The following transcript has been edited for readability. Timestamps have been removed and minor transcription errors corrected. Speaker comments and context have been preserved.

Opening Remarks

Rich Portelance

Hello there. This is Rich Portelance from EdGate, and today we're hosting the EdGate podcast, and we have as a guest Dr. Sara Delano Moore, who is the VP of content and curriculum for ORIGO Education. I’m super excited to have her on the podcast. Sara was also on our most recent webinar, and so this is supplemental to that webinar where we were talking about smart tech. So, today, we're going to dig into that a little bit further with Sara, but I'm going to let her introduce herself, and then we'll explore some of the topics. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Sounds great. Thanks for having me, Rich. As Rich said, I currently work at ORIGO Education. We're an elementary mathematics publisher of core and supplemental curriculum, and I'm the math lady. I'm part of the content team and support our customers and our internal team in making sure we get the math right–both accurate and accessible for teachers, because, particularly in the elementary space, not all teachers are comfortable and confident with math, so we've got to present good math in a way that's accessible. I come to this work having spent some time as a subject matter expert (SME) at a supplemental publishing company that– the company currently called hand2mind, where we do a lot of work with manipulatives and hands-on learning, and how that helps students engage in the work. Prior to that, I was a classroom teacher and a university professor of math, science, math ed, and those kinds of things. I've done a little bit of writing, so I was part of the Visible Learning for Mathematics writing team. I have published some books on teaching with manipulatives, on working on word problems, and helping that side of math make sense. So I bring, I think, a wide-ranging background to this, and look forward to the conversation. 

Discussion

Rich Portelance

Well, same here, and, you know, the content is one of the building blocks for education. You know, we don't go any place without having quality content that we can work with. And when it comes to edtech providers or other publishers, they're looking to gain opportunity within schools; then they want to be accessible, and they want to play a part. And in order to do that, they need to be thoughtful to the educator. And so, I think what your approach has been and OREGO’s approach has been… you know, has really taken it from that lens of what does the educator need. And now, you know, obviously we're providing the education for the students, and ultimately they have to be considered, but I wanted to talk a little bit about supporting educators, because if we don't do that, I don't think there's any chance of getting into the classroom and being accepted. 

So, starting there, you know, what types of things is ORIGO doing today to help educators with their jobs so it makes it easier? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

So, there are a number of things we think about in that regard, and the fact that our teacher-facing materials are digital first helps us leverage technology to support that work. At the beginning of a unit, there's information about what's the math we're going to teach, and it's linked directly to video resources if a teacher wants to learn more. All of the materials teachers need for a lesson are right there in the right-hand sidebar at point-of-views to say, “Click to open in a new tab”. 

We've partnered with Brainingcamp, which is a provider of virtual manipulatives, and that serves in a couple of ways: young children still need hands-on–I'm very much a believer in that. And there are limitations to hands-on. If we're trying to work with fractions, and you've bought a set of fraction circles, or towers, or whatever shape, they're only four 1/4’s. If I'm working virtually, there's an endless supply, and that allows kids to think more freely, to create different models, to keep counting beyond four fourths, to five fourths, six fourths, and seven fourths, and build that sense of mathematics. So we want to make sure–and the tech helps us–that teachers have what they need in the moment, and that it's accessible enough in length, in language, all of those things, to be quick and straightforward. Teachers are busy, particularly in the elementary grades, where so many of them are teaching all the core subjects and have responsibilities beyond that. They're not teaching four sections of Algebra 1 and two sections of Algebra 2 like a high school teacher might–they're teaching math, language, reading, social studies, science, and maybe some art and music depending on the building and the day. It's a lot, so we want to make it accessible, and those are some of the ways we do that. 

Rich Portelance

Well, you know, that's– I think that's very insightful. You know, being able to provide those teachers with that accessibility, and if that person's not an expert within that subject matter, they can still provide instruction and be useful to the students because you're making it easy. And so, we're talking, you know, in terms of smart tech, you know, here's a really kind of down-to-earth, fundamental way in which companies can think about how, you know, if I'm building new technology and I want to bring it and get it into the classroom, you know, having it be accessible, having be supportive. 

