High-Quality Instructional Materials for Each Child

I somehow ended up down a rabbit hole, so I hope I did this right.  I started with Explora, and I ended up finding a lesson plan called "Jackie Steals Home" on ERIC. The objectives of the lesson plan appear to line up with national standards which would allow for crosswalking to Ohio standards. The content has informational texts, including the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, and it requires a bit of background knowledge on primary and secondary sources. So, it also builds upon prior learning. It includes additional resources the teacher could pull in to potentially differentiate the instruction for a variety of learners.

Honestly, the only "major" deficit this lesson has is it's visual design. It is an older lesson, so none of the visuals are very crisp. Though this is a 9-12 lesson, so the visuals aren't quite as important, the teacher would probably spend some time finding better supplementation for the students. I certainly would have used this lesson in my own Language Arts classroom. 

I have been sharing INFOhio Tools and Resources for the past several years. Within the flyer, my eye caught a resource called "Capstone Interactive Books". I started exploring this resource and was very impressed! There were over 800 ebooks available! I don't think any of our educators know this exists. The resource can be explored by content areas and there are activity resource built within. I do wish you could filter by grade-level and content standards to make it a little easier to drill down to specific books that mirror what an educator is focusing on their classroom. 

I explored Transparent Language Online from the flyer. It is an amazing program that people pay top dollar for similar programs and this one is free for Ohioans (and now has the teacher component too where classes can be assigned lessons)! It definitely aligns with English speaking standards especially for our students who are new to the language. It is research based because of the format of so many lessons using multiple modalities and interaction for students to progress through the lesson and is engaging because of the quick and specific feedback it uses. Although it does take some time to create an account it meets privacy policies because stduents do NOT have too any real identifiable information. Students can proceed in a pace that matches their comprehension and materials are available for review at any point too so that is excellent flexibility as well. I used the abbreviated instructional rubric to make this assessment!

I chose to look at World Almanac for Kids, which is a reosurce I've used quite a bit with students this year. This resource rates high on the rubric. One of the biggest strength I see is the standards alignment for every article, as well as a searchable bank of standards that allow educators to find materials based on their state's standards. The resource also includes lesson plans that build on knowledge gained from articles, videos, and games that are availabe to students on the website. In addition, student resources provide differentiation tools, such as read aloud.

The main weakness that I can see according to the rubic is the ability to access the content offline. As far as I can tell, you need Internet access in order to view materials on the site. The exception to this would be if a teacher used the printable graphic organizers and handouts, or printed other content for students.

1. I am going to use PebbleGo Next because as a tech integration specialist, I am being asked to find resources for all subject areas, and PebbleGo Next offers lessons for both science and social studies.

2.  Standards Alignment:  PebbleGo Next does allign to state standards.

Research-Based Strategies: Students can be given some freedom to inquire about different topics they are interested in through PebbleGo Next, however, it is more set up to work through a specific topic or reading and then answer critical thinking questions after. For some of the activities, more research can be done and students can fully explore questions that interest them.

Usability:  PebbleGo Next is usable because it has a home screen that is easy to read, uncluttered, and easily accessable. Every page looks clean and has buttons with clear meanings.

Flexibility: Most of PebbleGo Next's resources are online, however, PDFs are available to be printed off for the different lessons. The majority of the content is online, so it may not be accessable to all students when not at school.

A strong point of this resource is the ease of use and accessability for students. I also really like how students can read the material, or have the passages read to them, giving accomodations when needed to students that need them. An improvement that could be made is to expand this resource to more topics and content areas. The information provided is really good, but there are not a lot of topics covered.

For this post, I took a look at Points of View Reference Center.  I have been looking into purchasing Gale's Opposing Viewpoints, but think that Points of View Reference Center is an awesome resource, that will meet out needs at no additional cost for the district for the premium content.  

I think that the connectivity to state standards could be improved slightly.  I only say this, but the connection is clunky.  There is a curriculum connection tool - which is great!  The user can choose the standard they are trying to connect to the resource, but there aren't any exampe articles to click on.  The user would then have to apply the suggested search string.  As with students, I feel like sharing this with teachers as a tool for supplemental resources will have limited success because of this extra step.  

