Alleyoop online tutorial

By Jennie Rose

Alleyoop, the online college prep tutoring site created by Pearson, has added a group of new STEM-focused partners to its offerings. In addition to its current math programs, Alleyoop has added NASA eClips, National Geographic, Scientific Minds, Patrick JMT, Virtual Nerd, Adaptive Curriculum and Brightstorm.

Alleyoop uses the “gamification” model for its curriculum, which is targeted at middle- and high-school students. The site features real-time tutors, instructional videos, and a system described as “personalized, iterative, and adaptive,” according to an Atlantic article.

With these new additions, students who use Alleyoop will have access to NASA eClips, a video library showing STEM-related careers and applications for science and engineering concepts;  videos from National Geographic that are aligned to STEM topics, such as animal behavior and chemistry; National Science Foundation’s Science360 app, a source for science news, as well as a series of video interviews of scientists and engineers on the field.

Other partners in Alleyoop’s online curriculum offerings include Brightstorm, video lessons created by teachers covering biology, chemistry and physics; Adaptive Curriculum, featuring interactive scenarios that give students context for science lessons across the board; Patrick JMT, video activities including geometry, trigonometry to statistics and probability; Scientific Minds, quizzes and interactive biology flashcards; and Virtual Nerd, interactive whiteboard tutorials in math and physics.

The site, which has more than 30,000 beta users, was designed to be used outside  school, unlike other tutoring sites, like Civitas Learning. Alleyoop users earn ‘Yoops’ for the work they do on the site, and can put those earned points towards different activities. For $12 a month, a user can gain access to premium content, such as guidance help or career advice.

HOW IT WORKS

Based on the user’s grade — between 7th and 12th grade, Alleyoop recommends activities that challenge different skill levels. From the outset, the “Learner DNA” module begins profiling the type of learner—kinesthetic, visual or auditory—while the “Super Brain” engine pushes content and activities that are most effective for specific learning styles, even predicting academic areas where kids could use more practice.

Given the conditions in cash-strapped schools, Patrick Supanc, president of Alleyoop says he believes that the adaptive model created for out-of-classroom learning can also help students in school.

“What if you could just pull out your iPod Touch or phone, pin an issue you’re having with some material at school, and then when you get home, log in, and have a recommendation waiting for you to follow up on that material?” he said.

Roger Dawley, a 15-year-old sophomore at Scituate High School in Massachussetts who uses Alleyoop, appreciates the performance feedback. But he especially likes approaching classroom material at his own pace, and finds it easier to revisit the material than to ask his teacher. Dawley uses Alleyoop largely to review classroom curriculum that he didn’t understand. “It’s easier to re-watch videos of the parts that you didn’t get instead of having to deal with someone,” he says.

By the same token, Dawley wishes the Alleyoop interface offered an instant chat feature to query if he’s struggling.

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Students at Rocketship Mateo Elementary working in the Learning Lab.

When it comes to math and literacy software, the choices are vast and varied. But over the past months, I’ve heard a recurring complaint from different school administrators: The quality of literacy software is not as high as that of math.

Why is this the case?

I spoke to Aylan Samouha, chief schools officer at Rocketship Education, a network of charter elementary schools in San Jose that allots 25 percent of students’ time at school in the computer lab, where they use math and literacy software for basic skills mastery. Time in classroom with their teacher is spent on what they call “higher-order thinking” and collaborative projects.

For math, Rocketship uses Dreambox Learning, ST Math, TenMarks and Equatia. For literacy, Compass Learning is used for vocabulary and Rosetta Stone for English language learners. Students also have independent reading time, for which they’re given “comprehension quizzes.” For both math and literacy, students who need more individualized help work in small groups of four or five with math and literacy specialists.

Samouha, who’s in charge of what software the school uses, says that the math software is “much further along than literacy.”

“It’s not like people aren’t trying to crack the code,” he says. “But the truth is that there are aspects of math, particularly at the elementary school level, that lend themselves to online learning more easily.”