In terms of a tech stack within a classroom, you know, what are you seeing out there today, and what approach do you have from a technology standpoint to not make it overwhelming for schools? Because we've heard that, you know, too much technology and they start to pull back–they can't manage 15 things–so how do you deal with that problem at ORIGO? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Well, one of our core beliefs is that technology empowers teachers–it doesn't replace them. There certainly is tech out there that asserts, “I can do the teaching, and I can personalize in the weeds,” and I don't think our tech is there yet. Whether it'll get there… I think there's a lot of art to teaching, so I'm not sure how much I want it to get there, to be really honest. But the core issue, I think, especially in the elementary grades, is that nothing replaces the power of hands-on, play-based learning and thinking. So when we think about technology, we think about it primarily supporting the teacher. That includes virtual activities in games that can be projected, so we can play the left half of the room against the right half of the room, or model a game, and then kids go off to their own devices and use that. We have big books that are part of our math curriculum, and in the last few years, have made them available in an animated format where there's a narrator who reads, and if you'd like, pauses and asks questions. That's a great use of tech for young learners who are still learning to read. They want to be independent, and yet their reading skills may not be such that they can be sent off entirely on their own. A group of them can gather around the computer, listen to the story, answer the questions, talk about it, and go off and explore the virtual manipulatives. Like I said, students can start with the hands-on, but as the scale of the numbers grows, virtual tools that are a little more abstract become more practical and more appropriate. 

Rich Portelance

You know, it reminds me of a story that Dr. Rubin said. So, you know, going back to the webinar we just had, I also did an interview with Dr. Michael Rubin, who's the principal of Uxbridge High School, and he had mentioned a new technology that allows his students to interview famous people online. So, this AI will reproduce a conversation with Andrew Jackson, and so you're asking questions, and then the student can create an essay based on that conversation, and it's an authentic, you know, kind of experience. And so, you brought that back to the elementary level. Here's, you know, someone that can supplement the teacher, that really supports the students, and frees up the teacher to do some personalized instruction at times. I think that's a great use of technology, and a way in which companies can think about improving their product in order to become adopted, which is ultimately the goal for these companies, right? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Exactly, exactly. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. I do want to remind everybody to please like and subscribe. The more times that you do that, you know, the better off we're going to be, and we love producing this content for the edtech community, and of course, we love your comments, too. So if you have some thoughts, please put it into the comments field below, and Dr. Sara and I will look at it, and if there's a chance to respond, we will certainly do that. 

I want to move on a little bit; you had a– recently, you posted a short article on LinkedIn on space to work. I know that's not specific to tech; however, here's another example of kind of moving towards personalized learning. Can you explain a little bit about that, and then, you know, we can put that in context to what we're talking about today? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Sure. And I'm actually going to go back a long way–but I promise not to take very long to get back to the present–but in the late 19th century, a psychology researcher named Herman Ebbinghaus developed this concept known as the “forgetting curve”; if we learn something new and then we don't practice it, that forgetting curve is really steep. You know, you hear somebody's name at a party, and you don't see them for a month–I at least am not going to remember their name. I'm going to say, “I recognize your face, I apologize, help me, please.” 

Rich Portelance

Probably give me, like, a minute, and I forget their name.

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Right, exactly. If I'm working at an in-the-office job–and not as many of us do that anymore–but this person is a new colleague I see every day, I'm going to get their name pretty quickly, because it's reinforced; it's practiced. So that's the idea of the forgetting curve. All that high school foreign language we learned, we've probably forgotten, unless we've had opportunities to travel, read, and interact in that language. So, what spacing does is combat the forgetting curve, because we know from research, whether it's the Visible Learning work or other bodies of research, that if I have three short sessions– or four short sessions of learning with some practice in between, that learning lasts longer than one massed session. 

So, I'll give you an example straight from third-grade math: one of the big math assignments of grade three is learning your multiplication facts, and a traditional textbook says it's chapter 3 or chapter 2. “Let's start multiplication facts, boys and girls; it's about the 1st of October, and by Thanksgiving we're going to have these down.” And in the short run, kids do. Then, it's February, and you're studying area, and they're looking at you like, “Did I ever learn to multiply? Where’d that come from?” Because that massed learning, that one bulk session, doesn't hold. 

So, what we do with ORIGO Stepping Stones, our core curriculum, and I really encourage people to think about this approach: we don't teach all the multiplication facts at once. We say, “Let's spend a few days learning to multiply by two”, because a lot of students are really comfortable with 3 plus 3 is 6 and 4 plus 4 is 8, so rolling that over to 2 * 3 and 2 * 4 is pretty straightforward. And we'll practice that a little bit, then we'll come back and we'll do that again, because times two and then times two again, that's times four and times eight. And so, we have a series of strategy-based short periods of instruction, and by February, you've learned your multiplication facts, and you're much more likely to retain them because you've had that ongoing practice to mitigate the forgetting curve. 

