The Challenge: Data overload. A plethora of data can make it difficult for teachers to make sense of data from assessments and prioritize instruction to meet individual student needs. This is especially hard while teachers try to meet the evolving standards of their state and district.

The Answer: Personalized Learning. With personalized learning, each student experiences the curriculum with instruction that is specifically tailored to meet the student's unique learning needs.

The Facilitator: Technology. Technology, a flexible tool to assist teachers as they personalize instruction. Meet DreamBox Learning: A data-driven, standards aligning, elementary and middle school level personalized math program.

Overview

 

DreamBox Learning was founded in 2006 in Bellevue, Washington with a mission to change the way the world learns. Using a game-like format with virtual manipulatives, DreamBox engages students to expand their thinking and improve their problem solving skills. With success, students develop a love and foundation for life-long learning.

• Districts and schools in all 50 U.S. states and 11 Canadian provinces have used this research-based program that currently serves 1.5 million students and more than 75,000 K-8 teachers (Artefact, 2016).

• Over one million math lessons are delivered daily through desktops, laptops, or iPads to provide targeted lessons, in both English and Spanish, to intervene, reinforce, or enrich understanding of math concepts.

Useful Data

DreamBox uses its Intelligent Adaptive Learning™ technology to track student data. Every hour that a student uses DreamBox, more than 48,000 data points are collected. 

The Challenge: Data overload challenge. 

The Answer: Personalized learning.

The Facilitator: Dreambox lessons are immediately adjusted by level of difficulty, sequence or pacing. If needed, appropriate scaffolds or hints are put in place to ensure that the learning benefits the student's understanding.

(For some of the links that follow, make sure to scroll down the page)

The Insight Dashboard assists administrators and teachers. It brings student data into focus to drive instructional decision making. Reports provide overviews of student learning choices and current math understandings, level of specific standards proficiency, and usage reports for how students spend their learning time in and out of the classroom. 

The struggle to meet rigorous standards in a personalized learning world can seem intimidating.

DreamBox facilitates and promotes flexibility while tightly aligning itself with standards based proficiencies for specific states and provinces.The Insight Dashboard helps facilitate mastery and monitor student progress with each standard step by step. Many activities are provided so that students demonstrate learning under a variety of conditions.

In an ideal teaching world, students would have their own personal teaching assistant. The assistant would know the student's preferences and interests, as well as the method and pace that works most effectively for that student. DreamBox might be considered as every student's highly advanced math teaching assistant. The program develops a personalized learning plan for each student based on Grant Wiggin's  backwards design model - understanding the student's process for arriving at an answer and then planning instruction and learning experiences to achieve a learning goal.

What makes this teaching assistant special is that it can do things teachers can do and more. In a lesson about telling time, for example, students use virtual clocks with multiple scaffolds and representations that can be adjusted quickly based on level of understanding. DreamBox integrates a wide variety of engaging virtual manipulatives into each lesson to make meaning of the concept and build mathematical relationships. DreamBox is continuing to strategically build new lessons, tools, and games to ensure that all students' diverse needs are being met.

Tools like Dreambox will continue to evolve and 21st Century schools will incorporate more of these tools. However, just as more and more high quality tools are becoming available, the market will be inundated with other tools that fail to live up to their promises.  Personalized learning and easy to access data-reports are two standards that schools can use to help make decisions about technology. However, the role of the teacher continues to be primary, even with these 21st Century assists.

References

DreamBox Learning - A Dashboard for Success in Education. (2014). Artefact Group. 

Food is fuel, so children's diets should awaken their minds and power their bodies. Children's diets that include less processed or refined sugary foods and drinks, yet more whole grains, vegetables and fruits will be great at fueling them with energy to run, jump, play, think, learn and concentrate on the task. Refined and processed foods only contribute to the rise in childhood obesity, and metabolic and behavioral disorders. As more attention is given to what is feeding the nation, nutrition education is becoming a serious concern for families. 

Once the assessments were completed and analysis was drawn, researchers concluded the following:
Problems with food as a motivator. Many educators will note tasty treats are a powerful motivator. But some research declares using food as a motivator in this manner is inadvertently setting children up for failure in later life. For children, the quality and abundance of food is important as food supports their growth and development. Their growing bodies and brains require carbohydrates, protein, and fats in addition to adequate vitamins and minerals. In the past decade we've seen a matriculation of nutrition education in the form of student-led sustainable gardening and more open discussions about nutrition in health and wellness classes in schools.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics reports in 1996, 99% all of public schools offered nutrition education somewhere within the curriculum and 70% integrate nutrition education within the total curriculum (Carpenter, 1996). Classes have since evolved to afford students the opportunity to contemplate the source of food and become further connected with nature through hands on gardening (Edible Schoolyard, 2016). 

Candy loaded with sugar and artificial colors, and soda full of high fructose corn syrup and caffeine are poor sources of fuel. Whole grains, vegetables and fruits are great sources of nutrients and can build powerful minds and bodies. Slowly nutrition education is becoming more in the conversation its way into the curriculum and into the forefront of what food is feeding the nation's youth.

7 Breakfast Menu Ideas -

• Egg and toast and an orange
• Egg sandwich with avocado
• Oatmeal and fresh fruit
• Pancakes topped with berries
• Hot cereal (Cream of Wheat) with milk and topped with fruit
• Greek yogurt topped with granola and fruit
• English muffin topped with peanut butter and bananas

7 Lunch Menu Ideas -

• Small rice, bean and cheese burrito with a side of fruit and vegetables
• Peanut butter and banana sandwich
• Sandwich on pita bread with chicken and a side of carrots
• Egg salad sandwich topped with fresh spinach and a side of vegetables
• Pasta with brocolli, cheese and a side of fruits
• Homemade lentil soup
• Turkey and cheese sandwich with lettuce