This unit explores the various ways information and ideas about climate change are presented through a variety of media. This includes the evaluation of social media posts, research into climate change issues, and an exploration of contemporary art and artists. This was designed and taught in an honors 9th grade English Language Arts Classroom by Dr. Tavia Quaid in response to student interest in climate change and to reinforce key information literacy skills.

The activities in this cookbook draw on research and good practice in online course design to provide recipes - concise and specific instructions and examples - for adding asynchronous activities to a course. Meaningful interaction between students and instructors is a key ingredient in all of these recipes.

This toolkit is designed to help Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) create and maintain effective strategies with multilingual families. We explore and model best practices for the use of technology in teaching, as well as for assessing and communicating with diverse adults. The following guide is applicable for face-to-face, blended, and online instruction, and can also serve as a toolkit.

Este conjunto de herramientas está diseñado para ayudar a las Agencias Educativas
Locales (LEA, por sus siglas en inglés) a crear y mantener estrategias efectivas con las
familias multilingües. Exploramos y modelamos las mejores prácticas para el uso de la
tecnología en la enseñanza, así como para evaluar y comunicarnos con adultos diversos.
La siguiente guía es aplicable para la instrucción presencial, combinada y en línea, y
también puede servir como un conjunto de herramientas para tal efecto.

A practical guide to creating blended learning, with lots of videos to illustrate steps and concepts. Written for higher ed, but definitely usable for anyone.

The Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession  – Teacher Tech Project provides information, resources and learning opportunities for teachers to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of Learning Management Systems and instructional design for distance learning. 

Technology can be a powerful tool to assist students with special needs or any sort of learning challenge. In particular the Chrome web browser allows users to install a wide variety of web extensions that provide tools that can help all learners, regardless of ability level.

In this blog post we will take a look at over 30 Chrome web extensions that can assist students in five main categories:
Text to Speech
Readability
Reading Comprehension
Focus
Navigation

Some of the tools fit into more than one topic, but each is only listed once. Certainly this list does not cover all of the useful web extensions available for struggling learners, but it is a great place to begin. In addition to the list of extension, I have also linked in the video from a webinar I did a while back on "Google Tools for Special Needs".

With students and educators under shelter-at-home orders, states and districts are faced with difficult decisions about how to support students’ science learning while they are home. Home environments support different aspects of student learning than school-based environments. Designing home-based learning experiences to intentionally take advantage of the unique assets of being at home can be supportive of students’ social, emotional, and mental health; provide a meaningful and complementary science learning experience; and allow students to explore real-world and personally relevant science in ways that are difficult to accomplish in school. Field-based examples of home and neighborhood investigations of ecological systems will be shared.

Students examine what deepfakes are and consider the deeper civic and ethical implications of deepfake technology. In an age of easy image manipulation, this lesson fosters critical thinking skills that empower students to question how we can mitigate the impact of doctored media content. This lesson plan includes a slide deck and brainstorm sheet for classroom use.

This sequenced collection, curated by Seattle Public School educators, contains openly-licensed Digital Citizenship resources for K-5 educators.  

The information revolution of the 21st century is as significant and transformative as the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this unit, students – and by proxy their families – will learn about the challenges of our current information landscape and how to navigate them. This unit is split into four modules. These modules can be done sequentially or stand on their own, depending on students’ needs and teachers’ timeframes. In this module (1 of 4), students analyze their own use of online social media platforms and learn how filter bubbles and confirmation bias shape the content of their media environment. 

Students will learn the potential costs and benefits of social media, digital consumption, and our relationship with technology as a society in the three-week lesson. This inquiry based unit of study will answer the following questions:

Essential Question: How can we use science fiction’s ability to predict the future to help humanity?

Supportive Questions 1: What predictions of future development has science fiction accurately made in the past? This can include technology, privacy, medicine, social justice, political, environmental, education, and economic.

Supportive Question 2: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are positive for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to make these predictions reality?

Supportive Question 3: What predictions for future development in contemporary science fiction are negative for the future of humanity? What factors need to begin in your lifetime to stop these negative outcomes?

 Description: Don’t be fooled by food messaging is a media literacy embedded health unit that takes the health goals of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and adds some critical thinking skills and communication skills. In food marketing young people are surrounded by persuasive claims meant to influence and manipulate their eating behavior. Students will explore some of the techniques and strategies food marketers use to influence their eating behavior to better understand how it impacts their own food choices. Within the PE program students will discuss how food choices, levels of consumption and physical activity levels influence health and wellness. Body image/healthy weight will be incorporated into this content. The culminating projects require students to work collaboratively to synthesize their new learning while using a variety of strategies to create their own healthy choices messaging production projects.

This guide is meant to help teachers utilize technology in the classroom while protecting their students’ privacy.

Technology tools and apps are making it possible for educators and students to collaborate, create, and share ideas more easily than ever. When schools use technology, students’ data—including some personal information—is collected both by educators and often the companies that provide apps and online services. Educators use some of this data to inform their instructional practice and get to know their students better. It is just as essential for educators to protect their students as it is to help them learn.

What does formative assessment look like during distance learning? Without proximity, how can teachers gather and act on “in-the-moment” information – the behaviors, emotions, and situations that affect learning and inform instruction?
This resource provides explanations, sample questions, and possible actions to implement formative assessment during distance learning scenarios.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

For educators using Google technology in their classrooms, this toolkit from Google for Education provides videos and best practices for educators to share with their students' families and guardians.Materials are copyright Google. This document from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction provides links to the online resources.

