Are you putting together your toolkit of technology and lessons right now? A lot of great tools have been submitted to edshelf in the last week. Here are six notable additions that educators like yourself found particularly useful.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
For some of you, it is now summer break. Hurray! But what do you do about summer learning loss? Here are six notable tools added in the last week that can help your tech-savvy little ones. You can recommend these to your students’ parents or use them for your own kids.
Enjoy these new additions!
P. S. Here is a bonus. Elementary school teacher Glenda Stewart-Smith put together this great collection for parents: Math App Collection for Parents. Read her notes and find some math apps your kids can use.
What websites and apps do you recommend to parents? I would love to know!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
It is always exciting to see someone using our Collection Widgets on their blog or website. As we saw our widgets spread through the wild, we realized we needed to offer you more versions of this widget to better fit your sites. So starting today, we now offer three types of our Collection Widget:
How do you get these new types? When you fetch the embed code on a collection’s page, you will now see another customization option: Type. Just click on the radio button for the type you want: Full, List, or Compact. A thumbnail preview is provided to help you choose the type you need.
What do you think? Helpful? Want to see anything else from our Collection Widget? Let us know!
P. S. Use WordPress? Download and install our WordPress edshelf Widget plugin! It also supports these new types.
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Technology done well makes life a little bit easier. Here are a set of mobile apps and websites that are done well. From creating web pages to videos to podcasts, these tools have your media creation needs covered. For historical and geographic lessons, those are covered too. And to round this list out, here is also an app for the safety of your students & children.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Photo by James Lumb
Guest article by Steve Peha, Founder of Teaching That Makes Sense
From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s almost all classrooms where early reading instruction was taught used basal reading programs. As Diane McGuiness writes in Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About How to Teach Reading: “Basal programs tend to be alike…. Most hedge their bets and include all possible ways to teach reading…. It is typical for the content and logic of the phonics lessons to mismatch the [books] and for everything to mismatch the spelling lessons.”
With new federal dollars pouring into the system through Title I and Title II of the ESEA, and much of that funding tagged for reading, basal publishers learned a smart lesson: more is better—at least when it comes to what can be charged for gargantuan reading programs.
But more is not necessarily better for teachers. In the same book, McGuiness notes of researcher Jean Chall’s work that, “One of Chall’s most important discoveries was that teachers tend to be eclectic. If teachers are asked, or decide, to change to a new program, they do not abandon old activities from programs they enjoyed teaching…. This can create a situation where elements from contradictory programs cancel each other out.”
The ballooning basals of yesteryear that caused confusion in early reading classrooms will be nothing, however, compared to the Hindenburg-sized explosion of teaching tools and technology that will descend from the Common Core.
We’ll have no shortage of teaching resources—or even resources that help us find teaching resources like edusearch engines enabled by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative. But how will educators wade efficiently through the millions of options available to them? How will they separate the wheat from the chaff? The signal from the noise? How will a middle school teacher looking for the best way to teach expository essay writing find that needle-in-a-haystack unit she can trust to help her get the job done well?
The Common Core is a big deal. We’re all hoping it solves some big problems. But it might create a few problems, too. And the problem of efficient access to high-quality teaching resources might be one of the first that needs to be addressed.
Searching Google for “expository essay writing middle school” returns “about 652,000 results” but I only have to flip through the first five pages to find 50+ links (don’t forget the ads and related searches) that all seem promising at first click. I could imagine spending hours just evaluating this tip of the iceberg.
Life isn’t much better over at BetterLesson, a site devoted solely to educational resources, where my query returns but a mere 193,228 possibilities. At Curriki, I’m getting warmer (Or am I getting colder?) as my search yields but a scant 13,106 resources. And I don’t think this is even close to what life will be like circa 2015.
When it comes to educational resources, we don’t need more, we need best. But to get best, we need two things we don’t have yet: proof and provenance. First, we’re going to need to know how individual educational resources have been created and who created them. Then we’re going to need to know the extent to which resources were found to be “safe and effective.” For example, how many of the tens of thousands of expository essay lesson links I’ve unearthed will take me to teaching resources that have been tested successfully in tens of thousands of classrooms?
The “fewer, higher, clearer” goals of the Common Core, and the very fact of its commonness, augur well for a more consistent and complete educational experience for our kids. But the inevitable proliferation of resources could easily complicate things if instructional eclecticism entices teachers toward contradiction and away from common sense.
So how do we make sure this doesn’t happen? How do we create scalable systems that consistently and efficiently lead teachers to effective resources? For any single educational resource, I think we need several things in place. To help that middle school teacher find a great way to teach expository essay writing, I think we need something like the following:
A Specific Resource That Directly Addresses Teacher Needs. If teachers to teach expository essay writing, that’s what they want to teach. While supplementary material is almost always necessary, the initial resource should be something that is specific to the teaching-learning context. Here’s an example, with step-by-step instructions, of how teachers can use something called the What-Why-How™ strategy to help kids craft successful expository essays.
Directly Related Supplementary Resources. Supplementary materials often get out of hand. The last thing a teacher needs is a hundred pages of “enrichment” materials for a unit on expository essay writing. But a small set of directly related materials is often helpful and sometimes even necessary. Here’s a possible example.
Scientific Research That Supports the Resources. In this case, I can easily show that the What-Why-How strategy is well supported as an implementation of two research-proven learning techniques: “elaborative interrogation” and “self-explanation”. Those techniques, and the study that describes them, can be found here.
