Curriculum and Instructional Design for Digital Learning

 Helping our students learn and navigate a technology based world can seem like quite the daunting task. Thankfully, there are many different companies and websites that have come about to help us do just that. 

I have three wonderful options that can help us as teachers in many different ways. From helping build digital literacy, to helping us take control of our data, to building online lessons that students can access from anywhere.

NetSmartz is an online resource that helps teachers teach digital literacy in their classroom by providing teaching resources for digital literacy. They have resources like videos, quick frames, and activities that we can utilize to help bring these valuable lessons into our schools. 

LearnPlatform is an online education platform that allows teachers to manage their classrooms in an online learning environment. LearnPlatform is powerful in how it tracks data and utilizes a data management system to help teachers, administrators and LEA get real time numbers for student progress. It takes data from evaluations and assessments and places it in reports or easily consumable data sheets. This can be useful for progress monitoring or state benchmark reports.

Canvas is another online learning platform that has helped teachers create online learning environments. Canvas is used by our local LEA and one that I am familiar with. Canvas is a wonderful program that will allow you to build lessons within its online ‘classrooms’. You can use the platform to build nearpods, assessments, activities and more. Canvas also works with many different learning games and applications, and has some of their own, all of which work together to report data back to the teacher so that they can view student growth and scores in real time. Canvas also has a parent communication system built in, and will allow for both parent and student logins so everyone can be a part of the students' learning.

One way we can integrate these into our classroom and help facilitate student learning is by building out learning pods in an online learning environment. These pods can be integrated into our explicit learning strategies and allow students to take notes, and even answer questions within the learning to allow the teacher to assess how students are progressing in their learning and understanding as they click through the lecture enhancements on the learning pod. 

Additionally, these learning pods can feature nearpods or exit tickets that will keep students engaged but allow us to view data as it comes in. As an added benefit if a student is sick or misses a day, having these lessons on a platform like Canvas means they are accessible from anywhere and will give students further opportunities to participate or to catch up if they fall behind. 

Another way we can integrate these educational technology platforms into student learning is by utilizing the games, aps or learning options in station learning. By utilizing technology in this way we break up what we would normally see in stations and keep students engaged while continuing the lesson. Additionally, by placing a technology based station strategically in a rotation you can even use it as a learning check and a formative assessment in the middle of the activities.