Practi Promotes Math Practice, Supports Deep Analytics

Practi (@MyPracti) is an early stage integrated educational platform designed to support the deliberate practice required for students to succeed in math/science and subjects which require the automatic recall and application of declarative knowledge. Practi is developed specifically to help learners build a core base of knowledge and, eventually, domain expertise. Practi combines a flexible content authoring tool for teachers/publishers with a gamified practice app for students and a robust analytics engine that captures learner practice behavior to enhance and inform further development of both content and practice.

Practi was designed to 1) apply learning science to inspire and enable more STEM graduates, 2) shrink the STEM skills gap, and 3) help more learners become college and career prepared.

Like Socrative for formative assessment, Practi can also play in offline mode. Content creation tools are able to publish more complicated STEM content (including graphs, formulae, etc).

Practi is a technology platform that allows teachers to create custom quiz content, deploy it to their student’s mobile devices (Apple, Android or Windows), review their student progress, and then use that information to modify their teaching methods and material, or identify and target specific individuals who are struggling. Crucial to this activity cycle is the ability to present to teachers accurate and up-to-date information about the actions students are performing within the Practi quiz app, at various levels of aggregation and detail.

Background

Practi was developed by the team at Mathtoons Media. Mathtoons is a Canadian educational technology company that was started in 2011 by math educator, Kristin Garn.

To date, Mathtoons has developed dozens of educational apps that have been downloaded by over 300,000 people in over 16 countries. Their Pre-Calculus practice app won silver in the 2013 SeriousPlay awards, their Geometry app was chosen by Apple to be featured in Apple’s own marketing videos and Garn was chosen as one of Canada’s top female tech CEOs by the Canadian Consul General.

Practi has been developed through research partnerships with the University of British Columbia, the University of Saskatchewan, Athabasca University, the Canadian National Research Council and the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Still in research and development mode, Garn is seeking pilot sites where the goal is to increase student success rates in large courses with high failure rates (calculus, statistics) that require students to commit to and complete a large amount of independent, deliberate practice.

Free Webinar on Math Research

Steve Hargadon is hosting a webinar on Thursday, December 3, from 7:00 – 8:00 pm US-EST, for a look at the latest research in learning science and why it matters to math teachers.

• How can we take the research about teaching and learning and translate it into practice?  
• What are: “framing,” the “growth mindset,” the “testing effect,” the “retrieval effect,” “spaced repetition,” “chunking for memory,” “deliberate practice,” and “affirmative testing?”
• Why should these and other learning behaviors be familiar to math teachers?

Join Mathtoons CEO, Kristin Garn, and Mathematics Professor, Dr. Raymond Spiteri, as they outline their research looking at building math skills and greatly improving learning outcomes in the math classroom, discuss the best use of technology in the BYOD (bring your own device) math classroom, and demonstrate the use of Mathtoons Media tools.

Sign up at learningresearch.eventbrite.com to attend live or to receive links to watch the Webinar recording later.

For more blogs from Kristin, check out:

• The Future of Education is Emergent
• Emergence and the Future of Schools: Preparing for Data-Driven Systems

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