Rich Portelance

That's fascinating. I don't think I've ever heard that term, the “forgetting curve”, but it just makes so much sense. I mean, in, you know, from instruction of my time, and, you know, certainly everything was block-based learning, and depending on the learning style of the individual, that was sometimes effective, but most of the time, not effective, right? And so, we want to improve that over time. So, if I'm taking that approach, do you have any anecdotal thoughts on how somebody– if I'm an edtech provider, how do I use that knowledge to improve my product? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

There are two layers to think about: one is, how are you going to sequence… partition the curriculum into smaller chunks and sequence them? And then the second is, what's the practice component look like between those events of learning? Because there needs to be really systematic practice and review to keep that content active in our brains. It's called retrieval practice–the information's in there, but you’ve got to practice getting it out. And so, we have to look at that, and as curriculum developers, we have the scale and the bandwidth to think about that and look at what's the flow going to be, how the pieces fit together, and design that structure. As an individual classroom teacher, I think the practice component is the place to begin, because I can, as practice, say, “I'm going to give you two or three questions about what we learned today, two or three questions about what we learned last week, two or three questions about what we learned last month, and here's a nice six, eight, or ten problem homework assignment.” And if I keep that rotation going, I'm always circling back sort of short-term, medium-term, and longer term back. And that's a place an individual teacher can begin to do this work without rearranging the curriculum scope and sequence. 

Rich Portelance

So, as a curriculum developer, how are you managing through this rapid evolution of state independence… you know, and uniqueness? Every state is starting, you know– or, not starting, but is getting more and more unique in the way they approach their curriculum. So, what strategies are you deploying, and how do you manage through this?  

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

You know, it's a huge challenge. And if I may say for a moment, I don't think this move towards state independence benefits teachers and kids. And I say that because we are such a mobile society. Whether you're in a community that has a large military presence, and so, families move as parents are reassigned, whether you are in a community that houses a large corporation where parents have to be “corporate nomad” in order to move up the ladder and progress, or whether you're just in a place people want to be and people come to, there are lots of reasons people move. It benefits children to have a consistent education regardless of where they live. And so, one– and I say that because one of the first things we do when we look at all of this drift that states are having in their standards is we start by thinking about what they still have in common. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah.

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Multiplication facts are still going to be there. There might be some detail differences about what's expected in third grade versus what's expected in fourth, those kinds of things, but the core ideas are there. So, from a curriculum perspective, we start with that core, and then we think about how do we expand it in ways that are meaningful to children and teachers, that allow us to address a broader set of state standards, and that don't conflict with other state standards when we do that, and I'll give you an example: some states have added temperature as a form of measurement to the elementary math curriculum. 

Rich Portelance

Okay. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

I think of temperature as more of a science thing, but that's okay. Some states include what I call “calendar math”; days of the week, names of the months, there are seven days in a week, there are 30-ish days in a month, 365 days in a year, then there's leap year–that's kind of calendar math. Other states don't do that. We're comfortable including calendar math in our curriculum because even in places where it's not a box to tick on the state standards, it's content children need to learn. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

And it's accessible, it's friendly; if a teacher is pressed for time or if they have a morning routine that addresses that without making it part of math class, that's okay, but it's there if you want it. So, some of the thinking is about where is that Common Core still there, and then how far out do we want to go, and coming back to our earlier conversation, have a curriculum that's still teachable. If I try to address every standard from every state in one elementary curriculum, it's not teachable within 180 days–

Rich Portelance

Right. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

–and now I've set the teachers up, I've set the kids up; not fair. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

So, you know, that's how we think about it. One of the places the technology comes in and helps us, and in this context, it's your technology at EdGate, is that we're working now on using the technology behind the scenes so that, as a teacher, if I'm in Ohio, I'll see the Ohio standard number for multiplication facts when I get to that part of third grade, and if I'm in Virginia, I'll see the Virginia standard number for that curriculum. It doesn't change the math we teach, but it makes teachers’ lives easier because it helps them see right up front, “Yes, this is aligned to my standards.” Or, in the case of a calendar math activity in kindergarten or first grade, “It's not aligned to my standards,” and I can then say, “But I know it's important for my kids; I'm going to go on and teach it.” Or, based on this larger context, I'm going to skip this part. I know in my state that's taught somewhere else, so I don't need to use math time for it. And it empowers teachers to make those decisions about how they teach when we can give them better information about what standards different lessons are addressing, because standards are one of the drivers of the curriculum. 

