As an educator with 21 years of experience in teaching and learning, I have had the opportunity to work with students of differing abilities and learning backgrounds. During a typical school year, meeting the varied needs of my students makes for an extremely rewarding, but challenging job. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the needs of students tenfold, maximizing both the rewards and challenges of my role as an educator.
As the world begins to shift in the evolving post-pandemic environment, it’s clear that much has changed. In my opinion, K-12 education has seen tremendous changes whose impacts we will be assessing and addressing for years to come.
However, as educators begin to consider how to evolve education to meet the needs of our students today and in the future, we have before us the enormous task of shoring up students’ academic skills that may have eroded during the “emergency teaching” era.
As a Language Arts teacher, I’ve found that one of the skills my students need to improve is their basic research skills. Student media literacy, citing their sources, and communicating their results are all critical research skills my students need to brush up on.
The good news is that there are a host of edtech resources to support this. Here are some of the resources my colleagues and I are using to support students as they improve their research skills in a changing education landscape:
Edpuzzle is an excellent resource that helps students learn the basics of almost any topic. I find this program to be helpful because I can assign a group of students via Google Classroom videos to watch and take notes on. If I want, I can even include an assessment to see if students are absorbing the information within the lessons. One excellent features of this resource is that I can take videos and adapt them by embedding my own questions or audio. Then, once I assign the content, I can see who watched the video. In addition, students can re-watch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, which allows them to learn information they might have missed.