Personalize Learning with Buzz from Agilix

“The Time is Now. The Agent for Change is Agilix.” Since 2001 Getting Smart advocacy partner Agilix has been working to inspire education by developing innovative solutions that support a more personalized approach to education. This means more than developing and iterating products that support teachers. This means being a champion for change in education.

The Change. Education shouldn’t look the same way that it did nearly 100 years ago. In reality, education shouldn’t look the same that it did 10 years ago — or even last year. Technology changes too quickly for us to be satisfied with a system that doesn’t progress accordingly.

“A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational technology courses or training”, according to Wikipedia. And that’s a good place to start. But learning management systems were developed to support that classroom model from 100 years ago where there’s one curriculum for everyone.

So, what happens when it’s not enough to manage and administer learning? What happens when you want to affect real change? What happens when you want to really move the needle and accomplish truly personalized learning?

Enter Agilix Buzz.

The Tools. Agilix’s Buzz™ platform empowers personalized learning using very unique tools:

1. Built for K-12 Learners. Buzz is the first platform built from the ground up for the specific needs of K-12 students and teachers using bright colors, customizable themes and the option to brand with your school’s colors and logo. The interface is crisp, modern and easy to use.

2. Student Ownership. Students thrive when they are empowered to make choices in their learning. Using Buzz, students can assign themselves content or a task from a library of resources mapped to specific learning objectives and aligned standards, allowing multiple learning options- and choice- for students. Students can provide multiple forms of evidence for their work. Of course, teachers can curate and prompt students to choose content resources from the Buzz Digital Library, too.

3. Self Evaluation. Students can self-assess their interest, effort and understanding to let the teacher know at any time if they are comprehending and interested in the current curriculum and applying effort to their learning.  Buzz has a dashboard that allows students, educators and parents to see student progress based on their chosen learning paths and teacher assigned material.

4. Teacher Guidance. Using the Buzz Clipboard, teachers can take immediate action to individualize learning for a specific student or group of students by sending a note, awarding a badge, or starting a discussion. All actions are easily viewable from the clipboard.

5. Multiple Models. Buzz facilitates many different learning models, including Competency, Proficiency/Mastery, Blended, and Project-based. Buzz saves time by providing project templates that can be used as-is or adapted to individual students, groups or the whole classroom. Project templates support performance tasks.

“Our core purpose is to deliver exceptional personalized learning solutions that really work and can scale as needed,” said Curt Allen, CEO of Agilix. “Buzz motivates students with learning choices and real-time feedback. It provides teachers with tools to view progress for each student and provides guidance based on individual needs.”

Buzz for the 2015/2016 School Year. After seeing the next generation of Buzz in action this month, we fell in love with it all over again. It will be available in July for districts looking for a personalized learning solution for the 2015-2016 school year and will launch at PLS2015. This enhanced version will be customizable and scalable with deeper assessment capabilities, including test analytics, the ability to map to specific curriculum standards, and an expanded digital content library. This application is designed for use on personal computers, mobile devices, including Apple iPad, Google Chromebook, and Android Tablet.

This blog is part of the Learning Platforms Series brought to you by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more, stay tuned in for the final published project, Getting Smart on Next-Gen Learning Platforms and check out additional posts in the series:

• How Learning Will Work in the Near Future: 12 Features of Next-Gen Platforms
• 30 Attributes of Next-Gen Learning