How This Educator Uses Live Data on Boddle to Enhance Individual Lesson Plans

Mason Nichols is a third-grade math teacher at Fort Sam Houston ISD in Texas and was recently awarded the title “Elementary Teacher of the Year” in his district. He shares, among other things, how using Boddle's live-feed data feature helps him see exactly which skills his students understand and which his students need extra practice on.

Key Outcomes:

• Reinforced Learning: After teaching, Mason can assign his students specific skills that match the day’s lesson, thereby reinforcing their comprehension and retention of topics. ‍
• Enhanced Effectiveness of Lesson Plans and Assignments: Using Boddle’s live feed of students’ progress, Mason is able to get instant results of what his students understand and what areas they need to practice more. From there, he can create “intervention groups,” gain feedback, and know what each student needs to work on, personalizing a lesson for each student.  ‍
• Encouraged Creativity and Skill Practice: Boddle’s interactive and game-like features encourage students to spend time playing the game while enriching their learning and lives. Mason explains that his students are always excited to play Boddle; they engage their minds creatively and logically, enabling them to practice many skills.‍
• Increased Student Engagement: While using Boddle, Mason has seen an increase in student engagement, especially while playing Boddle. “My group this year was very creative,” Mason says, and by using Boddle, he can engage that creativity while furthering their education. 
  

Challenge: Lack of math programs that provide a wide variation of questions and instantaneous results. 
Before Boddle, Mason struggled to find a math program that would allow him to gather data from his students effectively. “I would create assessments on my own,” Mason explains, “and a lot of the assessments I would use were really good, but I would then have to wait after school and grade things… It wouldn’t break the data down as much. It wouldn’t show me learning gaps and things like that.” Identifying which areas each student needs to work on and creating plans to help them takes an enormous amount of time that most teachers do not have. In order to best teach his students, Mason needed a tool that would gather the data for him, thereby allowing him to create the lessons his students required to learn well.

Solution: A tool that is both engaging and beneficial to the students that provides data analysis on what areas each student needs to work on and what areas they comprehend. 
By using Boddle, specifically the live-feed data feature, Mason can see exactly which skills his students understand and which his students need to work on. Additionally, he can look at individualized student data, view their learning gaps, and design a personalized lesson. He can even assign skills to individual students to practice on Boddle. The students enjoy playing Boddle and look forward to it. Boddle engages with the students, making learning fun while building their understanding of math skills and maximizing their time spent. 

Result: Mason uses Boddle to enhance and adapt his lessons for the class and provide individual instruction to students, ensuring their success and strengthening his ability to teach by increasing his time to plan and connect. 
After a few months on Boddle, Mason sees the many benefits that come with the program. Using Boddle’s live-data reports and adapting his lessons, he can connect with his students personally and help them succeed. Before, he could not have accomplished this without spending hours or more working through the data he collected; Boddle enables him to do this within minutes. This feature not only saves him time but strengthens his teaching and his students’ comprehension.

“My students love Boddle. There will be times when we come in from specials and we’ll have 15 minutes. I’ll say, ‘Okay… if you have all of your work done, these are your options: You can work on Boddle, you can work on this program…’ and kids are so excited; they’re like, ‘Yes, Boddle!’ [Also,] I’ve had kids that are not typically motivated with math be completely motivated to work on Boddle. I’ve had kids in the parent-pickup line… using their parents phone and playing it.”
Mason Nichols