You may also want to show this fun clip from YouTube, which shows a student playing up the “non-interactivity” of print books and expounding on the great possibilities inherent in a digital curriculum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkhpmEZWuRQ> Thank you for joining me today. My name is ______and I am a ______with Pearson Education. I am really excited to share with you today our brand new middle grades math program, digits. But, before we do that, let’s take a moment to think about what life is like for teachers just like you today. Think about all the responsibilities middle grades teachers like you have, all the best practices you are trying to execute – grading, homework, assessing, reporting and so forth It’s a little like juggling a lot of balls, none of which you can afford to drop… Confidential Page 1 4/28/2018 So what exactly are all these balls you have to constantly keep in the air? What are the best practices a middle grades math teacher is expected to execute flawlessly and without fail? Let’s talk about these best practices for a minute… Think about how much out-of-class time lesson planning takes with a paper TE where you have to find every bit of information yourself. Assigning and managing homework – we all know how long it takes to grade all those papers and provide feedback the next day in class. Creating, administering, and grading tests by hand – not to mention reporting and aggregating data – is also a major and time-consuming task. And let’s not forget intervention, at just the right time and in the right manner… RtI takes a lot of work. Adjusting instruction to meet the needs of visual learners, English Language Learners, kids who are ahead of the class (or maybe behind) and so forth – meeting all those different kinds of learners in the middle is a major task in and of itself When we first started thinking about creating a new program, we visited classrooms nationwide to find out first hand what issues teachers were facing everyday. Many of you joked to us that you wanted us to make the day 30 hours long so that you could do everything that you wanted to do for your students. We took this joke seriously and decided to break down and evaluate exactly how teachers were spending their time. Current textbook program structures left teachers with just 12 minutes for grade level instruction in a typical 45 minute class period and no time to differentiate. We also asked teachers how much time, ideally, per week would they spend on each of these best practices in order to be an effective teacher. The numbers speak for themselves. It takes more than a full day of outside class time to juggle all those balls and make sure none of them drop… Confidential Page 2 4/28/2018 So what can Pearson do to help? We put together a diverse authorship and advisory team that could shepherd us into a new world of teaching built on a foundation of tried and true best practices and time saving technology. You will notice some familiar authors’ names here, as well as school districts from across the country who helped test and improve digits in development. Note that digits is also the only middle grades math program truly written to the Common Core State Standards as it was developed in complete alignment after the Standards were published. Our work led us to define our two program goals: Optimize Time and Personalize Learning, all with the smart use of the best technological tools available designed to enhance your teaching experience. Welcome to digits. Confidential Page 3 4/28/2018 Notice how I am opening the lesson content straight from the interactive whiteboard. Just a reminder – you do *not* need to have an IWB in your classroom to teach digits – a digital projector or an eBeam work just as well. Let’s take a look at what digits looks like for students. In this new world, students engage in the math immediately on entering the classroom. Students work on the Launch problem in their student companions while the problem appears on the IWB. Turn to the first page of your presentation packet to find the companion page associated to this lesson. With digits, students are not spending any time copying the Do Now from the board because the Launch is already in their own personal companions. And this Launch problem triggers prior knowledge for the upcoming instruction through problem-based interactive learning. Teachers can invite students to the IWB to share their solutions and strategies, including using the IWB tools or manipulating the objects on the screen, which is great for visual and kinesthetic learners. For example, students can sort the fruit right on the screen. Here we meet Jay, who is one of the Understanding by Design hosts in digits. These UbD hosts are real, young, successful students who middle-graders can look up to – a change from always listening to their math teacher (you!). This allows young learners to engage with the math on a new, relatable level. The Understanding by Design hosts guide students through the lesson by providing context and reasons for why learning the concept is important, and they do this sincerely and authentically, in their own words. In this screen, Jay is simply introducing the students to the Focus Question of the lesson. We will see more examples of Jay in just a little bit. Confidential Page 4 4/28/2018 The examples in digits provide direct, explicit instruction of the lesson’s concept. The examples build on one another to ensure understanding. Now for some fun features. Note the interactive megaphone button (which reads the problem aloud) – Various animations are built in to support comprehension and engagement. You just saw the shapes convert themselves into audio players and headphones to support the word problem. You also have the option to play the animated solution. Let’s