Rich Portelance

Well, as we know today, I think the statistic that's coming out says it's approximately one-third of all standards change every single year, so here you have millions of standards to start with, and then they continually change, and so, you know, managing through that process with a body of curriculum, it can be overwhelming. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

It used to be that I could kind of run through state math standards once a year or so because people were on very predictable cycles. I check it once a quarter now. 

Rich Portelance

Wow. Big difference.

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

It's a huge difference, and it's generally pretty quick. I have my list of websites and click through them, but it is moving fast, and we can't be behind, so that's what it takes. 

Rich Portelance

And that's where I know EdGate is really focused on how can we– you know, our approach to the market is, you know, the support for the secondary market; for the publishers, for the edtech providers, to make sure that they understand the changes to the standards, how to align the standards, the gaps that exist between state-to-state standards, and things like that. And, you know, I'm proud of the work that the team does, because it's very focused. You know, sometimes people get a little too broad; they try to do too much, but it seems like EdGate is very focused on what they do, and they do it as best as they possibly can. And so, just a little plug for what they're doing, but– 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Sure. 

Rich Portelance

And you– I think you work with Kathy, right? Don't you do some work with her? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Yeah.

Rich Portelance

She's just an amazing resource to me, I mean, I– 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Yeah. She got me started in understanding the system and how it works, and it's astonishing–the power of having the data in an organized and accessible fashion. I've learned a lot about the importance of metadata, which is not something I grew up thinking would be important for me, but now that I'm in it it's kind of fun– 

Rich Portelance

Yeah.

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

–to realize how these pieces fit together and how you think this through, and having the technical support of… that EdGate provides of, “We're going to load the new standards in the system. You take a look at how your content looks.” And sometimes there are things that need to be tweaked, but it flows really smoothly, and it allows us to focus on continuing to present good math without having to invest a lot of our internal time and energy on keeping track of all of that. When I monitor, I'm looking to know what's coming down the pike. Not because I have to have a team of people turn on and say, “Oh, now we have to adjust.” 

Rich Portelance

Right. Adjusting on a state-by-state basis, you know– 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Right. 

Rich Portelance

–and/or trying to say, “We're going to– we need to get into a state.” If you're trying to sell into a particular state that you don't have access there, that process, you have a new product, and you say, “All right, well, we have Oregon, and now we want to go into Washington,” that's not an easy process on an independent basis anymore. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

No. No, it's very– this market has changed so much in the last decade. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. And now you have third-party reviews too, which is something that I don't think I ever would have foreseen coming, but now it's a real thing, and it's more– makes it more labor-intensive to try to get into a state and try to do things, but if they require it, you don't have a choice. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Exactly, exactly, so they’re, you know, they're outside reviewers, like EdReports, that look at curriculum according to a rubric and say what's what. And then some states, as you're saying, they're now asking for a third party to look at lesson contents and say, “Does it really meet the standards?” And you can tell that this is a new idea for states, because they're not necessarily clear about where the bar is. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

You know, it's that fuzziness of an idea evolving, and yet it's clear that's the direction the market is headed, and is going to become increasingly important for us as publishers to be able to document what we do and how we know it’s the right thing to do. 

Rich Portelance

So, in terms of smart tech, you know, these are some hurdles that are out there that people have to overcome. And, you know, we had talked earlier about supporting educators, how important that is within the classroom market, you know, and I think everybody– if you're in the edtech space, you know classroom teachers are overworked, so, you know, the more we can support them, the more ways we can think through of how to reduce their time spent on certain tasks. Whether it's grading or, you know, customizing lesson plans, whatever it is, it's going to be more adoptable, and probably something that people would look favorably upon. 

What about existing tech structures that– you know, so you walk into a classroom, do you take a look at what districts are using so that you can make sure that ORIGO kind of assimilates better? Do you– how do you guys look at that and consider it? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

We do think about it, and it's interesting the ways that play out. You know, there's integrating with rostering and gradebook kinds of systems, there's integrating with learning management systems (LMS), and so… this is not the part of the work I'm particularly good at, but I know it's something our tech folks spend a lot of time thinking about how that works. And those conversations have become more and more a part of the adoption conversation. “How are you going to roster students? What kind of connectivity do you want digitally?” We think about what kind of hardware is in the classroom. 

