How Élise Beaulieu, a grade 3 teacher, is helping our teams to adjust some activities that were too difficult for her students.
Netmath is the result of close collaboration between the Scolab and education professionals, and this dynamic continues in the ongoing improvement of the learning platform. So, when our Netmathematician Simon Lavallée heard that in the class of Elise Beaulieu, a primary school teacher, they found some of the activities much too difficult to complete, he got in touch with her directly. He was interested to find out where these difficulties came from and above all, how to adjust Netmath to better suit the students’ level.
At Élise Beaulieu’s school there are no exercise books in grade 3. To practice math, they use Netmath in the computer lab and at home, on computer or tablet. And the students love it!
When they have homework on Netmath, it’s not a chore!” she says. “The kids really like it a lot because it’s appealing, visual, and easy to use.
However, she noticed that some exercises were not really suited to the students’ level.
It’s often because a concept is too advanced for them.
Sort through them. Skip exercises that pose problems. And that’s too bad because, with Netmath, we want to save teachers time by offering them a database of activities that correspond perfectly to their students’ level.
So, we asked Elise Beaulieu to work with our team to adjust the problematic activities to the required grade level. She accepted immediately:
I was glad to see that they were concerned about what teachers thought. Plus, when I told my students that I was working with “Mr. Netmath,” they were so proud!
In collaboration with Simon Lavallée and our content team, Élise looks over all grade 3 activities, with the progression of learning as a support, to identify and correct the sticking points.
It’s important to know that, since grade 3 is the first year of the primary cycle, there are a lot of new concepts. That’s why the activities can quickly become too advanced, because here, we’re really at the basics. But that’s not the case for all of the activities. There are some sections where I have nothing to say, and others where things hit a little bit of a snag.
Continuing, she says:
It’s really rewarding to see that I’m helping! As a teacher, I get a lot out of this experience because it allows me to better develop my math curriculum and leads me to new questions that improve my teaching, which we don’t always have time to reflect on in everyday life.
Some of her corrections have already been implemented on the platform.
At the start, Netmath was born out of a close collaboration between the Scolab studio and math teacher Claude Laverdure, launching our team on this exciting adventure! Since then, we have initiated several other collaborations with educators like the teacher and education consultant Paul Patenaude. And we’re working hard to preserve this dynamic as Netmath grows.
That’s why we regularly visit classrooms and different conferences about education and digital technologies. It’s also why we put in place some tools to gather feedback from teachers and students, like test sessions and the comment feature in the app.
Elise Beaulieu is a grade 3 teacher at the École de la Source in the Commission scolaire des Affluents in Mascouche, Quebec.
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