EDUC 462 Blogs

  Teach Engineering  Teach Engineering is a website that provides guidance and access to many free STEM lesson plans for grades kindergarten to 12th grade. These lessons align with common core standards and the NGSS standards with a DCI, cross Cutting concept, and Science and Engineering practice. It also contains the integrated standards for math as well. It provides premade lessons, connected Units, stand-alone activities. Each lesson plan comes with all of the materials, the handouts, the directions, integrated videos, and the research used to back up their lesson material. I found this website as I was creating a natural resource portfolio for my science capstone.  Eaze of Use / Versatility  It is very simple to explore as each lesson can be searched for in the search engine or on the left top side where you can search it based on certain requirements. You can use topics, grades, types of lessons, and what kind of standard it contains. Once you find one you like ...

  Reflex Math       Reflex Math is a website that offers a research-based system where students can practice math facts like subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division in a gamified way. I came across Reflex Math through my mentor teacher this year who uses it as often as she can with her fourth graders. Students get to play a set of fun and engaging games on a device such as a computer or a tablet that includes mathematical concepts throughout. It is unique in the way that 25 students could all be on reflex math but all be doing different problems because it automatically differentiates instruction as each student answers a question. It really helps the teacher reach all of her students whether they are underdeveloped in math concepts or achieving very high. It is a math fact fluency tool that adapts to each student resulting in student growth throughout the entire classroom.  Eaze of Use/ Accessibility       It is very easy to...

Readworks  Readworks is a website that is driven by cognitive science research to enhance student reading comprehension and curricular supports to solve the student reading crisis and close the student achievement gap for grades from kindergarten to 12th grade. I heard about Read-works from my mentor teacher because she uses it daily for her fourth-grade students to learn something new and practice their comprehension skills. Teachers can assign or give students specific lessons that have a certain topic where they read a part of a text and have comprehension questions that follow.  Eaze of Use/ Accessibility  There are over 1.4 million teachers using Read works and over 17 million students benefitting from it currently. It is a completely free resource and very easy to use because of it’s organization and guides on how to enhance learning and integrate readworks in it. You can push “find content” and on the left-hand side choose what kind of text you want like an article...

  Flocabulary  Flocabulary is a unique tool found in article 8 MUST-HAVE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL APPS AND TOOLS by Matthew Lynch on “The Ed Tech”. It is a website that helps students learn and engage in learning by turning new concepts or a group of vocabulary words into rap songs. There are hundreds and hundreds of pre-made raps that help teach a variety of concepts k-12 including math, language arts, science, social studies, life skills, vocabulary, and current events.  Each concept and topic you choose has not only a premade rap video, but tools such as premade vocab cards, a vocab game, read and respond, a quiz, and a “lyric lab” where students get to design their own rap with their own lyrics and can choose a unique beat to pair it. The creators of Flocabulary intentionally created each video to line up with common core standards to help teachers organize content.   Eaze of Use/ Versatility  Flocabulary is a very easy tool to use because it organizes the vid...