Announcing Homeschool+, a Comprehensive New Program for Home Educators

Yesterday, Age of Learning announced the launch of Homeschool+™, an innovative new program that provides home educators with resources and tools to guide their child’s education and inspire a lifelong love of learning. Developed for children ages 4-8, Homeschool+ offers a comprehensive curriculum, adaptive math and reading learning programs, and robust home educator tools for planning lessons and tracking progress, customizable to meet each family’s unique homeschooling needs.

The Homeschool+ curriculum features Age of Learning’s research-validated digital learning solutions My Math Academy, and My Reading Academy. Based on well-established principles of learning science research, these programs enable young children to master essential math concepts and build foundational literacy skills. They help accelerate learning by identifying each child’s strengths and growth opportunities, then dynamically adapting the selection and sequence of learning experiences to meet each child’s needs.

In addition to math and reading, Homeschool+ offers art, science, social studies, language arts, music, and Spanish. These additional courses, all designed by education experts, feature content from ABCmouse’s award-winning, research-validated curriculum, augmented by lesson plans that take full advantage of the learning opportunities of the home environment. Home educators can select from a broad variety of lessons to address their children’s interests, each one offering online and offline learning activities.

Learn more about Homeschool+ at https://www.homeschoolplus.com.

Age of Learning Named “Most Innovative Edtech Company” in 2023 SIIA CODiE Awards

Age of Learning has won the 2023 SIIA CODiE™ Award for Most Innovative Edtech Company, which honored the company for the impact, evidence, and efficacy of its suite of edtech products.

The SIIA CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative Education Technology products across the country and around the world. This year marks the first time that SIIA has awarded a CODiE for the Most Innovative Edtech Company, which “is charting new pathways, showing others in the industry what is possible in instructional design.”

SIIA awards are based on thorough assessment of a company’s products, approach, and commitment to proven outcomes. Age of Learning has invested over a decade of research and development into personalized and adaptive learning solutions based on well-established principles of learning science, broad and deep curricular expertise, and industry-leading design, engineering, and artistic talent. The company’s learning solutions for classrooms, My Math Academy® and My Reading Academy™, are research-validated digital learning solutions supported by multiple studies demonstrating their effectiveness. These solutions can help close gaps and are designed to accelerate learning in as little as 10–12 weeks for students in pre-K through 2nd grade.

To date, 10 studies for My Math Academy and My Reading Academy have been validated as meeting the various evidence requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

A SIIA CODiE Award win is a prestigious honor, following rigorous reviews by expert judges including educators and administrators whose evaluations determined the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products, and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners.

Learn more about Age of Learning and other award-winning products at https://siia.net/codie/celebrate-finalists/.

Innovative New My Reading Academy Expands Age of Learning School Solutions

I am thrilled to share that Age of Learning has recently launched My Reading Academy, an individualized, adaptive learning solution and an important expansion of our School Solutions programs. My Reading Academy follows the successful June 2021 launch of our first Schools Solutions program, My Math Academy.

My Reading Academy was specifically developed to support educators’ efforts to provide equitable instruction; the game-based platform is an AI-powered, individualized, adaptive reading solution blending interactivity, adaptive challenges, and ongoing feedback to sustain engagement and motivation in young learners.

Age of Learning’s early literacy experts have spent years developing, testing, and refining My Reading Academy to ensure it provides educators an effective solution that personalizes instruction to meet the unique needs of every child. The innovative early reading program delivers an effective educational experience that we feel will empower teachers and accelerate student learning, as My Math Academy has done in classrooms, schools, and districts nationwide.

My Reading Academy offers comprehensive early reading instruction, including concepts of print, phonemic awareness, phonics, sight words, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and monitoring. The program also continuously assesses performance to evaluate what each student knows, where there is a knowledge gap, and what the student is most ready to learn. Based on this individualized real-time assessment, each child is presented with engaging learning activities that provide the right amount of productive struggle to maximize learning rate.

To learn more, visit the My Reading Academy website.