In general, he points out, with any form of learning — online or otherwise — basic skills are easier to teach, grasp, and to measure than higher-order thinking and concepts. And although math does involve conceptual thinking, even at the elementary level, it’s easier to break out conceptual skills than in literacy.

Take, for example, multiplication. A student can practice and master multiplication and make improvement on basic skills with varying degrees of understanding of the concept. “A kid can spit out five-times-five quickly, whether they understand what that means,” he says.

But literacy is a different animal. When it comes to vocabulary, the definition of a word is not a simple mathematical equation. A word has different meanings in different contexts, and some have multiple meanings. “To isolate the basic skill of literacy is just much trickier to do,” Samouha says.

What’s more, the successful math software can scaffold the process, working on basic skills that lead to conceptualization, whereas in literacy the conceptualization process is immediate. “Anytime you’re starting to read a sentence, you’re already in the world of conceptual understanding,” he says.

What do they want to accomplish with literacy software? Two things: Comprehension and expression — and “almost everything falls under those big buckets,” Samouha says.

“We want a child to be able to read a text and derive meaning from that, literally understand what the author is trying to say, make connections between the text and their own experiences, and other text they’ve read,” he says. “That’s what real literacy mastery looks like with comprehension.”

With expression, the goal is for the student to be able to communicate verbally and with writing — the ability to express oneself in ways that are grammatically correct, interesting to read, presenting a logical point of view, showing a connection between what they’re reading to their own experiences, all while being as descriptive as possible.

Of course, educators do just that — they isolate each one of those skills and help students work on them individually. “But for a computer to know whether or not there’s a proper self-to-text connection is a lot trickier than finding out if they have the right answer to math problem,” he says. “We are much more cautious and protective on the literacy side. If we saw there was software that was just as effective as Dreambox is in math, we’d do that.”

Which begs the question: Why are we using software to teach literacy, if it’s not as effective.

Samouha says we need both teachers and great software.

“Learning happens best when human beings are freed up to do what they’re best at,” he says. “Teachers didn’t sign up to teach so they can teach short vowel sounds for four months. Or do times table recitation with kids. They’re teachers because they want to teach concepts and ideas.”

And especially in under-served communities, where basic skills are typically in need of “shoring up to such degree that teachers get stuck there, it’s not good for kids or teachers.”

All that said, Compass Learning does have an engaging program, and it’s shown to increase students’ Northwestern Evaluation Association scores, according to Samouha, who describes assessment as a reliable adaptive diagnostic test.

“For the very basic parts of literacy, it’s starting to make itself valuable in the process,” he says. “We’re starting to see benefits, but it’s at early stages. But literacy software right now doesn’t have as much lift as math.”

Sintia Marquez in Rocketship’s Learning Lab, where she uses adapative technology that moves at her level.

When it comes to a student’s education, expectation is everything. What parents and educators expect from each student, and what she expects from herself, has a tremendous effect on how a student fares in school.

For Sintia Marquez, a fifth-grader at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary, expectations are high, both on the part of her parents and her teachers.

Though she’s naturally a high achiever – well above grade level in both literacy and math – that foundation of support and encouragement from her parents and teachers is helping her forge ahead, even in a public charter school where more than 90% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch and 70% for whom English is a second language.

Sintia’s mother was allowed to progress only to middle school in Mexico. She’s a housekeeper now, and her father finds work as a contractor and a restaurant worker. “Sintia can’t say that I have a career that she can be proud of,” said Livier Maria Marquez in the one-bedroom guesthouse she shares with her husband and two daughters. “One of my hopes is for her to go to college. She really wants to go to Stanford or Santa Clara.”

If the present is any indication of the future, Sintia is well on her way there. In June, she’ll graduate from Rocketship, one of three branded charter schools in the area that has plans to expand across the state and across the country. The school offers open enrollment and receives funding from local, state, and federal taxes, as well as from venture capital.

