Buzz in Practice

As classroom sizes grow, it becomes increasingly harder for teachers to accommodate the needs and pace of every student. Some teachers end up teaching to those who struggle most so no one is left behind, while others teach to the highest performers, hoping for some kind of trickledown. Not only does Buzz provide classroom and data management tools to free up time that teachers can use to give students the attention they need, it also provides tools that directly facilitate personalization.

• Clipboard intervention: Use the Clipboard to quickly provide personalized attention to individuals and groups, and help them find and accelerate their personal pace. You can assign activities, award badges, assign tasks, and message students quickly and easily based on their needs. This is an easy way to provide intervention and direction on the fly; you can even sit with a student, discuss what they are trying to accomplish, and develop and assign next steps and tasks right in Buzz with them.
• Formative and remediation assessments: Buzz's formative and remediation assessments help identify individual student's needs and provide customized learning opportunities to meet those needs.
  • Formative assessments: When students demonstrate objective mastery on a formative assessment, Buzz automatically lets them skip activities meant to teach those objectives, so they can focus on material they haven't yet mastered.
  • Remediation assessments: Remediation assessments also evaluate performance against objectives, and, if a student shows lack of mastery, Buzz identifies activities that were meant to teach those objectives and encourages the student to return to them.
• Self Assessment: The Self Assessment feature allows students to evaluate their personal understanding, interest, and effort in a course using a simple four-point scale for each. This is a low-risk and easy way for students to communicate with their teacher, and teachers can use the results to guide intervention and personalized attention.

While a blended learning environment is meant to facilitate personalized learning, it shouldn't eliminate the opportunity for students to work together. Buzz provides various features that can be used to blend independent efforts with collaborative experiences.

• Groups: Buzz lets you easily divide your classes into multiple and overlapping group sets. Once you've created groups, you can send group messages, assign group activities, create quick intervention tasks for them, assign group grades, award badges, arrange peer assessments within groups, and filter your list views with them. Buzz eases the logistical nightmares that group work can cause, and lets you focus on helping students get the most out of collaboration.
• Wiki and Discussion activity templates: Easily create Wiki and Discussion activities in which students make recorded, individual contributions toward collaborative knowledge building and idea exchange.  
• Project activity template: This activity template let's you:
  • Create and assign a project.
  • Assign project groups.
  • Integrate critique, collaboration, and reflection activities, like Discussions, Blogs, Wikis, and Journals.

Sometimes giving students greater freedom and control over their learning paths leaves teachers with less ability to hold them accountable to standards. Buzz opens up opportunities for authentic choice and exploration without disrupting the teacher's ability to build and follow fair and manageable grading practices.

• Objective Mastery: Buzz allows you to import educational standards (e.g., federal, state, district), align them with activities to establish learning objectives, and track and review how each student performs against them. Both teachers and students can easily access this information and use it to personalize the learning path.
• Student choice: Choice activities in Buzz enable students to review a teacher-curated selection of activities and choose to complete the ones that best align with their personal interests and goals.
• Self-assigned tasks: Students can create and self-assign activities that are integrated into their calendars. Creating and completing self-assigned tasks helps students explore material, manage their time, and direct their own learning path.
• Digital Library: Expand and diversify the content students can explore with various online resources in the Digital Library. These can include other courses within your district or organization, as well as open educational resources (OER) from sources like OpenEd.

Blended classrooms create opportunities for teachers and students to interact in various ways. Buzz helps you take advantage of these opportunities by providing tools that support personal, immediate feedback, rewarding achievements, reinforcing desired behavior, peer review, and personal reflection for students.

• Self Assessment: The Self Assessment feature allows students to evaluate their personal understanding, interest, and effort in a course using a simple four-point scale for each. This is a low-risk and easy way for students to communicate with their teacher, and teachers can use the results to guide intervention and personalized attention.
• Badges: Badges are rapidly becoming a standard way for teachers to reward achievement, reinforce behavior, and verify competency. Buzz lets teachers set up automatic and manually-assigned downloadable badges that students can upload to external badge managers.
• Journal activity template: Journal activities give students the opportunity to regularly reflect on their experience in a space that only their teacher and they can access.
• Question-specific feedback: When setting up assessments, you can create feedback to address each possible answer outcome and it will be automatically delivered to students.

A learning environment is not truly blended if there is a disconnect between what students do in their virtual space and what they do in their brick-and-mortar environments. Buzz provides a user-friendly, dynamic experience in which all of its tools and features support continuity between online and realworld instruction and classroom management. It integrates with other major learning tools and is connected to an active community of users and technical support who are dedicated to making your blended experience the best it can be.