Age of Learning and Rakuten Announce Joint Venture: Age of Learning Japan Co., Ltd.

Age of Learning, Inc., the leading edtech company for young learners and creator of ABCmouse Early Learning Academy, and Rakuten Group, Inc., Japan’s leading e-commerce company and a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society, today announced they have agreed to form the joint venture Age of Learning Japan Co., Ltd.

Building on Age of Learning and Rakuten’s existing relationship, the new company will accelerate the growth of ABCmouse English, known as “Rakuten ABCmouse” in Japan, to serve families across the country.

Designed by Age of Learning’s language learning experts and grounded in learning science, ABCmouse English teaches English to young children through engaging interactive activities. The program, which uses a unique, research-proven approach to language learning, helps children build English communication skills with 260 sequenced lessons and more than 6,000 original videos, games, books, and songs.

Learn more on the Age of Learning blog…

Age of Learning Is Honored by the City of Glendale for Our School Continuity Initiative

I have a long entrepreneurial history in the City of Glendale, having started three companies there: first the Dohring Company, then Neopets, then Age of Learning.

Since I founded Age of Learning 14 years ago, we’ve been proud to call the City of Glendale our home. This week, all of us at Age of Learning were thrilled to receive Glendale Tech Week’s Best Breakthrough Award, which is given to a tech company that successfully pivoted during the pandemic by developing solutions and seeking opportunity in the face of adversity.

We were honored for our School Continuity Initiative, a program we created in March 2020 when schools were forced to close, impacting the academic lives and growth of millions of children. True to our mission to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success and a lifelong love of learning, we created this program to offer preschool through middle school students free home access to our leading digital education programs—ABCmouse, Adventure Academy, and ReadingIQ.

More than 80,000 schools, school districts, and teachers contacted us within days of announcing the School Continuity Initiative–and I’m proud to say that we were able to reach more than 1.2 million children with this initiative. The children who participated in the program not only continued learning while sheltered at home, but they also experienced academic gains.

You can read more about this on the Age of Learning blog…

My Math Academy: Classroom Edition Wins Tech & Learning Awards of Excellence

This past week, My Math Academy: Classroom Edition, Age of Learning’s adaptive, personalized early math program for schools and districts received another honor, winning the Awards of Excellence from Tech & Learning as one of 2021’s Best Tools for Back to School. Tech & Learning’s Awards of Excellence have long recognized innovation in the edtech industry, and its latest iteration, The Best Tools for Back to School, celebrates the most impressive products and solutions that support the work of teachers, students, and parents as they prepare for the new 2021-22 school year. Tech & Learning’s panel of advisors evaluated My Math Academy on ease of use, value, versatility, and (most importantly) the product’s ability to solve a problem.

This is the latest of many success stories for this product, the first offered by our new Age of Learning Schools Division, which we announced in June.

Click here to read more about My Math Academy, our Schools Division, and this latest award on the Age of Learning blog…

Chairman Doug Dohring Welcomes Global Education Leader Mubuso Zamchiya to the Age of Learning Foundation as Managing Director

Chairman Doug Dohring welcomes Mubuso Zamchiya to the Age of Learning Foundation

Since I announced the establishment of the Age of Learning Foundation at the Education World Forum in London last year, we’ve made tremendous progress on our goal of reaching more underserved children and improving their education, having already provided our learning resources to millions of children in Central America, Africa, and South Asia in this short time.

To further build on this progress, I felt it was time to appoint a highly qualified Managing Director to lead our Foundation’s efforts. After an exhaustive search, I am very pleased to announce that we have found an exceptional candidate: Mubuso Zamchiya. He is a highly respected global education leader with more than two decades of experience in serving children and families. Mubuso earned his undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Bristol and a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. You can find out more about his remarkable career in the press announcement linked to below.

Mubuso’s leadership and experience make him an outstanding person for this role. He has such enthusiasm for our learning solutions–ABCmouse, Adventure Academy, and My Math Academy, to name just a few–and the enormous potential of making them available to hundreds of millions of children around the world, at no cost to governments, teachers, and families.

