Built around how teachers actually plan, grade, and decide what to do next.
Built by a teacher who got tired of fighting the gradebook, then rebuilt the gradebook around what actually matters when you're planning a Tuesday.
If this sounds like what you've been waiting for, there's a letter at the bottom of this page.
One column tells you what to do tomorrow, the other tells you what number to put on a report card that doesn't quite mean what you wrote on the rubric.
Read onSo we built a different one.
This one was built around the question of what a teacher actually needs to know about a student's learning, and the answer turned out not to be a percentage.
This is the view you actually need on a Monday morning. It tells you who has mastered what, where the class is stuck, and which students can do the work in practice but freeze on the formal assessment. Toggle between formal assessments, practice work, or both at once. Click any objective header to drill in: class distribution, the band breakdown, and every score that fed the number. Every score lives as evidence against the objective, so the trajectory of a student's learning is built into the view, not buried under a single average or scattered across a glorified spreadsheet in a game called “how many points is this worth.”
Assessment fills each cell. A sage chip appears when practice tells a different story.
| Student | Avg | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avery Chen | 3.2n=4 | 2.4n=3 | 3.7n=4 | 2.82/3 | 3.0 |
| Marcus Bell | 3.8n=4 | 3.7n=4 | 3.9n=4 | 3.43/3 | 3.6 |
| Sofia Rodríguez | 2/3evid | 3.0n=3 | 2/3evid | 2.42/3 | 2.6 |
| Jamal Washington | 3.1n=3 | 3.0n=3 | 3.2n=3 | 2.73/3 | 2.9 |
| Priya Patel | 1/3evid | 2.3n=3 | 2.4n=3 | 1.91/3 | 2.2 |
| Daniel Park | 3.6n=4 | 3.2n=3 | 3.8n=4 | 3.53/3 | 3.5 |
2.9
Class Average
1
Mastery
3
Proficient
2
Developing
0
Beginning
Click Heredity to fan out the objectives inside it, or click any objective name to drill in.
Most LMSes give you a flat list of modules with every page, quiz, and link dumped underneath. PrepPanel gives you two real levels of organization, so a unit of instruction can hold its lessons without forcing you to flatten the way you teach. At a glance you can tell which items are reading, which are practice, and which count toward a grade. You can drag anything anywhere, collapse the parts you're not teaching this week, and rename every level so it matches the words your school's report card already uses.
And when you're standing up a brand new course, you don't have to click your way through ten dialog boxes to make a single unit. Paste your whole scope and sequence into Build in bulk and PrepPanel turns it into units, lessons, and aligned objectives in one pass, instead of forty dialog boxes.
The Modern Classroom Project is built on three things, and they happen to be the same three things PrepPanel is built on: blended instruction, self-paced structure, and mastery-based grading. So when we sat down to build this, we did not ask “how do we add self-pacing later.” We asked “what does an LMS look like if a Modern Classroom teacher is the person we are designing for first.”
Pages and assessments live side by side in a Lesson, with type dots so a student can tell at a glance which is which. The video is the instruction; the class period is for practice and the teacher's attention.
Tag a Lesson as Must Do, Should Do, or Aspire to Do, and rename those labels per course. The chip propagates onto every activity inside, so a student can scan a unit and see the teacher's intent. Nothing is hidden, nothing is gated. The student keeps agency. The teacher keeps the wheel.
Mastery on the standards drives the heatmap, the routing in Learning Paths, and the conversation about who is ready to advance. Tier-clearance is not an algorithm. It is the teacher's read of the data, supported by per-student mastery on the objectives the Mastery Check is tagged to.
Students move their own pin. Teachers mark the mastery check. The grid stays honest about both, so you can finally walk in Monday morning and see who needs you first, without scrolling a Google Sheet.
| Student | Unit 1: Fraction FoundationsExpected: Equivalent Fractions | Unit 2: Decimals + Place ValueExpected: Decimal Place Value | Unit 3: Multiplying FractionsExpected: Multiply by Whole |
|---|---|---|---|
Aaliyah J. on pace | Compare Fractions (Should) Mastered | Decimal Place Value Mastered | Multiply by Whole Working |
Marcus T. 1 pending | Equivalent Fractions Mastered | Decimal Place Value Pending check | Not yet |
Sofia P. 1 pending | Add Fractions Mastered | Compare Decimals Mastered | Multiplying Fractions Pending check |
Layla M. !3 backward moves this week | Comparing Fractions Working | Not yet | Not yet |
Jin C. ahead | Compare Fractions (Should) Mastered | Decimal Operations (Should) Mastered | Fractions of Groups (Aspire) Working |
Most LMS pacing dashboards infer where a student is by what they clicked. That's why they always look right and feel wrong: a kid who opened a page once shows up “on track” while their actual mastery sits at beginning.
Self-pacing classrooms run on a different loop, and we built for it directly.
Every MCP-mode course has a public family pacing guide. Class median, spread, and pacing. No individual student data ever leaves the server. Shareable in a text message. FERPA-defensible by construction.
Every objective in PrepPanel can carry its own learning path. You decide what a student sees next based on where they actually are. Beginning students go back to the foundations, developing students get the specific piece they're missing, proficient students hold the level, mastery students get pushed further. Paths sit alongside content and assessments in the course nav, not buried three menus deep, because routing students based on what they actually know is not a side feature.
Most LMSes give you a blank text box and a few formatting buttons and expect you to be grateful. PrepPanel ships with a library of real classroom templates you can drop into any page and customize, plus an editor that respects design and accessibility without making you write HTML.
