NASBTT Annual Conference – in conversation with Vretta/Elevate My Maths
25th November 2020
Vretta is the principal sponsor of the NASBTT Annual Conference 2020 – Compassion, Flexibility and Trust. The award-winning education technology company powers Elevate My Maths (https://elevatemymath.com/nasbtt/), a programme that not only provides an online diagnostic assessment of applicant trainees’ maths skills, identifying the areas that require improvement, but also interactive upgrading modules for trainees to remedy those identified skills and a summative assessment to gauge their learning gains. We spoke to Vretta’s President, Anand Karat, after Day 1 of the conference.
Thank you for sponsoring this year’s NASBTT Annual Conference. Why did you decide to do so?
“We have always been inspired by the commitment of NASBTT to raising standards of learning and teaching for children by developing high-quality teacher training programmes. We are proud to have the opportunity to work with them to support the development of numeracy skills for trainees. By sponsoring this year’s conference, we look forward to sharing the impact of the work that has been done over the previous year and identifying ways of further improving the numeracy skills of trainees across SCITT providers, School Direct Lead Schools, Teaching Schools and HEIs.”
What services do you provide for trainee teachers, and NASBTT members in particular?
“In partnership with NASBTT, Vretta has designed and developed a custom version of Elevate My Maths to diagnose and upgrade the numeracy skills of trainee teachers. The programme identifies the strengths and areas of improvements in foundational maths skills, and provides trainees with interactive, voice-enabled modules to upgrade those skills by reducing their maths anxiety and raising their level of confidence.”
On Day 1 you spoke about the Elevate My Maths 2.0. What are the key innovations with this update?
“Some of the key innovations include a newly designed and topic specific assessment/upgrading layout, improved learner feedback, more intuitive real-time dashboards, as well as several new administrative settings which can be used to create truly unique assessment and learning experience for all learners. Through this virtual format we were excited to engage with attendees during our presentation and be able to share information on the results of the feedback we gathered from them during the previous year, while they were using Elevate My Maths to improve their trainees’ numeracy skills.”
The title of this year’s conference is Compassion, Flexibility and Trust. What does that mean to you?
“Compassion, Flexibility, and Trust are all essential elements when it comes to developing assessment and learning programmes that are designed to truly support every learner. Having equal compassion for trainees, no matter what level of skill they may have when starting; being flexible in implementation to ensure the programme works in a wide range of applications; and trust in a long-term strategic partnership to deliver a programme where all parties involved are motivated by a common goal: helping all learners achieve success.”