see the solution to this particular problem. The animated solution is paced for students who are learning the mathematical concept for the first time. Visual elements such as color-coding, pulsing and movement draw students’ attention to the important details of the concept. Students count along with the narrator and write the ratio accordingly. Color coding and movement demonstrate how the ratio can be rewritten to compare the objects in reverse order. Paced audio narration and visuals support learning and comprehension. Confidential Page 5 4/28/2018 Here’s our friendly UbD host Jay again, explaining the math in real-life terms Every example wraps up with such a Got It feature to check for understanding. If students are successful with the “Got It?”, you can move on with confidence. If the class is not successful with the “Got It?”, it gives you the opportunity to re-teach the example immediately. Assessments in each example can be delivered in a variety of formats. U can use the white space Another unique digits feature is the Key Concepts. This allows you to summarize the content of the lesson and check for understanding. You control how much information is displayed – you can show definitions graphically Some examples are designed for higher order thinking. Confidential Page 6 4/28/2018 Jay, our UbD host, has something to say On this next screen, teachers can invite a number of students to the board to complete the T/F statements Additionally, a detailed, comprehensive solution with visual learning elements is also available Got It 1: Got It 2: Example 3 has 2 Got Its? The first Got It? is very similar to the ones we’ve already seen, with white space for solutions, multiple choice, and completed solutions. Confidential Page 7 4/28/2018 Each lesson closes with another appearance by the UbD host to help you shore up understanding. The Close and Check is designed to bring students back to the Focus Question. You can use the white space Let’s take a look at what planning looks like for you. The Teacher Support Panel is your equivalent to the TE wrap, but on steroids. Instead of being limited to the narrow space of a printed wrap around, you now have access to deep resources at point of need, at your command, and the ability to customize. The details tab right here provides you with specific information about each problem, including probing questions that foster comprehension. If you click the Overview tab If you want more information, simply click on one of the links at the bottom to access deeper content support and resources, only click and expand for what you want. Let’s open the Teacher Guide Confidential Page 8 4/28/2018 You can also customize your Teacher Support Panel by editing the existing content or adding your own. For example, you might have found a YouTube video that supports the math concept. You can add it here so that you can launch the video directly from the lesson instead of having to go out of the lesson to open a separate browser. Additionally, let’s say during planning, you decide to change the order of the examples, you can do that. You can also remove examples and add in your own, so that it is exactly what you want, and only what you want, to present to your class. Try doing that with a book! Differentiation with print textbooks often means managing a variety of resources, both print and online. For the teacher, this most likely involves navigating and managing data across different systems, such as online remediation accounts and grade books. Print materials require teachers to distribute, grade, record and track for each differentiated group, and for this reason, differentiation is often difficult to sustain over the course of the year. In order to make this best practice feasible on a regular and long-term basis, the digits development team explored ways to simplify the process for the teacher. We looked for ways to automatically manage distribution, grading, and tracking and seamlessly integrate with core instruction. Confidential Page 9 4/28/2018 To start, we moved assessments online. This enabled auto-grading, instant feedback for both teachers and students, data automatically ported into the grade book, and most importantly, auto-differentiation. By automatically analyzing student performance data, digits can identify the students who are struggling and those who are on-level or advanced and automatically assign appropriate materials. The instructional architecture of digits is called the interACTIVE Learning Cycle. Please follow along on your handout as I describe this unique teaching tool. The interACTIVE Learning Cycle builds from the online Readiness Assessment administered at the start of every unit, which is approximately every 6 to 8 weeks. The RA is a universal screener that gauges students’ understanding of the pre-requisite concepts for the unit. Based on the results, students are automatically placed into differentiated groups for the Readiness Lesson, which reviews the pre-requisites at a foundational level for the struggling students, and provides enrichment and extension of the pre-requisites for students who are on-level or advanced. The Readiness Lesson provides a holistic and connected treatment of the pre-requisites by presenting them in application to a real world context. Additionally, the data from the Readiness Assessment drives the automatic creation of individualized study plans for every student that provides instruction and auto-graded Confidential Page 10 4/28/2018 practice on the specific pre-requisite skills that the students are deficient in. For example, if the readiness assessment covers 10 specific skills and a student missed 3 of them, that student will have exactly 3 intervention lessons correlated precisely to the missed skills in his study plan. Students have the duration