Ardor Education

Ardor Education is a math practice and assessment platform that provides teachers with substantial data around standards and student readiness on various math concepts. Students and parents must create their own accounts and are added into the classroom by the teacher using an enrollment code. A free account gives you limited access to features, but you can create as many classrooms as you need, students have access to practice questions, and teachers have access to limited gradebook data. Paid accounts give you access to assessments and assignments, the ability to include links to videos in the platform, and the ability to export your gradebook. 

Inside the system, you can generate a classroom with a set curriculum or with questions that can be assigned as individual subjects or a whole chapter. This allows teachers to fine-tune the materials being presented to the students and to focus on what is being taught in class. The adaptive leveling system, along with an extensive data collection area, allows teachers to see if their students are really getting it. When creating a lesson plan (using a calendared system), teachers can see a sample problem related to each concept at different levels, from one to four. There's a Help button that links to a searchable "ask me a question"-type system. Teachers can attach videos and messages to the assignments/assessment and view the gradebook by chapter, assignment, or student readiness level. There's also a student dashboard with a timeline or calendar. 

As a way for kids to practice specific math concepts in a way that captures data for teachers, Ardor Education does a solid job. However, it's limited in terms of letting students approach problems in different ways, and there is little variation in the way the questions are presented (some are multiple choice, some are typed answer). Most problems provide a walkthrough (and some videos) explaining a topic in greater detail when the student gets a question incorrect. It's great that there's a solid amount of content available for grades seven and eight that could be used for younger or older grades as well. The adaptive system is nice for checking that a student knows the material but could be cumbersome for a stronger student who just wants to practice the more complicated content, as students have to go through all the lower-level materials first. There do seem to be improvements in this, where the teacher can assign just specific topics to specific students, but this seems to be limited to assessments only, and not practice or assignments. 

The system itself still has some bugs to work out, and things didn't always work like they were supposed to. Navigating between the student and teacher accounts was also quite cumbersome, as was attempting to return to the main Ardor Education homepage from the account page. The built-in calculator is missing many operation buttons (such as brackets) but is a nice addition to certain questions. Overall, Ardor Education is a solid tool for drilling concepts taught in class, but it'll work best when teachers use it in specific, targeted instances. The extensive data in the backend is useful for helping with this and for creating targeted assessments to help understand student progress.