March 2015 – EVALS.NET

EVALS visits APPLE

After returning from three days on the road visiting Apple stores in Salt Lake City, Rancho Cucamonga, and Newport Beach, EVALS could not be more excited about the future of technology and the benefits a mobile workforce will realize by taking advantage of these advancements.

By working closely with Apple, our partner, Wolfpack Solutions, has been able to identify significant improvements in effectiveness and efficiency for Public Safety. When properly implemented, iOS can help every division in the Fire Service and Law Enforcement.

EVALS was honored to sit at the table with Wolfpack solutions and Tablet Command to share our product features and benefits. Although Salt Lake City and Southern California are 700 miles apart, fire agencies in these areas share pain points and stand side by side in the mission to find ways to make training better.

EVALS feels very fortunate to have regional fire service leaders, the most innovating tech company (Apple), and amazing partners collaborating with us and discussing what collectively can be accomplished by working together.

EVALS would like to thank all involved parties for the opportunity, passion, and commitment to finding successful solutions for Public Safety.

Sierra College Use Case – Increasing Student Success

The following Use Case is written by Sierra College Fire Instructor, Matt Jewett

Increasing Student Success:
Firefighter 1 academies are both mentally and physically stressful on students. Because of this stressful paramilitary learning environment, most academies have an attrition rate of between 16-20 percent. Those numbers are too high and just plain unacceptable. Especially when one considers the rigorous hiring and acceptance process just to get into these programs. Allowing students to fail, costs both the students and the organization valuable time and money. So how can this be addressed in order to increase our student success rate?
To answer this question it requires some self-reflection. Some of the issues found during this self-reflection were a lack of consistency between instructors teaching hands on skills; a lack of transparency of the skill expectations; and a lack of time spent practicing those skills. These conclusions led us to the decision to implement EVALS to determine if this platform could assist with addressing those problems that were affecting our success rates.

Skill evaluation sheets and example videos of those skills are available to the students on the EVALS platform 24/7 eliminating guesswork by the students on the skill expectations. Our instructors have the same access as well, which allows them to properly prepare for teaching those skills creating consistency between our instructors.
There are only so many hours available to practice skills on the drill ground which makes it difficult for students to master the many skills required. EVALS allows us to video the students while they are practicing their skills. Those videos of the students are instantaneously uploaded to that student’s profile allowing the student to view their own performance and compare it to the expectation video that we as staff uploaded as the standard. We have found that this has bridged that gap of not getting enough reps on the training ground.

These are just a few things that EVALS offers in its platform. Due to the capability of the EVALS platform to address instructor inconsistency, create clear student expectations, and create better skill results, our student retention has increased. For the first time in my 9 years of teaching in the fire academy setting, we had a 100% pass rate on our module 1 / Mid-Term skills testing. Every module 1 / Mid-Term testing prior to that had 2 to 8 students fail. Because of this success, I can’t imagine ever go back to the way we used to teach our skills.

Special thanks to Sierra College for the kind words, and to Matt Jewett and the rest of the Staff at the Fire Academy for truly caring about Student Success!

If you are looking to attend a Fire Academy and live in the Sacramento area, Sierra College is a great choice. Visit the Sierra College Website for more info.

Weekly Adventure – Gym & Ice Cream

Each week, we try to identify an activity and/or adventure in which everyone on the team can optionally participate. Various previous activities have involved BBQ and drinks on the patio, trail running, breakfast, and even watching baseball.

This week’s adventure involved calories – as a result of consumption, the burning thereof, and more consumption.

The outing took place at OrangeTheory Fitness, in Folsom where we participated in a 55 minute group workout session. To begin, we all started on the treadmill and were coached when to increase and decrease our speeds. Being competitive, some of us were blatantly obvious in increasing our speeds so as to keep up with those next to us, even if it was clearly above our daily activity constraints of 0.

Following the treadmill, we then found ourselves in the uncomfortable seat of a row-machine. The motions involved in the rowing of a machine do not bring peace and tranquility to mind when I pretend it’s just a row boat and I’m in the middle of a stream, much like the scene portrayed by Ariel in the Little Mermaid (Talk about the worst idea for a date – going on a row boat. I’d be out of breath and tired, resulting in us being stranded).

The final stage of our workout involved light weights and a series of bizarre crunches involving a moving pad. I ended up laying on the ground for most of this, hoping the pain and agony would evoke emotion in others to continue on through the workout without me.

Towards the end, Matt was quickly rushed a thirst-quenching Gatorade due to immediate onset of “I haven’t worked out in forever”. So as to not look as though I too needed a Gatorade (or lets be honest, a glazed donut) to bring me back to life, I cheated on my rep counts and stared at the ceiling hoping not to see Jonny, Kathy, or Heather whom were always no fewer than 4 rounds/sets ahead of the group.

To bring things back full circle, our workout session carried over to milkshakes and frozen yogurt.

We look forward to our next session (Thank you OrangeTheory Fitness for the great workout) where more of the team will hopefully decide to join, if for no other reason, but to earn the frozen yogurt reward.