From what's inside a cell to how a cell stays alive.
If a cell could only do one of its jobs, which one would keep it alive the longest?
Measure how fast a colored dye moves through agar at different temperatures.
Over four weeks you'll trace a trait through three generations, calculate probabilities, and write a letter to a family explaining their odds in language they can understand.
Is a virus alive? Defend your answer using at least oneof the four functions of life we've studied.
The library grows as teachers tell us what they're trying to teach. The editor underneath handles visual editing for most days and drops you into clean HTML when you need to get specific, the way a content tool is supposed to.
Legacy learning management systems give you one level of grouping, usually called a module, or the Schoology route of folders inside folders inside folders that hides everything from everyone. PrepPanel gives you two real levels, and lets you name each level whatever fits the way you actually plan. Want the top level to be Week, with Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday underneath? Go ahead. Prefer Quarter and Topic, or Unit and Lesson? Call it whatever you want. The fields on the left are live, so try it.
A student doesn't show up to a unit either knowing it or not knowing it. They demonstrate understanding across several attempts, and the picture you actually need is the pattern those attempts make. PrepPanel keeps every demonstration as evidence, and the band a student sits in reflects the trajectory of their work instead of the most recent score. Most mastery tools are bolted onto a traditional gradebook that was never built for mastery, so every workflow in them ends up fighting the system. PrepPanel started with evidence and objectives as the model itself, not as an afterthought.
PrepPanel ships with a default 4-point scale, but the number of bands, their names, score values, thresholds, and colors are all configurable at the institution or course level. Try renaming a band below to see the idea.
First encounters. Pre-instruction baseline.
Partial understanding. Needs more reps.
Independent. The school-day target.
Transferable. Apply it somewhere new.
Tests are inherently a points game, a student gets X out of Y correct, and that doesn't have to break mastery. In PrepPanel, every item bank ties to a learning objective and carries its own mastery thresholds, so the bar can match the kind of learning the bank is for. For a foundational vocabulary bank, set the threshold so only 100% accuracy counts as mastery, because a student who doesn't have those facts cold isn't ready to move on. For a more conceptual bank, set the threshold lower, because four out of five can be genuinely strong understanding. The points still count, the threshold is yours, and what “mastered” means on the report card actually matches what mastery means for that topic. Drag the sliders below and watch where Avery lands.
In the real app, every item bank carries its own thresholds, so a foundational vocabulary bank can demand 100% while an applied analysis bank recognizes mastery at 80%, and that kind of per-bank tuning is something no other LMS offers.
Where they read and learn.
A daily lesson, a warm-up, a lab brief, a vocabulary list, the instruction itself that students consume. Nothing is collected, nothing is graded, it lives in the content tree as the thing being taught.
Rehearsal that counts as evidence, not as a grade.
Exit tickets, quick checks, weekly drills. You collect responses, students get feedback, you watch mastery move. PrepPanel tracks every practice attempt as evidence of growth but never rolls it into the grade column. The Mastery Heatmap has a Practice view, separate from the Assessment view.
The moment that counts.
The unit test, the performance task, the constructed response on the rubric, the thing that lands on the report card, and the only warm dot in the system. Banded scores feed mastery, route students into learning paths, and post back to the LMS gradebook.
Batting practice is not the same thing as an at-bat. Rehearsal is not the same thing as opening night. Both of those things matter, and you want to watch them and give feedback, but only one of them is what gets reported. PrepPanel treats practice the same way. It tracks what kids are doing during the rehearsal so you can see who's ready and who's still figuring something out, and it keeps that information separate from the grade column. Practice counts as evidence of growth. Assessments count toward the report card. They're different jobs, so they get different dots.
Drop PrepPanel into your existing LMS as the mastery layer the legacy systems forgot to build.
PrepPanel launches as a standard LTI 1.3 tool, so you can install it yourself without filing a ticket with your LMS admin or paying for a vendor implementation call to wire it up. Grades pass back to your existing gradebook automatically, and your school's vocabulary stays in front of students instead of a vendor's.
Works with any LMS that supports LTI 1.3. Best if Canvas (or your existing LMS) is already where your teachers and students show up every day.
Or use PrepPanel as your full LMS instead of stitching together three platforms.
Courses, content, mastery tracking, assessments, and learning paths all live in the same place, all wire back to your objectives, and all speak your school's vocabulary instead of a vendor's. K-12 templates are already in the editor when you start a new page.
Best if you're tired of jumping between platforms, or you're still on Google Classroom because the heavyweight LMSes never felt right.
PrepPanel launches inside Canvas via LTI 1.3 today, and on the near roadmap the same standard works the other direction so your favorite content providers and tools launch inside PrepPanel. Google Assignments support is coming with it, so the parts of Google Classroom your teachers actually rely on, like automatic per-student copy creation, come with you. A lot of K-12 schools have stayed on Classroom because none of the full LMSes felt right, and PrepPanel is built to be the soft landing for those schools too.
Evening
A note.
What does a teacher actually need to knowabout a student's learning?
That's the question I started with, and the data model got built around the answer rather than around a gradebook column. The gradebook was the last thing we touched, because once you know what a kid is doing across a unit, the report card almost writes itself.
We're still pre-pilot, so you won't find a fake user counter on this page or a “join 10,000 schools” badge. If you want to hear when there's actually something to look at, leave your email below and you'll get a letter when there's news worth sending, which will probably end up being every few weeks at most.
Signed, a teacher.