We all intuitively know that not everyone learns the same way or at the same pace or have the same level of understanding of a particular subject. Yet, traditionally, systems including Teamie, were designed to support the learning for all learners in a class in a uniform way. The real impact of the use of technology in the classroom may come from the ability to personalise the learning experience for each learner.  

At Teamie, we want to enable a Personalised Learning environment, where each learner can learn as per his/her pace and interests, while allowing teachers to guide and monitor the progress made by each learner.

“Personalized learning is generally seen as an alternative to so-called “one-size-fits-all” approaches to schooling in which teachers may, for example, provide all students in a given course with the same type of instruction, the same assignments, and the same assessments with little variation or modification from student to student. Personalized learning may also be called student-centered learning, since the general goal is to make individual learning needs the primary consideration in important educational and instructional decisions, rather than what might be preferred, more convenient, or logistically easier for teachers and schools.”

– Definition by EdGlossary.org

 

While the concept of Personalised Learning has been around for a long time, the ability to implement it has always been a challenging task. The ability to share resources & conduct assessments with specific students or teams of students has been challenging as it had been to seamlessly create, share, assess and support learning differentiation opportunities through a tool, without having to use a diverse set of applications.

One aspect of Personalised Learning serves as a means to allow learners to receive instructions in a manner that is designed and optimised for them. These instructions assist learners to learn at a pace suitable for them. As an instructor, you can decide on the content and instructional approach that you wish to take for an individual learner or a group of learners (mostly referred to as a team). Personalised learning helps in creating and sharing meaningful and relevant content with learners based on their needs and interests, in the form of lessons and/or assessments.

 

Teamie now supports Personalised Assessments

While Personalised Learning has several aspects and requires different toolsets, we have made some strides in our product to allow teachers to create and support learning differentiation for their learners.

In the past, we have supported the idea of creating teams of students within a class that can be used for group assessments, or sharing of resources with specific students or teams. In our latest release, we have added the ability to create assessments and share that with specific students or teams.

Based on our conversations with teachers, we learnt about the following needs for personalising assessments:

• Learners who are struggling with or need more advanced resources need to be assessed individually as well
• Learners who need to “re-sit” for an assessment because they did not do well in the first run of that assessment. Only a few of the students from the class need to do this, and take another or similar assessment on that topic to show progress and understanding of the topic.
• Learners work on different projects wherein the set of standards or criteria in the rubric may not be the same for all students, as the projects may cover different aspects of the curriculum. In the past, the same “project assignment” would be created for all learners with the assumption that all standards apply to all projects. We were asked “Can you allow us to create student assignments for each student, so that we can align the exact standards that are being assessed in each students’ project?”

Teamie now supports the ability to create assessments and share them with specific students or a team of students in the class. This allows teachers to create an assessment for an individual student and have a separate rubric for that assessment, and create a different assessment for another student who may be working on a different project or task, with a different rubric that is more aligned with the project/task scope.

 

A recap of Personalised Learning features on Teamie

In the post, we will recap some of the tools and features available within Teamie to support Personalized Learning.

 

Teams

Teamie allows instructors to break their classrooms into a number of teams and have multiple teamsets for different projects or needs. In addition to sharing materials with the whole classroom, they can choose to personalise the learning by sharing materials (assignments, quizzes, and offline tests) with either individual learners and/or teams. Thus, allowing teachers to easily create learning differentiation opportunities for their students, while working on Teamie itself.

Team Creation

 

Personalised Lessons and Assessments

Sometimes, there is a hesitation among instructors because of  the perceived complexity of personalisation, which makes them shy away from the technology-powered personalized learning. Therefore, we have made the approach of personalised learning very user friendly and easy to impart in order to best pair learners with appropriate individualised content.

You can simply alter the Sharing setting of a material to share the content with a classroom (by default) or with individual learners or team(s).

Sharing materials with individual learners

Sharing materials with teams

 

Managing Personalised Learning Resources

On the Materials page of a classroom, instructors can differentiate between the materials that are shared with the whole classroom and the ones that are shared with individual learners and/or teams, in a glance.

Personalised material shared with info

 

Instructors can also quickly filter all the personalised materials in a classroom by ticking the Personalised Only checkbox.

 

Personalised materials filter

Similarly, instructors have the option to filter the classroom materials on the basis of individual learner(s) or team(s).

Filtering Materials view on the basis of learner(s)

Filter Materials view on the basis of team(s)

 

One more aspect of personalised learning that is made simple and easily accessible for instructors is the ease of filtering the personalised material(s) that a learner is assigned with. This helps in keeping track of the personalised learning plan that you intend for different learners. All you need to do is, head over to that particular learner’s Gradebook and tick the Personalised Only checkbox to filter the personalised assessments available for the learner under the respective sections of that classroom.

 

Personalised materials filter in learner Gradebook

 

As personalised learning is all but an effort to pace learning for meeting the needs of individual learners, therefore, we have made it simpler for learners to filter the Materials view of their classroom for viewing the personalised materials that are shared individually with them and/or with a team that they are part of.

Learners filtering a classroom’s Materials page to view materials shared individually with them

Learners filtering a classroom’s Materials page to view materials shared individually with a team that they are part of

 

In case you wish to know more about how learning is personalised in Teamie, you can visit our help center.

 

What’s next with Personalised Learning on Teamie?

We have embarked on a journey to enable a Personalised Learning on Teamie, and while we have made some good progress, there is a more that needs to be done to fully support a personalised learning experience. While the features so far are support “instructor-led” personalisation, in our upcoming releases we will focus on “student-led” personalisation.

So, stay tuned and keep collaborating! You can also share your feedback with us, which will be much appreciated 🙂