es. Common Sense Education offers free curriculum components (lesson slides, videos, bilingual and customizable materials) by grade level and topic.
Tools for Classrooms with In-Person and Remote Students: Offers 27 tools for concurrent (a.k.a. hybrid or hyflex) learning, a complex blended learning model that can be challenging and frustrating for teachers and students. Teachers are increasingly being asked to manage classrooms with both students who are physically present and students attending remotely. Concurrent learning relies on videoconferencing software (e.g., Zoom, Teams, Skype), and poses challenges including technical difficulties, and creating an inclusive environment to facilitating group work or assessments. Common Sense Education has compiled these tools to help teachers create seamless, collaborative digital classrooms that will benefit students learning in-person and those learning online.
A Virtual Learning Guide for Professional Development: Provides technical and interactive strategies and approaches to virtual learning to support both educators and the school mental health workforce.
Remote and Hybrid Learning May Be a Permanent Strategy: How Will We Know Whether It Is Successful?: Describes tools to inform implementation of remote and hybrid instruction now and into the future.
Emerging Challenges and Creative Solutions for Early Childhood Play-Based Learning in Remote Settings: Highlights strategies for integrating play-based learning into remote instruction. This blog focuses on how play-based learning engages young students in intentional, structured, and developmentally appropriate play that supports specific learning goals.
Updated: Free Resources for Schools During COVID-19 Outbreak: Provides direct links to resources offered by education technology companies and organizations to support distance learning. Links - updated in September 2020 - are categorized by academic subject area, and address broadband/internet access/free Wi-Fi resources, and social and emotional learning resources.
Wide Open School: Provides five sets of free, curated on-line lessons and learning tools supported by Common Sense Media. Sets of lessons and materials are presented by grade level. The full collection is accompanied by a 5-minute video overview. The learning content and activities prioritize students’ social, emotional, and psychological well-being in the context of academic instruction in a distance learning context.
Promising Practices Brief: Improving Student Engagement and Attendance During COVID-19 School Closures: Provides an overview of the research on student engagement and attendance in online environments and highlights the efforts of five districts across the country to support student attendance and engagement during emergency school closures during 2020.
Strategies for Trauma-Informed Distance Learning: Offers some general strategies, with specific examples, for how to recognize and respond to students’ social and emotional needs while teaching remotely. The Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety [CISELSS] has organized these strategies according to neuroscientist Bruce Perry’s “3 Rs” approach to intervention: Regulate, Relate, and Reason.
Creating a PBIS Behavior Teaching Matrix for Remote Instruction: Shares tips for maintaining continuity of learning through defining classroom expectations for remote/ distance instruction and online learning environments. This practice brief from the Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports, shows how teachers can adapt a PBIS framework to make remote learning safe, predictable, and positive for students.
Keep Calm and Connect All Students: Incorporates a series of reflection questions, highlights promising solutions geared towards remote learning measures for learners, and describes effective practices for educators and system leaders. ED’s Office of Educational Technology provided this extended blog series with multiple posts geared to a variety of audiences. Information shared intentionally complements other publicatio