Resources: Online Learning For Educators

To Support Educators – We’ve thoroughly researched and put together a list of free, high quality online learning resources. They are full of outstanding content, and very user friendly, we hope you find them helpful.

Please let us know of any other resources you feel would be beneficial to share with the community by emailing through our contact form. Thank you.

Platforms To Communicate With Parents and Students:

PARENT SQUARE –  Parent Square is a flexible, practical platform that allows teachers to create positive communication with families through updates, information and shared experiences. It provides an easy format for posting announcements, homework, and activities. For each classroom, teachers can select notices, homework, and albums to be shared. Each of these includes additional options to attach photos, videos, or files. 

TALKING POINTS – TalkingPoints is a multilingual family engagement platform that helps you to communicate with your families, keep connected with your students, and get the most critical information out to your communities. TalkingPoints drives student success in low-income, diverse areas through building strong partnerships across families, schools, and communities.

Resources For Creating Online Learning With Fantastic Content:

LESSON UP – LessonUp is an award-winning online platform that makes it easy for teachers to create engaging lessons using video, images, interactive questions and quizzes. It offers flexibility so you can meet your students’ personal needs and lets them join your lessons with their own device (smartphone, laptop or tablet).  – LessonUp is free until June 2020.

KHAN ACADEMY – Khan Academy is a free resource for students, teachers, and parents. Khan Academy’s library of trusted practice and lessons covers math, science, and more. They have created daily learning schedules ready to go for teachers or parents to implement, with lesson content embedded. The schedules are organized into different grade levels. Here is a breakdown of features:

• Khan Academy has a library of standards-aligned lessons covering kindergarten through early college math, grammar, science, history, AP® courses, SAT® preparation, and more.
• Students can practice skills with exercises, quizzes, and mastery challenges and get immediate feedback and support.
• Khan Academy is available in 40 languages. 
• Students without laptops can access the Khan Academy website or use the Khan Academy app on smartphones.

TED ED – TedEd an extension of the famous Ted Talks. TedEd comprises of video based lessons organized by age and subject. As an educator you can use the resource to create your own video based lessons customized for your students adding interactive questions, discussion topics and more to your favorite TED-Ed Animations, TED talks or any video on YouTube. You can share the lessons with your students online and track the results. In addition you can receive a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups.

Students can also use the platform to create talks of their own at home, sharing their ideas with the world. In the TedEd Student Talks program, your students will learn how to discover, explore and present their big ideas as TED-style talks.

EL EDUCATION – EL Education offers a wealth of free online resources for teacher professional learning and a large collection of projects to inspire work students can do at home:

• K-8 English Language Arts Curriculum. Created by teachers for teachers, the EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum is a free comprehensive, research-informed, core language arts program that engages teachers and students through compelling, real-world content.
• Resource Library. This open-source library houses guidance documents, protocols, and more to support educators. Use the navigation bar to select academic discipline, grade bands, and topics. 
• Models of Excellence. This curated, open-source houses the largest collection of high-quality PreK-12 student work, along with resources to support the use of student work models to inspire and elevate teaching and learning. Consider identifying and sharing specific models of student work to inspire your students to create their own projects. 
• Video Collections. Videos are grouped by topics of interest, including guidance, models from schools, and more. Browse the full video collection which can be sorted by grade level, topic, and discipline. 

BRAIN POP – Brain Pop is a comprehensive library of animated movies and activities, organised into groupings of grades and covering a huge range of topics, in English, French, Spanish and Mandarin. Lessons are designed with relevance, depth and humour to encourage kids on their unique learning paths and to challenge them to reflect, make connections and engage in deeper curiosity-driven learning.

GREAT MINDS – Great Minds is a fantastic resource to support educators with free knowledge-building resources including their Eureka Math®/EngageNY Math curriculum—an open education resource available to anyone, anywhere. Every day they offer newly recorded lessons from Math (K-12), English language arts (K-8) and Science (3-5). They are customized by grade and module, delivered by experienced teachers, and viewable on any device.

NEWSELA – Newsela offers great content across many subjects, specifically curated to keep students highly engaged with their learning. They ensure diverse opinions are covered and feature people all students can identify with. – “When students aren’t engaged, learning doesn’t happen. Content manufactured for the classroom isn’t cutting it. Newsela content comes from the real world, about people and topics students relate to. We start with the world’s best sources and carefully select only the content that is most representative, most engaging, and best for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Because when students read about things they’re excited about, they learn to love learning for life.” – They are offering their entire product suite free until the end of 2020.

ZEARN – Zearn makes math engaging and accessible for all learners, and they’ve adapted even further to account for remote learning. They offer a K-5 curriculum – including 400 hours of digital math lessons with on-screen teachers and supportive remediation.

A summary of what they offer educators:

• Warm-up activities provide fluency and application work to prepare for new content and activate prior learning
• Lesson materials develop deep conceptual understanding of key mathematical concepts
• Flexible whole-group and small-group materials create opportunities for all students to participate in discussion
• Planning materials and PD help teachers customize lessons for the needs of each student
• Formative assessments support precise and actionable feedback
• Reports and data provide real-time visibility into student progress

THE SMITHSONIAN – The Smithsonian is supporting teachers and their students through their extensive Learning Lab, where teachers have access to millions of digital resources from across the Smithsonian’s museums, research centers, libraries, archives, and more. You will also find pre-packaged collections that contain lessons, activities, and recommended resources made by Smithsonian museum educators as well as thousands of classroom teachers.

PBS LEARNING MEDIA – PBS Learning is another extensive resource for US educators that’s a station based organization. It comprises of standards-aligned (based on your location) videos, interactives, and lesson plans, separated into grade levels. There is also a section specifically supporting how to create engaging, effective, at-home learning.

RESOURCES FROM GREEN SCHOOLS NATIONAL NETWORK: 

• • GSNN PD Collaborative Partners have assembled some excellent resources for teachers and students to facilitate virtual learning:
    
  • Strategic Energy Innovations: Distance Learning Resources (includes curriculum covering water conservation, transportation and climate change, and energy audits)
    
  • Captain Planet Foundation: Resources for Educators
  • Biomimicry Institute: Youth Design Challenge
    
  • EcoRise: At Home Learning Resources
  • GSNN Webinar: GSNN vetted and assembled a “best of the best” list of preK-12 curriculum and resources for educators to tap into. They held a webinar on April 15 to highlight these resources and answer questions, and you can go in and rewatch that recording any time.

Well-being:

MINDFUL SCHOOLS – Mindful Schools offers mindfulness classes for kids! Join them online – for mindful activities, mindful movement, and read-alouds. Mindful Schools are designing these online mindfulness classes with K-5 students in mind – Though please know that students and adults of all ages are welcome to participate. Mindful Schools is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that has trained more than 50,000 educators to build “mindful schools” that positively shift the outcomes for the future generation.

‘Mindfulness is a critical, foundational skill for both educators and students who are living in our increasingly complex, 21st century world. When educators integrate mindfulness into their school communities, the conditions for greater well-being, resilience, kindness, and effective learning are cultivated, shifting the outcomes for an entire generation of young people.’