And it's interesting, when you use virtual manipulatives and other kinds of things on an interactive whiteboard, the age of the tech matters. We noticed in one school where some teachers were having a hard time with some of the digital tech, and others were not. I was talking with one of the coaches, and he finally figured out that the hallways where things were going well had just gotten new boards, and the hallways where things were struggling were still using hardware that was four, five, six years old. And it had been updated and maintained, but at some point, it ages, and to realize that, “Okay, this summer, I think the last of the classrooms in that building are going to get the new hardware,” we have to be responsive to that as the publisher. We also have to be aware that when someone says it's not working, have you updated your hardware? Where are we? Because there are so many moving parts now that there didn't used to be. 

Calculators–I think it's a bigger issue at the secondary level perhaps than at the elementary level, but we need to help children learn to use calculators. And now, we've got to think not only about the calculator the schools might provide, but the one we wear on our wrist, the one we carry with our phones… your phone calculator, if you have it portrait versus landscape, follows different-- operates a little bit differently–you've got different keys. So we notice things like that, and we think and talk with our customers as we work on implementation to say, “How do we fit with the rest of your tech?” 

Rich Portelance

Well, you know, I think that really to me speaks to something I believe in; it's customer service, you know, so, at times as edtech providers–and I can put myself in that category because, you know, I've started an edtech company–you get very focused on the product, the technology, and how whizbang it is, and, you know, all the good things it can do. But if you don't have this customer support alongside of it, then often you can– it's very easy to miss the mark. And so, what you just described and what I heard you say is, you know, being there to understand the other pieces of technology that come into play, understanding the classroom environment–you know, some of the age of the technologies that might be there, and accommodating as best as possible–gives you a better chance to be able to support and be able to be adopted within that classroom. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Well, exactly. And it goes beyond being adopted, which is the initial goal–it's also having schools get the benefit they want from the investment that adoption represents.

Rich Portelance

Right. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

You know, it– proportionately, adopting a new curriculum in any subject is a big investment for a school or a school district. And so, we've thought a lot about how do you support implementation, whether on the tech side, as I was just talking about, or on the instructional leader side; what does a principal need to do? Because we could have a perfect curriculum, we could go in that summer of the first year of use and do “perfect” training–and please hear the sarcasm font in the word “perfect”, because we're all human–but, you know, everything could go exactly right, and then we leave–we're not in the building every day. We're an email or a phone call away; we try to schedule regular return visits and all of those things, but we also have to support the people who are on the ground every single day with the tools they need to be successful. 

Rich Portelance

And that goes back to the conversation we had the other day about free trials, because someone had asked on the webinar about free trials, and I think everybody agreed that those can be very, very useful, but they have to be managed properly. And it has to be thought through not just today, you know, getting it in there, but how is it going to look in six months, in a year, and in two years? It's not something that can be rushed, because it's a big-time investment on those teachers' parts to bring in a product to get it started, and they don't want to be “Hickety Pickety” about, you know, what comes in and what goes out, because they just can't keep learning new things. And Dr. Rubin had mentioned that it's like, you know, he's very critical about what he allows in and says yes to, because he knows his teachers don't have the time to learn new things. So if it is coming in, you know it's pretty highly– it– They do the evaluation, they say yes, but then they need to know that it's going to be supported long-term if they're going to say yes to it. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Exact– it's hugely important, and I think that pre-work for a pilot makes all the difference in the world, because you can understand, “Is this enough of a fit for my school? In my district? Our needs?” That it's worth the investment in the pilot, and then let's do the pilot right and invest enough to make a good decision about adoption. It comes in waves, and particularly with edtech, I think the other variable– we didn't talk about this on the webinar, but it's also important is are all of your pilot teachers your early adopters? I'm not sure that's always smart. 

Rich Portelance

Yeah. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

I think we need to look, and in my experience, the districts that do run adoptions really well think about things like that. If I'm piloting, I may say, “No, I'm not going to have any first-year teachers involved in a pilot.” That's fair–the first year of teaching is enough. But I'm going to have some in that three- to five-year space; I'm going to have some with a longer tenure; I'm going to have… some of the old guard, as it were, because I need that perspective. Technology changes so fast that different ones of us are comfortable with different aspects of it and the change. And so, I can have a pilot that's great with a group of early adopters, and I have to figure out how everybody can use it. And if I don't have a preview of what some of those hurdles for my more reluctant team members are, I get stuck. 

