Teaching & Learning

Technology's power to optimize teaching and learning opens up possibilities for new ways to engage with curriculum and content.

Tech-enabled practice focused on teaching and learning holds power and promise to

  • expand and extend the ways teachers and students can engage in the process of learning and building knowledge

  • provide students with new, different, and more engaging ways to build, demonstrate their understanding

  • provide students in-the-moment feedback which can disrupt and clarify misconceptions and lead to deeper learning

  • Minimizing recreation of resources

    Automating repetitive systems or processes

    Making the recall of required resources simple and fast

    Providing direct and in depth access to instructional frameworks and connected best practices

    Synthesizing large volumes of content (articles, research, standards, etc) to isolate most impactful resources for teaching

  • Removing boundaries to access the latest tools and resources aligned to grade level, content, and standards

    Offering multiple ways to customize practices according to pedagogical preferences, student needs, and school or community access

    Succinctly maintaining records of all vital instructional information to support reflection and research

    Using multimedia tools to support comprehension and analysis of complex concepts

  • Customizing planning options based on typical search and use patterns

    Increasing shareability of planning resources with educators in other districts and states

    Incorporating interactive features (like hyperlinking, digital call-outs, media embedding, etc.) into the lesson plan building process

Optimizing Teaching

Developing Plans and Accessing Resources 

Supporting the development of lesson plans and instructional resources

  • Providing a diverse array of options to invite students into learning

    Making curriculum content easier to navigate and interact with

    Opening up access to local and global communities and expanding the students’ and teachers’ worldviews

    Expanding access to tools that support social-emotional and collaborative learning

  • Providing curated content that is high-quality and designed to engage learners

    Offering students multiple modes of engagement in curriculum learning while still achieving curriculum objectives

    Creating meaningful learning experiences connected to unique student interests

    Increasing representation of a diversity of perspectives, authors, and characters

  • Providing multi-modal features that deepen students’ knowledge and increase engagement with the concepts

    Encouraging the implementation of creative instructional practices that place the teacher in new roles as they facilitate student learning

Optimizing Teaching

Enhancing Curriculum Content 

Accessing and engaging with standards-based, culturally relevant curriculum content

  • Reducing time spent finding and curating differentiated resources to meet students’ individual needs

    Removing unnecessary practice of what students already know

    Supporting with the creation, monitoring, and adjustment of instructional plans and resources to meet the diverse needs of students

  • Providing real-time feedback to students on their learning

    Adapting learning resources to meet each learner's current knowledge and skills

    Using assistive technology and universal design principles to increase access to learning, particularly for students with disabilities

    Creating a classroom community where students are seen as unique learners with unique strengths

  • Building a holistic understanding of students as learners, including their assets and unique strengths

Optimizing Teaching

Meeting Individual Learning Needs

Responding to identified learning needs for students related to style, interests, and diagnosed conditions

  • Maximizing the possibilities for strategically building cooperative learning groups and diversifying the collaborative space

    Providing asynchronous working abilities for students who may miss class or work at a different pace

    Enhancing students’ interpersonal abilities and digital citizenship skills

  • Incorporating tools that promote equitable access to shared learning and contribution of voice

    Harnessing students’ social media skills like commenting and liking to support interactive discourse

    Deepening students’ consideration of others’ ideas or points of view and promoting discourse around these perspectives

    Offering interactivity options that reduce apprehension to participation

  • Empowering students to contribute their voice and strengths to a shared goal using a diversity of tools or features

    Removing the barrier of school or land borders for virtual visits and social experiences with new environments or cultures

    Redefining collaborative participation to include asynchronous contributions and various content medium

    Building opportunities for feedback from other learners within and across systems

Engaging Learning

Fostering Collaboration

Facilitates interactive and meaningful collaboration amongst students with their peers

  • Moving the teacher’s role from developer and leader to facilitator and learner

    Expanding the pool of topics students have available to choose from beyond the teacher’s own awareness, allowing students to identify their own interests in problems they seek to solve

    Allowing students new and different ways to participate and share their thinking beyond just verbal discussion and questioning and answering

  • Providing real-world applicability for students to exercise critical thinking and 21st century skills

    Engaging students in learning by offering flexible approaches to pursuing possible solutions to a presented problem

    Increasing the depth and breadth of curriculum-based connections available to students that are applicable to real-world experiences

  • Providing a diversity of learning activities to engage thinking around a single competency or topic

    Engaging students’ previously developed design skills to create learning activities to demonstrate their conceptual knowledge

    Providing the structures needed for students to develop their own gaming platforms using key curriculum content

Engaging Learning

Focusing Thinking

Engages students in complex thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning

  • Significantly increasing access to assessment items through the use of online item banks reducing the time required to develop assessment items

    Recording and saving all previously designed assessments for easy reuse in the future

    Containing design features that are easy to use and customizable for specific data needs

  • Integrating easily before, during, and after instruction

    Curating assessment items and activities to align to identified standards and curriculum

    Updating content continually for relevance to students’ cultures and interests

    Incorporating features that keep students actively engaged in the assessment activity to yield more accurate learning results

  • Providing personalized, immediate and engaging assessment experiences

    Providing methods and modalities by which students can demonstrate learning

    Including features that allow students to describe their thinking or process for developing solutions and responses

Streamlining Assessments & Feedback

Developing Assessments

Supporting teachers in designing formative assessments

  • Providing quick, real-time data on student learning for student and teacher reflection

    Automatically aggregating and disaggregating data for easier organization

    Documenting learning progress toward goals more efficiently

    Providing teachers the ability to frequently remix student groups and use a combination of academically homogeneous with heterogeneous groupings

  • Providing structures which allow for more immediate and targeted feedback

    Allowing teachers to embed links, videos, or audio that further clarify learning objectives and criteria for success

    Strengthening peer assessment by empowering students as instructional resources to their peers

    Tracking trends in students’ learning misconceptions that can be addressed in targeted groups or whole-class Include something additional here

  • Leveraging AI to personalize student learning supports

    Activating students as the owners of their own learning

    Aligning data trends across classrooms and teams of teachers

    Diversifying the types of feedback teachers are able to provide, including options for student interaction with feedback

Streamlining Assessments & Feedback

Gathering Learning Data

Collecting student performance data from assessments and providing feedback to support student growth

Learn about the other Areas of Impact.