It is the mission of the Foundation to distribute these valuable learning resources to underserved children on a global scale.

I am very excited to have Mubuso join the Age of Learning team to lead the Foundation’s efforts.

Click here to read read more …

Age of Learning Raises $300 Million in Financing Led by TPG, the Largest-Ever Raise by a U.S. Edtech Company

I am thrilled to share that Age of Learning, the edtech company I founded in 2007 and creator of ABCmouse Early Learning Academy, Adventure Academy, English language learning app ABCmouse English, and My Math Academy, has announced a $300 million equity investment in the company. The round is led by TPG and includes Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Madrone Capital Partners. The capital will be used for the company’s global expansion and further increasing investment in new products and technologies to effectively educate more learners.

This funding further validates all the work we’ve done to develop digital educational programs with proven efficacy in increasing children’s learning gains. To date, these programs have helped educate more than 50 million children around the world and have been used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms.

“Every child deserves a strong foundation for academic success, and we are committed to delivering on this promise for kids everywhere,” said Paul Candland, CEO of Age of Learning. “We combine best practices in education, cutting-edge technology and the creativity of a major digital studio to build products that are proven by extensive research to really deliver results for children. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with TPG and their global team as we continue to unlock access to opportunity for all kids around the world.”

“Age of Learning has established itself as a leader in education technology over the last decade,” said David Trujillo, Partner at TPG and Co-Managing Partner of TPG Tech Adjacencies. “Their talented team has innovated to create digital education programs that both engage and provide effective learning solutions for children around the world. Age of Learning was built on the vision of helping children everywhere develop a love of learning, and we are excited to partner with them to accelerate that mission.”

Read more about this Age of Learning funding announcement and $3 billion valuation on Bloomberg or visit the Age of Learning blog…

How My Math Academy More than Doubled Math Skills in Texas School District

Over the past year, Age of Learning’s new Schools Division has been successfully rolling out My Math Academy—an innovative personalized, adaptive math program for pre-K through second grade—in schools and districts across the U.S. Pilot programs have included the Los Angeles Unified School District, Chapel Hill Academy, Lakeport Unified School District, and EPIC Charter Schools, where it has driven significant gains in students’ math skills.

But it’s the company’s latest pilot program in a relatively small district that’s been garnering outsized excitement and interest. More than 900 mostly economically disadvantaged pre-K students in the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District in Texas, started using My Math Academy during the pandemic in the fall of 2020. As reported on the Government Technology magazine website, “math skills more than doubled for 4-year-old pre-K students and tripled for 3-year-olds. The average pre-K student aged 4 is now at mid-kindergarten level, while the average pre-K student aged 3 is approaching kindergarten-level math skills.”

According to the Director of Early Childhood for the school district, My Math Academy, which includes a robust teacher dashboard, is giving teachers unparalleled insights into the learning needs of each individual student. She also praised the program for allowing students to learn at their own pace and giving teachers more flexibility to move towards a more individualized approach to instruction.

Read more about it on GovTech.com …

Announcing the Launch of My ABCmouse Classroom Live!

With parents and caregivers juggling work and the educational needs of their children, we saw the opportunity to provide a new, safe, and trustworthy learning experience for ABCmouse families. Our goal is to make the home learning experience even more engaging and effective, and we’re excited to introduce a first-of-its-kind learning tool for families: My ABCmouse Classroom Live! Children can now stream daily classes on-demand, led by master teachers who encourage kids to learn, think, draw, exercise, sing, laugh, and more.

As in a real classroom, each week focuses on what curriculum experts call a “Big Idea,” such as community, responsibility, change, communication, and cooperation. Students are thoughtfully instructed in reading, math, social studies, and science explorations tied to each week’s Big Idea.

Each daily class encompasses more than an hour of high-quality, engaging, concentrated learning as part of an expertly designed curriculum that addresses standards-based educational objectives. After a teacher-student video segment, students complete independent learning activities including interactive games, art, puzzles, and offline activities.

Learn more on the Age of Learning blog …