of the unit to complete their individualized study plans. Because pre-requisite deficiencies are addressed in advance, students are more likely to succeed with grade-level content, represented in the interACTIVE Learning Cycle as interACTIVE instruction. Every on-level lesson is supported with… …automatically assigned differentiated homework and practice, also driven by the results of the Readiness Assessment. Each problem set has 2 parts. The first part is given to all students and directly supports the instruction of the lesson. The second part is differentiated, where struggling students are given problems that help them think through the process and on-level and advanced students are given challenge problems that require deeper thinking and analysis. When delivered online, the homework is automatically graded and the data is ported into the teacher’s grade book. Every topic and unit concludes with summative assessment, which enables educators to gauge students’ response to both the on-level instruction and the interventions. In summary, the blue elements of the interACTIVE Learning Cycle represent assessment and content that is provided to the whole class as tier 1 materials, the orange elements represent the content that is differentiated to provide tier 2 resources to struggling students and additional challenge to on-level and advanced students, and the green study plan element represents individualized intensive intervention for students who are below grade level and deficient in pre-requisite content. Additionally, teachers can assign independent or team-oriented enrichment projects that apply the content from the unit to on-level and advanced students. digits is proud to be the only program with the unique interACTIVE Learning Cycle which makes differentiation not only possible, but also simple for the teacher. What does this look like in practical terms? Confidential Page 11 4/28/2018 How can you adapt digits to the technology available in your classroom? For starters, take a look at what homework looks like. Homework in digits is powered by MathXL, Pearson’s award-winning homework and assessment system that has helped over 5 million students succeed. Differentiated homework can be administered with paper or digitally through a CD or online. Paper and digital formats share the same sequencing and problem structures so that regardless of how students complete the homework, teachers can compare results. Paper-based homework needs no explanation… students complete on paper, the teacher grades and records. Homework through the CD includes powerful learning aids and auto-grading that the student reports back to the teacher. And homework online includes learning aids, auto-grading, and auto-reporting into the teacher’s online grade book that can show exactly which problems gave the class the most difficulty, instantly. You can implement homework using any of these 3 forms, or even a combination, based on the available technology, and make modifications over time as computer or online access increases. In fact, digits is the ideal solution for any middle grades math classroom, no matter what type of digital equipment you are working with. digits allows you to grow with Confidential Page 12 4/28/2018 technology, no matter where you are in the digital spectrum. Take a look at this handout in your presentation packet to see how digits could work in your classroom! With all the excellent resources digits has to offer to help you optimize time and personalize your students’ learning, we at Pearson hope that you will soon be juggling the challenging and rewarding tasks of being a middle grades math teacher in a much more fluid fashion – with the help of the country’s first true Common Core math program. We are looking forward to being your partner along the way. Please take a look at the Components and Pricing handout in your presentation packet to learn more about digits ’ components and pricing structure. Remember, since digits is a digital curriculum, program updates and standards updates are automatic and free of charge. You pay once, and you receive the Student Companion worktext automatically at the beginning of each year. And, best of all, all you need to get started is a laptop and a projector – the program’s flexible structure allows you to grow into the technology as technology advances with you! I am happy to answer any questions you may have – but before we do that, let me show you something special. You have seen how digits allows you to optimize your time. Here’s what real digits students had to say about the personalized promise the program holds for them. The images and video footage you are about to see were collected at digits field test sites in NYC and Lawrence, MA. All quotes are actual, unsolicited comments from real digits middle grades students. Confidential Page 13 4/28/2018 <…advance to return to the PREZI home screen of the digits logo to use as a backdrop as you take questions/comments. Use this chance to refer your audience to the Feedback Form to learn more about what digits topics your customers are interested in.> PRESENTATION PACKET 1. customized cover sheet (copy single-sided; Intranet digits page: Sales Tools) 2. Presentation Packet (posted as first item on Intranet digits page), consisting of: a. Student Companion sample (double sided) b. interACTIVE Learning Cycle and RtI (double sided) c. Adaptive Implementation Matrix (single sided) d. Pricing and Components (double sided) e. Feedback Form (single sided) Please check the Intranet for the most current versions of these handouts (as well as for other digits resources you may find useful): http://intranet.pearsonschool.com/?event=page&pid=CC816875-96FF-882E-655C0B024DF10A1B Confidential Page 14 4/28/2018
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