Enrich Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning is at the core of ANGEL Learning's products. The goal of schools is to improve student achievement; the goal of ANGEL Learning is to help schools get there. The ANGEL Learning Management Suite (LMS) is easy to use for teachers just beginning to incorporate technology. At the same time, it is a robust system with many advanced features that allow teachers more experienced with technology to truly meet the needs of their students.

Ease of use and perceived benefits encourage teachers to try ANGEL in the traditional classroom. Initial success generates enthusiasm. Soon faculty are applying ANGEL in new ways, and ANGEL becomes integral to instruction. Watch the enthusiasm that ANGEL brings to a building spread as implementation grows, leading to more focused teaching and learning.

Engage Students

In order to reach today's digital natives and involve them in the learning process, educators must engage students using the tools and technology they are used to accessing in their daily lives. In addition, today's students expect and respond to a media-rich environment, a personalized approach, and collaborative learning opportunities. The ANGEL LMS provides teachers with all of these capabilities:

• Create differentiated learning paths – release advanced or remedial material based on performance and release material only when a student has reached a pre-determined level or completed assignments and assessments.
• Provide personalized feedback – praise and encourage students based on performance and send reminders when work is due or missing.
• Enable authentic student assessment – allow students to prove what they know in a variety of ways, including project-based learning.
• Facilitate collaborative and social learning &ndash use course mail, discussion forums, wikis and blogs to stimulate active learning and encourage participation.
• Leverage LIVE communication tools – communicate "live" using familiar tools like instant messaging and chat and extend the classroom with virtual office hours, desktop sharing, and whiteboard capabilities.
• Deliver a media-rich curriculum – integrate audio and video files, link to external content, and provide Podcasts of materials for students to download.
• Allow students to work at their own pace – enable anywhere, anytime learning so students can work when it is convenient for them.

VALUE: ANGEL's array of built-in communication and collaboration technologies require no additional investment.

Differentiate Instruction

No Child Left Behind calls on schools to close the achievement gap and ensure all students reach a proficiency level in their education. In order to be successful, educators must differentiate their instruction and meet the needs of individual students. The ANGEL LMS allows teachers to easily create personalized learning paths and report on individual student performance through a variety of flexible and automated actions:

• Align curriculum to individual goals so each student is making progress in the areas where he or she needs development.
• Use students’ ability, interests, and knowledge as a teaching tool by giving formative assessments and not presenting them with material they do not need or are not ready to tackle.
• Support multiple means of formative and summative assessment including quizzes and tests, essays, audio and video files, and multimedia presentations.
• Enable flexible grouping to keep students with comparable peers.
• Monitor class activity and trigger actions based on performance, including personalized communication and dynamically released curriculum.

VALUE: ANGEL's built-in surveys allow for pre-assessment of students' knowledge of topics to assist in instructional design decisions or to facilitate differentiated instruction.

Align Curriculum to Standards

State standards and local objectives are an important part of accountability for schools and teachers. ANGEL makes aligning curriculum to standards easy within a class, a school, or across an entire district. Teachers can easily align both curriculum and assessments to any standard using powerful search and browse tools. Available reports then measure performance against those standards. This ongoing visibility into student competency enables teachers to identify underperformance while it is occurring, thus providing the opportunity for them to act early when problems are identified.

ANGEL standards alignment allows teachers and schools to:

• Simplify state standards integration and alignment with the click of a check box.
• Administer standards and objectives consistently.
• Identify gaps in curriculum with detailed standards reports.
• Measure outcomes against standards on an individual student level.

State Standards Packs

ANGEL Learning also offers state standards packs from Academic Benchmarks. These add-ons to the ANGEL LMS provide schools with an up-to-date database of their state's individual standards.

Case Study

See how Forsyth County Schools in Georgia uses the ANGEL LMS to facilitate their standards-based approach to instruction and assessment. The ANGEL LMS helps Forsyth schools align their curriculum to standards, share standards aligned curriculum across schools, and report on student and class performance against standards.

VALUE: Learning Outcomes Management technologies built into ANGEL require no additional investment.

Improve Assessments

ANGEL makes it easy for schools and teachers to create more effective measurements of student success. ANGEL empowers teachers with information about their students’ progress so they can use the information to help move the students forward in their learning rather than just report their grades. The ANGEL LMS allows teachers to:

• Systematically review answers and provide feedback that encourages a student to continue learning or guide them to resources and support for better understanding.
• Drill skills to a desired level of proficiency before allowing a student to progress to the next level.
• Use item analysis to refine assessments and ensure reliability and validity.
• Access proven questions from a question bank.
• Import questions from publisher software.

Secure Browser Included

The ANGEL LMS also provides a built-in secure browser, making it possible for schools to securely give exams in a proctored lab environment. This helps teachers eliminate cheating and builds trust in the outcomes seen in assessments.

VALUE: The ANGEL LMS' built-in secure browser requires no additional investment.

Analyze Class Activity to Intervene

The ANGEL LMS gives teachers real-time information about logins, amount of time spent on tasks, documents or curriculum components accessed, assignments submitted &ndash the list goes on and on. With all of this information at a teacher’s fingertips, he or she can identify issues to address with their students.

• Gain visibility to class metrics – summaries of course logons, mail messages, discussions posts, submissions, and grade distributions – with the ability to drill down for more detail.

• Identify at-risk and achieving students – milestone reports that identify students who are falling behind or may need help.
• Create powerful reports &ndash a wealth of reports that provide deep insight into classroom and individual student performance.
• Use exception based reporting – "WhoDunIt" reports to determine who has or has not performed a specific activity.