Investigating Istation's Learning Environment

 

Learning Environment

Istation is a digital online program that provides blended learning for reading, math, and Spanish. It provides seven elements to help students grow. The seven elements are formative assessment activities that are similar to games. Adaptive Curriculum that adjusts to the students’ needs and capabilities. Personalized data profiles to guide teachers in choosing appropriate intervention strategies. Teacher Resources that help educators customize learning for individual students, small groups, or whole groups with the use of interactive tools, assignments, and scripted lessons. School-to-home connection offers 24-7 access to the program. Professional development supported by experts and technology and finally, proven results of greater benefits for students using the Istation program (Istation, 2022).

Cognitive Presence

Istation promotes cognitive presence as it presents academic content in activities such as games with engaging animations to keep students motivated. The adaptive curriculum can keep students engaged by meeting the students needs academically rather than a one size fits all approach where some students may get bored or frustrated and lose interest.

Teacher Presence

Istation’s environment facilitates teacher presence by gathering personalized data of the students. With personalized data, teachers can group students heterogeneously and homogeneously for the purposes of small group instruction and center time. Each student’s summation handout has the details about the student’s usage, performance, reading or math grade equivalency so that the teacher can select appropriate reading/math material for the students to target specific skills (Istation, 2022).

Social Presence

Istation does not promote social presence with online peers or teacher. Istation provides lessons that teachers may use in the classroom that may promote face-to-face social presence but not online social presence. Most of Istation’s lessons are digital lessons adapted for each individual. The lessons are repetitive and drill like.

Glows

In my opinion, the highlight of Istation is that it has an adaptive curriculum that differentiates lessons for each student’s curriculum. Another valuable element of Istation is that teachers can obtain personalized data for the purposes of monitoring learning and guiding their instruction.

Grows

The weakness of Istation is its online social presence. It fails to create a community of online learners. Students learn independently of each other when they are completing their adaptive lessons. Hence, most of the students learning is coming from drill and practice instead of dialoguing and interacting with others.

References

Istation. (2022). Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://www.istation.com/