Reasonable Information About the Usage and Success of the Resources. The What-Why-How strategy has been in consistent public use for over 15 years. It has probably been downloaded half a million times, presented by someone in my company to more than 20,000 teachers during formal training, and used by thousands of teachers more all over the world. I have many anecdotal accounts of how the strategy has helped kids score well on tests that required expository essay writing. I also have a brief informal case study about general writing success across the curriculum at one school where the strategy was heavily used.
A Sense of How the Resources were Created. I created this resource by first teaching it in a variety of forms at many grade levels and in many subject areas. After tuning it up and putting it into its optimized final form over a two-year period, I trained other teachers to use it and followed their progress. Once I was satisfied that it could be used effectively without training from me, I put it up online and offered it for free to the general public for non-commercial use. This last issue is very important: these resources must be delivered such that they can be used without training or assistance from the people who create them. They must also be free.
Ideally, these things wouldn’t exist as a disparate set of PDF documents. Everything should be bundled together in an accessible format that users can easily modify. Other artifacts like flipped classroom videos, slide decks, or student sample work could be included as well.
The resources could be delivered in a standardized fashion like the experience of installing and using an application from an app store—with update notices. A plug-in model could work as well. Perhaps best of all, teachers could simply have their own places in the cloud where they could keep links to valued resources such that the resources could be updated so that any time teachers needed them they would always have the most up-to-date version.
A final component would be an obvious support and reputation management system. A wonderful model for this is the plug-in library on WordPress.org. Here, thousands of developers have registered tens of thousands WordPress tools. Information exists on versioning, reviews, support, installation, and a number of other crucial areas—all maintained in one easily searchable place. If you want something that works with WordPress, you need only go to one location to look for it.
All of these things can be done. I’ve just done many of them right here—albeit manually. And this is something I’ve been doing for 15 years with many teaching resources I’ve created. It’s not rocket science. But two essential things are involved: human curation and deep practice in the field. The majority of the resources—teaching materials or technology products—that teachers have access to today have no basis in science, no proven record of use in the field, no proof or provenance educators can rely on as they set about the challenging and often time-consuming work of finding what they need and implementing it successfully. Education resources are still, for the most part, human-created. But that’s a long way from human curated. Curation is vital because it creates things that are useful out of things that are not.
Finding high-quality teaching resources shouldn’t be like finding a needle in a haystack; it shouldn’t be like separating wheat from chaff or discerning signal from noise. Teachers should only find needles, they should only get wheat, and they should always hear the signal loud and clear. Anything less is a waste of valuable time, that of teachers and of students as well. And time is the most precious resource of all in education.
Steve Peha is the Founder of Teaching That Makes Sense, an education consultancy specializing in literacy, leadership, and school-wide change. Through his work and his website, he has delivered over 100 million pages of free, original, classroom-proven teaching materials to educators in over 120 countries. He recently spent 18 months working as a technical product owner on the Gates Foundation’s Shared Learning Infrastructure project. A former software entrepreneur, his dual interests in technology and education have inspired him to promote an idea he calls Agile Schools whereby he advocates for the application of Agile methods (Lean, Kanban, XP, Scrum, etc.) directly to classroom practice.
Sometimes you need a series of apps to get something done. All-in-one apps rarely are all-in-one, or end up being weak in all areas. Here are a set of apps that will enable you to get more done and engage your students & children in meaningful ways.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
We had an incredible number of tools added to edshelf this week. Wow! Thank you, you kind and generous members, for submitting so many great tools.
Here are six notable additions. The first three will help you search through and organize the wonderful world of open educational resources & materials. The latter three augment the real world with the power of mobile technologies.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Photo by AnandTech
I just tuned into the Google I/O event after a friend mentioned one of their latest announcements, Google Play for Education.
This is awesome.
You are probably not surprised to hear this from a co-founder of a directory of curated tools for educators. I know how frustrated educators are with using technology that doesn’t work, while simultaneously trying to find technology that does work.
Google Play for Education is a curated app store that allows you to sort by grade level and subject. It only includes Android apps, I believe, though hopefully they’ll add Chrome apps too, since their Chromebooks are being adopted by schools fairly quickly. Android devices, not so much yet. But the Amplify tablet may change that.
A Google account is required to use this product. This means all of your students will require a Google account too. If you and your students already use Google products, then this should be a no-brainer. Google Play for Education will launch this fall.
It makes a lot of sense for Google to do this. And, about time too.
What does this mean for edshelf? I’m excited about this announcement because it further validates the need for a curated directory of tools for educators. I love that they’ve included grade level and subject filters too. We had those features from the very beginning because, in my humble opinion, they are obvious features to include.
In Google’s case, their directory is platform-specific and only includes Android (and Chrome?) apps, while edshelf is platform-agnostic. So the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play for Education are complementary more than anything else.
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
A lot of great tools for educators were added this week, thanks to members like you. As always, it is a struggle to highlight just six. So this week, we decided to select a range of tools that you can get for free - because, hey, who doesn’t like free? Here are mathematical & literacy manipulatives, presentation & lesson plan aids, and study aids for students.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Looking for more ways to engage your students? Here are a myriad of options, from providing rich, contextual feedback, to presenting your subject through images & experiences, to combining real-world events, examples & electronics.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
