Snappet
1. What is Snappet?
Snappet! is a complete teaching platform or approach for Primary education. Students do their exercises with tablets or computers. The adaptive software increases in difficulty, with certain exercises, according to the level of the student. Normally students follow traditional instructions and after the instructions they work with the adaptive software that searches for the right zone of proximal development.
2. How can Snaooet make learning more personalized?
Teachers have a dashboard that they use to set activities for the different courses (language, mathematics, reading, etc) and they can follow the progress of the students for those courses on different levels:
- Overall school performance by subject area
- Overall performance of the class by subject area
- Performance per student by subject area
- Performance per student per goal
- Performance on an exercise
This opens up the way for teachers to analyse the students’ performance thoroughly and that way it is possible to personalise education further. In the Netherlands it is normal to create three instruction groups based on method independent tests and/ or method tests that teachers administer every 4/ 5 weeks. Because Snappet collects data for every exercise a student makes, it’s possible to follow the students formatively, live for each goal you set as a teacher.
In other words, it is possible to work in micro cycles where a teacher sets a goal, students work on that goal, the teacher evaluates the goal with the students and sets another goal. Every time the instruction group can differ. The effect of working in small cycles, is that students that are not confident overall in for example math, have the chance to be good at certain goals. That is why a higher student motivation is experienced by the teachers.
Another benefit is that teachers receive and give ‘just in time’ information, when it is most needed for students.
However teachers need to have extensive knowledge about the Snappet system. That way the teacher is in full control of Snappet and not the way around. Snappet is an adaptive system, and in some cases it makes choices for the teachers, if they are not mindful about their teaching. An important task for the teacher is to do data analyses every day, every week and every month, and to compare different sets of data (Snappet data, method-independent test data, observations, etc), in order to make informed decisions for the best student route through the curriculum. There is more data to work with, which can be a good thing, but it makes data analyses more complex.
3. What to consider when implementing Snappet?
Multiple years of training were needed at De Kringloop (PE School). The first objective was to get to know the system better: how does the adaptive software work? How does the dashboard work? And even simpler questions for some teachers: where can I find my lessons, how do I prepare them and how do I send them to the student computers? After that, there was more specific training about mathematics and language in combination with Snappet, and especially about analysing the data and how to work in small lesson cycles.
At this moment, individual needs are met with personal training programmes provided by Snappet. Also, every in staff meetings staff discuss Snappet (eg problems, opportunities, Snappet software updates, etc).
4. Where can I get started with Snappet?
If you want to get started with Snappet yourself, you can consult this page: https://nl.snappet.org/