My school district adopted Houghton Mifflin's GoMath curriculum this year. We are having an official digital training at the end of this week so hopefully by next weekend I'll be an "expert". In the meantime, students have used the HMH Player app based on what I've taught myself, the paper materials from GoMath, Splashmath, Tenmarks, and Zeal (practice and exit ticket components). Each of these provides a different "take" on math and I think help students practice the same concepts in different ways. One thing they all have in common is data! I am interested this year to really compare data analytics from different platforms to see how an individual student's results compare.
Toward the end of this week we added a new component, Zeal Tutoring. It has been very helpful in getting my students help quickly.
With the change in curriculum (both the order content is covered and an official switch to CC from the "old" curriculum) I have found many of my students are not grasping key concepts in as quick a time as they are being covered in the GoMath lessons. Lesson 1.9, skip counting to 1000 was especially difficult and we needed to add in a lesson about place value including the hundreds place.
Enter Zeal Tutoring...
As with the "regular" Zeal assignments, students answer questions tied to CCS. Zeal Tutoring analyzes student mastery in the moment and when students are struggling with a concept they are pulled into a live 1:1 online tutoring session with a credential teacher/professional tutor. Instead of 5 students raising their hand and having to wait to get my help on different aspects of a lesson, they immediately talk with someone. This interaction happens with the laptop screen turning into an interactive whiteboard and the Zeal teacher/tutor speaking to the student via headphones worn by the student and the laptop's microphone. It's magic!
So far the students love it and have asked for extra Zeal Tutoring time. I appreciate knowing students aren't wasting time waiting to talk with me, nor am I trying to juggle sitting at a table with 4 students who all need slightly different re-teaching. My teacher dashboard has specific feedback from the tutoring session (including recordings) so I can meet with students at another time and check-in with their understanding. Regardless of whether a student needs assistance from a teacher/tutor, I get feedback about how well students answered the questions.
Check out Zeal Tutoring here
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