How This Special-Ed Teacher Created Fun and Personalized Learning Experiences for Her Students

Nicole Bagdanov is a teacher working with a virtual and global learning pod of special-ed students with skillsets ranging from the 3rd to 5th grade level. She consistently faces up to the challenge of personalizing the learning experience to each of her student’s unique educational needs. In doing so, she found Boddle to be an invaluable partner that delivers an engaging learning environment her students thoroughly enjoy.

Key Outcomes:

• Efficacy in Remote Learning: Boddle works well within a remote learning setting and with other common remote tools, such as Zoom. Nicole and her students can easily interact live and virtually, as she shares her screen with lessons that align with the questions on the game.
• Versatile Learning Tools: A variety of tools are available to teachers and students, and for students with learning disability, the availability of tools like video explanations assists them immensely in grasping key concepts.
• Perfectly Balanced Platform for Interactive Learning: The dynamics between gameplay and learning is well-balanced, as Boddle ensures that students are having fun and find incentives to keep learning while successfully acquiring and retaining skills.
• Adaptive and Personalized Learning: Boddle gives Nicole control over what materials and curriculum to prescribe to each of her students as appropriate to their skill levels and learning pace.

Challenge: Due to the students’ needs for special attention and varying learning pace, the traditional grade level structure was not compatible with the students’ actual skills.

Prior to using Boddle, Nicole found it challenging that her classroom division relied strictly on grade level. The main concern was that even within the same grade level, students demonstrated a wide range of skill levels and cannot all coalesce at the same curriculum. Some 4th graders were still operating at a 2nd grade level, while others were ahead of the pack and did not find the appropriate learning challenges to stimulate their growth further. This caused difficulties for both teacher and students; on Nicole’s side, she had to struggle with only having one curriculum to prescribe for everyone’s differing situations, while her students faced the difficulties of learning at a pace incongruent to their specific needs.

Solution: A platform that boasts versatility and adaptability to accommodate for each student’s unique learning needs and pace.

Nicole was able to leverage Boddle’s extensive library of content and assign different curriculum and skill levels that are more appropriate to the students’ personalized needs and skill levels while also progressively bringing them up to speed. This also facilitates for a very open and transparent communication between Nicole and the students’ parents. Through Boddle’s reporting tools, Nicole can compile the necessary feedback to share with parents in terms of their child’s strengths, learning gaps, and progress. Additionally, students find themselves learning and developing the appropriate skills at a pace that works for them individually. With Boddle’s adaptive learning technology, in fact, students can find themselves completing or even exceeding the curriculum required of their grade level. Combined with Boddle’s ease of use, especially in a remote setting, the platform serves teachers like Nicole and their students well during an era of distance and virtual learning.

Result: Nicole can leverage Boddle to target the specific needs of each student and understand their progress better, while her students relish in the fun learning environment that Boddle creates.

Nicole and her students alike find in Boddle a tool and a resource that they are comfortable with and enjoy using. On the teacher side, Nicole can easily identify each student’s learning progress, where they are in the learning journey, and what they are working on. Boddle gives Nicole a direct insight into the children’s “brains,” allowing her to examine closely what skills would best benefit from reinforcements or advancements. Meanwhile, the students find active engagement with the program, and they feel comfortable using the program to the point that they find themselves wanting to keep learning. For Nicole’s group of special-ed students, the “fun” factor of Boddle especially dispels the common frustration these students would usually face when learning; instead, they find themselves energized and encouraged to catch up and keep up with positive progress.

“Boddle presents a really great balance between gaming and learning. I love the engagement and the interactions taking place on the platform; I like that it still focuses on math while also giving my students a fun game to play. They really enjoy it, and I would find my students often still playing the game past their class time. I think it certainly is an indicator of success when you have to tell your students to stop doing math! They are very into it!”                                       -Nicole Bagdanov

Devices

Boddle currently runs on desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks using Safari, Firefox, or Chrome browsers. The Boddle app for iPad, tablets, and mobile users is also available on the Apple App Store.

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