Since she transferred from a nearby public school in fourth grade, Sintia has been able to progress at her own advanced level with the help of the charter school’s hybrid learning system. With this system, teachers teach high-level concepts in class, and students practice those theories in a computer lab.

It’s all part of a highly engineered, tightly structured block schedule that moves students through classrooms and computer labs, with time for recess, lunch, and outdoor activities throughout the day.

“They’re transitioning from class to class the way high school kids do,” said Judith McGarry, spokesperson for Rocketship (who has since left the organization). “You’ll see how a topic is being introduced in social studies and it gets carried through into math, etcetera.”

Rocketship

Here’s how it works: A student starts her day with a literacy teacher, for example, for a three-and-a-half hour block of time during which the class practices basic grammar skills, works with guided reading programs, rotates through science or social studies lessons, and works on writing skills. After lunch, the student goes to a different teacher’s class, where she works on math for the next one hour and 45 minutes.

Then it’s time to go to Learning Lab, a computer area cordoned off by dividers that shares space with the school’s modest cafeteria. In the Learning Lab’s Reading Center, students read independently at their own level for 30 to 45 minutes everyday (Sintia is reading Twilight and loving it), then take a break with P.E. outside. They then return to the computer rotation, where they spend 30 to 45 minutes on adaptable learning programs.

EducationNext described the specifics in a recent article:

In the lab, the 1st graders log in by selecting from a group of images that acts as a personal password, and then race through a short assessment that covers math and reading problems. Faced with the prompt “Put all the striped balls in one basket and all the polka-dotted balls in the other basket,” a student named Jazmine uses her mouse to move the objects to their places. Then it’s on to the core activity of her 90 minutes in the lab: a lesson on counting and grouping using software from DreamBox. The scenarios are slightly surreal—more objects to move, in this case mostly fruit, and the reward for getting it right involves an animated monkey bringing yet more fruit to a stash on her island—but she and most other students take on the task assiduously. It may be a lesson, but that’s not how Jazmine sees it. “This game is really easy,” she says. A bit later, she’ll read a book from a box targeted at her exact reading level, and make a return visit to the computer to take a short quiz about what she read.

Rocketship uses educational programs that are adaptive — they help students progress at their own level and really achieve individualized learning, the Holy Grail of education.

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Students spend 30 to 45 minutes reading at their own level in the Reading Center.

McGarry describes it this way, using an example of a student learning two-digit addition: “If she’s really struggling, the program sees that in terms of the way she’s playing the game. So the program will just unobtrusively and automatically back her up into the building block skills that go into two-digit addition. Once the program sees that she’s doing just fine there, then she’ll try once again to move into that two-digit scenario. That’s how remediation is occurring in this sort of seamless, automated way.”

And since most kids don’t have computers at home, McGarry said, “they love going into Learning Lab, because it’s really fun for them and they get to play.”

The programs they use are:

• DreamBox Learning (Math)
• Reasoning Mind (Math)
• ALEKS Quicktables (Math)
• Headsprout (Literacy)
• Rosetta Stone (English Language Development)

The day is long – from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., but for someone like Sintia, that’s not so bad.

“Sometimes I’m tired because I have a bad day, but everyone has a bad day,” she says. “But I like it because you can spend more time with friends, and you can better understand what your teachers are talking about.”

For kids who are struggling – including those with learning disabilities or in special education programs – the school provides a Response to Intervention program, where they learn with tutors in small groups. In a large classroom furnished with big, round tables, students rotate in throughout the day for 30-minute intervals for more focused, individual help.

The heart of Rocketship is not just use of computers and a grid schedule, though. Hybrid learning (they don’t call it “blended learning” because the computers aren’t blended into the class per se) is a huge component of the school’s secret sauce. But other important factors contribute to the package: a powerful school culture, strong emphasis on assessments (for better or for worse), and a focus on teacher retention and professional development. More to come on those topics.