Other than that, I think that Points of View Reference Center hits all of the sections on the rubric!  I think that it is especially strong in providing differentiation to meet the needs of and be accessible to all learners.  The search bar allows students to who are more aware of their topics to start there, while students who may need a little help finding a topic can choose from the hot topics by subject - I also really like the "In the News" and "In the Spotlight: suggestions.   These features really help ease students into their reserach at their own pace and to gradually reserach more independently as their comfort level increases. Once students have chosen their articles, the ability to save it to their Google Drive allows flexibility in accessing information online and offline.  The more I work with this resource, the more I really like it for argumentative essay resources!

I chose Science Online because I was not very familiar with that resource, and I want to share it with the science department faculty so they can use it to supplement their classroom curriculum.

Standards Alignment - The search by standards tool is extremely helpful when searching for articles that are aligned to particular standards. I was able to perform a search by grade level, and the search produced pages of articles that are aligned to the standards and benchmarks. A feature that might be a helpful addition would be the ability to search by standard.

Research-based Strategies - Every article I looked at had the citation of where the information originated. I did look at a computer science timeline, which was fascinating. I learned a lot of new information, but I didn't see any citation information on the entries. However, I found the Sources tab and it listed all the publishers that were used in the various resources, including the timelines.

Usability - The interface is easy to navigate. The search tool is simple to use and it seems to find information using a variety of keywords. Being able to search using the Topic Centers provided a broad overview, which is helpful when beginning research. The topic center also led me to the computer science timeline, which I wasn't searching for but I found useful (perhaps it anticipated what users might want to read/see?). As a side note, the number of suggested research topics were a little bit lacking.

Flexibility - There are articles, videos, diagrams, tables, data, and science experiments, so there are a variety of ways to learn about science. Articles can be printed, saved, sent to Google Drive, or read aloud. There is also a citation tool. Where were those when I was in college? ;) 

I'm glad I took the time to look more closely at this resource. I'm definitely going to share it with the science department faculty. 

I chose BookFlix because I currently use it with my youngest students. Having the ability to sort the book pairs by subject and grade level make it easy to help align your lessons with learning standards. The usability of the program is incredibly easy. It could be used on a slower internet connection if needed, but internet is required for its use. I like the flexibility of being able to have the read along feature turned on or off. 

I selected ScienceFlix as the resource to explore further. It is easy to navigate and flexible for a variety of learners. I liked to see that you can adjust the reading level of the content to meet students at their level. It has a lot of resources sorted for easy access. One weakness that I found from the rubric for ScienceFlix is that it would not be accessible offline. 

Explora was a great resource that was most applicable to students at my school. It was a useful resource with a lot of content that would support usability, flexability, and accessibility. Accessibility may require due diligence of the teacher in order to effectively differentiate. The same goes for alignment to standards, especially if considering extended standards for students with disabilities.

For this activity I chose the World Book Kids resource. I chose this resource because I had briefly looked into it before for an activity and I wanted to learn more about it. When going through the rubric with this resource, I found that it aligns to Ohio Standards and you can even search certain areas for specific standards to work on. I feel that it uses reasearch based strategies in all aspects. One in particual is the ability to search for information based on Lexile Levels so it is easily differentiated for students. The usability of the World Book Kids is sufficient for students in the classroom. There were a couple of areas that I found that students may get confused as to where to click to see the information they need. The resouce is very flexible for student use. They provide the option to print any of the articles or pictures. There are even Webquests that are created that can be printed for students to explore the resource while learning. One of my favorite parts of this resource is the ability for the articles to be translated to MANY different languages. How amazing for our EL population to be able to see print in the first language. I love that feature!

I chose Explora from the 9-12 flyer. Explora 9-12 is a very useful and easy to use database geared to high school students. It is aligned to standards and you can easily search by standard by using the tool in the menu on the left of the page. Being a research database, it is research based. It is also very usable and flexible. Explora makes finding reliable sources on the Internet easy for students. One way I might improve it is just to enhance the look fo the database so that it is more "teen friendly".

1) BookFlix

2) The strong points are that this resource provides students with a variety of ways to learn about the subject. There is a nonfiction book with read aloud which is paired with a fiction book that has a video. The pair also has puzzles, such as word match and fact or fiction game. The books and videos can also be changed to Spanish. BookFlix is also strong in student-directed inquiry since they are able to chose the books they would like to read. The thing I see that could be improved from the instructional materials rubric is that the site requires an internet connection. This would not get a passing grade for usibility.