Rich Portelance

That's a really great consideration. If you're an edtech provider and you're listening to this, you know, there is that continuum of personality types that exists, whether they're early adopters, to the mainstream, to the laggards. And, you know, I can say from personal experience, when we started CareerPath, we had an early adopter, and we really didn't consider that continuum, but, you know, it was a guy that was running the professional learning career center up at Dartmouth College, and he brought us in to build out the CareerPath application, and, you know, it was all around student engagement. It worked very, very well–it was a very successful program. However, we got excited, and we said, “Okay, now we have a company. You know, this is what Dartmouth is doing,” but we didn't realize this guy was a very unique character within that space of career centers; he was an extreme early adopter. And when we started to sell in, we were pushing against a wall, because people just weren't ready to take on that program. I would say today, you know, we're– that was 2014. Today, we would probably have better luck getting in the door. I think today is a good time for that kind of technology, but 10 years ago, we were way early, and so it took a little time to figure that out, so I think your point is really valid that you need to look at and space out the type of people you're doing pilots with, and not just go for those early adopters because they can give you false data, right? 

Closing Thoughts

Rich Portelance

So, Sara, what did we miss here? You know, are there any topics or anything that you would like to add into the conversation today? 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

I think the other place technology can help us… is communicating with parents and families. I know one of the things that we do because the way math is taught today is not like how many of us learned it in school. And for a parent who might be math-anxious to start with, and then this new method comes home and it doesn't look like what I know how to do, so, how on Earth can I help my child with their homework? Those kinds of things. One of the things we do is we have a collection of videos–they're typically a minute long–that say, here's this make-10 strategy that your child's learning about with addition and subtraction, how it's useful, and how that thinking can extend a little bit beyond what seven added to five is. Tech makes that easy. We can put a short URL in a newsletter; we can put in a QR code; the videos are up on YouTube–it makes it a very straightforward process to get that information to families. 

I look at the power of tools like Seesaw, or ClassDojo, or any in that ilk to have easy communication between families and schools, and I think, both as a grandparent helping a rising second grader with school, how nice it is to be able to have those conversations, and as a– it changes my thinking as a publisher, like, “Okay, how do we need to format content? How do we need to organize content to make it easy for our school customers to get this information out to families?” Because that connection is huge. 

Rich Portelance

So, that's really a communication strategy that needs to be thought through, and I think that's a really valid point, is, you know, how do we support our parents and families in teaching this information? It kind of goes back to your first point about breaking out learning into what you called spaced learning. I would imagine having that reinforcement at home and in such a way that the parents understand, even if they don't understand the topic so well, they can provide some touchpoints. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Yeah. I have a lot of math teacher friends that, one of the great frustrations of COVID was that kids got home with their parents, who were doing yeoman's work in an incredibly difficult time, and teaching their third grader long division because that was all they knew. Yeah, and that's fifth or sixth grade content now, and it's hard to go back–that was an artifact of the time. I think now that we're back in school, that's happening less, but that's an example of why that communication is so important; we're doing things differently, we've got a reason for that, let's talk about it, and let's provide you with a video to understand– to help you understand what we're doing. Let's provide you with access to games that you can play with your child to keep developing their skill because I certainly want to foster that “I can be helpful and I want to be engaged and active” thinking. I also want to channel it a little bit, sometimes. 

Rich Portelance

I think that's a wonderful point. Well, you know, I have to say, we've touched on the parent component, the students, and the teachers, and really, that's a nice broad spectrum of, you know, understanding the classroom better. Not just thinking about the technology, but all the other ancillary things that go along with working with the class to become a needed product. I think your insights are incredibly valuable. I really appreciate the time, and I appreciate your interest in providing the community with a little bit of insight into how ORIGO Education goes about its business, and I thank you very much. 

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

Well, I thank you, Rich. It's been a pleasure. 

Rich Portelance

Absolutely, and we'll look forward to talking again soon.

Dr. Sara Delano Moore

That sounds great, thank you! 

Rich Portelance

I'll remind everybody: like and subscribe down below, and please leave a comment if you'd like to ask a question to Dr. Moore or myself, and have a great day!