Teague Elementary School: Prodigy from Their Prospective

When the Ed Tech Team visited Teague Elementary school earlier this school year we noticed that students were actively engaged in math concepts through using Prodigy.  We recently asked Jessica Gutierrez, 5th-grade teacher at Teague Elementary School, to tell us a little bit more about Prodigy from her perspective and from her students' vantage.

We appreciate the guest blogging of Jessica Gutierrez:

      As far as my perspective, I started using Prodigy last year as a way to try to get my students excited about practicing math.  From the start, the students have loved working with it.  They love that they get to create their own character and choose different worlds to go into.  It's a lot like a fantasy type video game.  

     What I like is that I can set up the practice to mirror what  I am currently working on in class and alter the questions.  If we haven't reached a certain part of that lesson, I can just click off that particular piece until I can cover it.  It also has an assessment feature so I can get an idea of how they are performing on a certain piece and the students don't even know they are being tested, they just think it's part of the game, which helps ease the stress of the students.  Everything is aligned with Common Core standards and it does provide extra practice in areas that are always kind of weak, like using number lines or working with missing digits in a problem.  Areas that I wish were a bit better are that it doesn't allow for a lot of individual work, it's set up pretty much whole class.  The initial set up is easy, but you do have to make sure that the students write down their username and password as you cannot set that up for them.  It is easy to find it once they set themselves up though.  I use Prodigy mostly as a free time choice, rainy day schedule activity or as a reward for hard work on something, like a benchmark. 

Jessica, thank you for sharing how you are using technology to make a #impact in your classroom!