This resource includes multiple lesson plans developed by Washington State teacher John Zingale and can be taught as part of in-person, hybrid, or remote instructional settings. The core content areas include social studies, civics, and media literacy and are designed for use with students in grades 6-12. Additional integrations include ELA, world languages, mathematics, physical education and science. These lessons integrate both state and national civics instruction using project-based and collaborative learning strategies. Features of these lessons include:student researchcollaborative learningdigital learning strategieslateral readingdesign and creation of infographicsTo support these lessons, additional resources are provided to help educators and families with understanding and teaching information and media literacy to young people. Resources include:introductions to media literacyeducator guidesparent guidesstudent learning standards

This collection of lessons represent adapted and remixed instructional content for teaching media literacy and specifically civic online reasoning through distance learning. These lessons take students through the steps necessary to source online content, verify evidence presented, and corroborate claims with other sources.

The original lesson plans are the work of Stanford History Education Group, licensed under CC 4.0. Please refer to the full text lesson plans at Stanford History Education Group’s, Civic Online Reasoning Curriculum for specifics regarding background, research findings, and additional curriculum for teaching media literacy in the twenty-first century.

This social media literacy unit introduces students to foundational skills in analyzing images and social media posts. It also reenforces critical thinking questions that can be applied to various forms of media. This unit was taught to 9th grade students but is easily adaptible to a range of secondary classrooms. It was also taught in conjunction with another unit focused on social media platforms and content.

This book is your guide to blended teaching in K-12 spaces. It was designed to help both pre-service teachers and in-service teachers prepare their classes for blended teaching. This book begins by orienting you to the foundational dispositions and skills needed to support your blended teaching practice. Then you will be introduced to four key competencies for blended teaching:

Online Integration – ability to effectively combine online instruction with in-person instruction.
Data Practices – ability to use digital tools to monitor student activity and performance in order to guide student growth.
Personalizing Instruction – ability to implement a learning environment that allows for student customization of goals, pace, and/or learning path.
Online Interaction – ability to facilitate online interactions with and between students

This textbook provides a set of high-quality resources to university educational technology courses. All chapters are written by professionals in the field, including university researchers, teacher educators, and classroom teachers.

The book in its entirety and each chapter can be freely accessed, downloaded, printed, and remixed. Professors of educational technology courses can select the chapters that will work best for them when creating course packets, and preservice and inservice teachers can use relevant chapters for trainings and professional development purposes.

Student created presentation to educate kids and communities about safe internet habits and practices.

The LIFT Framework is an asynchronous self-paced professional learning path designed to allow any educator to build expertise to lead, teach, and support their peers to innovate instruction and effectively use digital tools and adapt to rapidly changing and dynamic learning environments. Educators integrate research-based instructional practices including reflective professional collaboration, inclusive instructional design, social and emotional learning and culturally-responsive teaching. Developed in Washington State as an open education resource (OER), the LIFT Framework can be used and adapted without cost to educators and schools.

This slide deck on Learning Management Systems by the Washington Association of Educational Service Districts is intended to be customized and presented by district personnel to families and caregivers. Materials are available for districts to use with families in nine languages for each of the following learning management systems (LMS): Canvas, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Schoology, and Seesaw.

Training and support links for the four most widely used Learning Management Systems in Washington school districts (as identified in the annual state technology survey from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction).

This unit engages students in a variety of activities that analyze and reflect on the role of social media in our everyday lives. This includes options for collaborative group work, reading nonfiction articles, a design challenge and presentations to communicate ideas. The unit also includes a formal writing assessment option that aligns with the Common Core State Writing Standards. Activities can be adapted or combined in a variety of ways to support student reflection and analysis. These lessons were piloted in 9th grade English classes but are suitable or a range of secondary students. 

NCCE is a leader in professional learning with a mission to lead, engage, and assist educational communities to reach higher levels of teacher and student success through the use of 21st century technology.The NCCE Live events are free to attend via Microsoft Teams or to watch archived versions on YouTube. 

The National Standards for Quality Online Courses provide a framework for schools, districts, state agencies, statewide online programs and other interested educational organizations to improve online learning courses. The standards are intended to provide guidance while providing maximum flexibility for the users.

In response to school closures due to COVID-19, OSPI content experts have curated a selection of links to external organizations providing high-quality online educational materials – courses, lessons, videos, physical and outdoor activity suggestions, etc. Please note that in many cases, these resources are free to use online but are not openly licensed for wide scale reuse and adaptation.

This document provides guidance about issues related to using videoconferencing to support continuous learning and student data privacy and  online safety.

The PBS Learning Media Teacher Planning Kits for New School Routines are eight-week planning kits filled with lesson ideas, activities and professional learning support. 

PBS Learning Virtual Professional Learning Series is created for teachers—by teachers—to bring together content experts and educators from all backgrounds. With an emphasis on fun, engaging, accessible, and free tools for classrooms, these bite-sized opportunities are designed to connect educators with each other and PBS shows, themes, and content.

Your involvement in your child’s education can lead to better learning results and outcomes. This “Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide” will inform you, as a parent or caregiver, as you monitor your child’s progress as your child accesses and uses technology for learning.

This guide aims to help all parents and caregivers, including those who have limited experience with digital tools, those who are expert with these tools, and anywhere in between. Each section starts with foundational pieces and builds from there.

Part 1: Benefits of Digital Learning
Meeting the Learning Needs of Your Child: Personalized Learning
Understanding Your Child’s Progress: Competency-Based Learning
Connect with Your Community and Beyond: Developing Partnerships
Part 2: Enabling Digital Learning
Ensuring Your Child’s Access: Personal Learning Devices
Ensuring Your Child’s Access: Internet Service
Ensuring Your Child’s Safety, Privacy, and Responsibility Online

This unit is designed to accompany the study of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Resources encourage students to recognize a variety of propaganda techniques and to connect those techniques to media that they can find in their everyday lives. Resources also help students to understand the historical uses of propaganda by governments and political parties to influence public opinion. Resources can be used independently of the novel.