Calling All Instructors! Do you use these (or other) free reading and writing resources with your learners?

CrowdED Learning is excited to be leading an upcoming September LINCS event centered around using our soon-to-be live tool—SkillBlox—to incorporate really great free and open education resources into your reading, writing, and language instruction. To maximize the impact of the event, we want input from you!

The week-long event will focus on specific resources that lend themselves to particular concepts—comprehension, fluency, grammar, vocabulary—along with great free tools that can be used to share these resources with students. 

To make the discussions during the week as productive and engaging as possible, we are reaching out to the community to learn from educators who currently are using the following resources, all of which we intend to touch upon (to varying degrees) over the course of the week:

We are interested in engaging with educators who currently are using these various resources ahead of time, particularly so we can

  1. ensure inclusion of educator perspectives/inside “tips” as we introduce and explain each resource / tool,
  2. be certain to highlight key features and considerations that make each tool particularly effective with adult learners, and
  3. encourage active participation by educators currently using these tools to answer questions and provide guidance to others who might be interested in exploring these tools.

Please feel free to use this thread to share your thoughts and insights on any of these resources and how you use them with students. 

We are also interested in interviewing “power users” of these resources to make sure our overviews are as helpful as possible, as well as to discuss opportunities to participate prior to or during the week as resource experts. If you are interested in this, please DM me @ jeff@crowdedlearning.org

In the meantime, be on the lookout for an announcement of the event from Jeri in the coming month! And, I hope you are enjoying some great summer reading!!! :)

Yours, in learning,

Jeff

Comments

Jeff,

Thank you for getting this discussion started!

In the past , I have used newsela.com, procon.org, as well as some of the free resources from The Change Agent.  I have also Drafting Board in icivics.org for writing.

I look forward to learning what others are using!

Jeri

Hi Jeff, I'm looking forward to this upcoming event. I've used almost all of the sites you have listed. I'm curious about Quill and Wakelet. An English grammar site that we learned about from the English learners in our classes is Learn American English Online. This site features short, easy to understand videos on specific aspects of English grammar. 

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, Teaching & Learning CoP

Hi Jeff,

I use quite a few of the listed resources (Remind, Google Classroom, Wakelet, ReadWorks).  I am very excited to hear how other educators are using these, and the other, resources!  Thank you!