Pivot Interactives Reviews & Product Details

Pivot Interactives ("Pivot") allows users to achieve the ultimate dream of science teachers: true formative (and summative) student data from lab work. With in-person, hybrid, and remote strategies for interacting with the product, coupled with a variety of automated and instructor-led grading options, advanced by LTI integrations into your favorite LMS/SIS products, the program becomes a "one stop shop" for science learning. The program comes with hundreds of curated activities written by science teachers in the classroom to meet the needs of learners. And, if you want even more to sift through, the community library has *tens of THOUSANDS* of submissions made from users around the global.

Implementation is as easy as you want it to be: find an activity, copy to your library, assign to your kids. With built in grading tools, anything that is manually graded is a breeze. And - thanks to the several autograded features, many of the questions (and several of the activities in general) automatically grade.

When you get stuck, you have a customer support team ready in the chat to help you get unstuck. They're also former teachers who have been in the trenches, so not only can they help with "this button isn't working," but they can also help with "how do I do this with 35 screaming banshees... I mean teenagers... in my room?" Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pivot is a lot like poker - it's easy to learn and easy to teach to someone, but it's a lot more complex than most people realize. There's a pretty large gap between a "user" and a "power user."

Pivot is not a complete curriculum. This is not your daily learner driver - rather, Pivot is a "fun treat" to add to your curriculum. As such, burn out is a thing. If you use Pivot too much in your class, your kids will get sick of it. If you don't use it enough, you'll need to retrain the students on the activities every time.

Pivot's activities are generally written for high school students at a high school grade level. While there are more activities coming out intended to be very introductory, even the "easy" activities can be seen as hard by modern students. Scaffolding is provided in the lessons and there's tons of support on how to bring your students up to the activity's level or how to scale the activity down for the kids, but either way - as a teacher of a gen ed class, you'll likely get a lot of pushback from students due to the cognitive load of the activities.

The pinnacle of usage is making your own activity - everything in Pivot is editable. And, while this sounds like a dream, most teachers don't have the time/energy to do this. You'll really want to stick with the premade activities and remove/add one or two questions at a time until you get a feel for the editor. Then, slowly build your library of your own activities as you go. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.