are looking for and difficult to get lost. This product solves the problem of spending hours on YouTube or Pinterest finding the perfect resource.”

“The tagging and aggregating features for individual teachers and groups of teachers sorted in different ways are effective and useful, especially in terms of how you might want to organize collaboration/meeting time.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“There’s a list of things I dislike about the product. 1) Brand identity. Although I like that the site looks like Google Classroom, it sort of gives me the impression that it has been done before. I wonder if there are some visual tweaks that could give this product more unique brand identity. 2) Micro-credentials and CEUs. This seems like a neat feature that I’d like to know more about and might draw me towards this product over to others. How does it work? How much does it cost? Visual network of teachers. It would be insightful to see a map that graphically demonstrates where the teachers who use this site are from; color-coded and shaded to indicate areas of high-use.”

“Teachers in my district (and most low-income districts, I’m guessing) would not respond well to PD that is totally online/impersonal. If there isn’t someone in front of the room who is part of their culture and/or community delivering the information, it probably won’t make it through.”

“Here are some of my suggestions. 1) Integrate more detailed user profiles. 2) Include as many opportunities for reflection as possible. 3) Allow teachers to prove they have mastered the topics covered through some sore of “certification” process attached to each PD resource and curate the results.”

“I’d like to be able to embed the videos in our LMS. I’d like to be able to integrate training assessment and track mastery. I’d like SSO integration for our school management software.”

“The recommended articles are useful. If there were a way to see if the teacher actually reviewed the recommended material that would help an observer engage in follow-up conversations.”