Vizzle

Visual lessons reinforce concepts for students with special needs

Learning rating

Community rating

Based on 2 reviews

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Expert evaluation by Common Sense

Grades

K–12

Subjects & Topics

English Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies

Price: Free to try, Paid
Platforms: Web

Pros: Ready-made, interactive activities make lesson prep effortless.

Cons: Slightly outdated content, limited feedback for students; navigating the dashboard can take some time.

Bottom Line: Thoughtful but dated tool helps with differentiation and progress-tracking for students with autism.

Teachers can use Vizzle to differentiate their class lessons for students. Built with universal design in mind, students can complete lessons on an electronic device of their choosing (fit to their own instructional level). Have students complete lessons at home, or use rotating stations in your classroom; Vizzle can be used as independent work for some students while you work with others in small groups.

Use Vizzle as a supplement to instructing IEP goals. Set a mastery level (e.g., 80%) to fit a student's IEP goals (e.g., reading consonant-vowel-consonant words) and easily chart their progress. Then bring the report to annual meetings or parent-teacher conferences. When analyzing student-specific data, use the filter option so that you can see which lessons the student completed in a week's time or even during one class period. 

Vizzle is a platform that includes visual, interactive lessons for special education students and students with autism. Log in to the teacher dashboard to begin searching for lessons, which can be sorted by subject, grade, or type of activity. Topics include everything from ELA and math to speech therapy and life skills. Once teachers find a lesson they like, they can tag it, preview it, add it to a student's education plan, or save it to My List. Once they're added to the roster, lessons can be assigned to multiple or individual students.

With Vizzle, teachers can set goals for students along with customized mastery levels (so that students must reach a certain percentage before moving to other content areas). Detailed reports show student progress toward mastery. Feel free to customize each student's play preferences, and add accommodations such as text to speech, color, theme, and visual reinforcer. Filter data to include start and end dates, times, and more. A separate Vizzle Player lets students interact directly with the online lessons that teachers have added to education plans. 

Whether students use Vizzle individually or at home for additional practice, the platform is best used for supplemental instruction. Because the website includes thousands of lessons, students and teachers can narrow in on specific areas, like single-digit addition. Once students complete lessons, data is automatically collected. The best thing about Vizzle is that it collects the data seamlessly and presents it in an easy-to-read graph. Filtering the student data helps teachers see if their students are generalizing content to their core academic areas, performing to expectations in different class periods, or even if they're able to independently complete lessons during a certain time of day.

While the data is great, the content in Vizzle could use a bit of sprucing up; the visual reinforcers will be less engaging to older students. Assessment is limited to matching and multiple-choice questions, and there's little help or feedback given to students if they get wrong answers. Vizzle is best for targeting specific student needs, and it may help provide reinforcement to students with autism or other special needs if teachers are able to use the data wisely.   

Learning Rating

Overall Rating
Engagement

The content is a bit outdated and stale, but students and teachers will appreciate the visual reinforcers they independently select, the easy-to-read data, and the positive reinforcement along the way. 

Pedagogy

Students with special needs are presented with lessons that focus on visual reinforcement while teachers are given tools to differentiate and monitor progress. Matching and multiple-choice questions lack useful feedback.

Support

Training videos and support manuals help teachers get started. A robust set of accommodations is available, including multiple sliders for text-to-speech settings and a selection of reinforcers and themes.  

Community Rating

Go Vizzle? Go Crazy!

Go Vizzle is a great website to use for any content area. You can match, sort, read a book or play a game using content from a specific unit. There are plenty of pre-made activities, but if you feel adventurous you can certainly create your own. I like being able to make my own content as I know the activity will be appropriate for the lesson and my students. I haven't seen much support from the website which is the downside of using this site. The website will often "glitch" and images will not load or the website won't load or free in the middle of an activity. Usually refreshing the page and logging back into the site will take care of the issue. This website will work on touch screen computers or with a mouse depending upon what is available in your classroom.

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Privacy Rating

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