I’m always on the lookout for high-quality, free resources for teachers. Educators working with middle and high school students know that finding high-interest resources is often a challenge. So today, I’m excited to tell you about a fantastic platform for interactive assignments for students in grades six through twelve.
Actively Learn helps you quickly find and customize content for English Language Arts, social studies, and science. Teachers can access thousands of free assignments for their classrooms with this free content catalog.
If you’ve heard me speak at a conference or school visit, you know I love sharing free resources that work with lots of different devices. So when the folks at Actively Learn reached out to share their platform, I wanted to learn more about it. In this blog post, I’ll tell you all about the resources from Actively Learn. You can find high-quality, multimedia content for every student in your classroom.
Can’t wait? Head over to Actively Learn’s website to sign up for a free account.
Interactive Assignments for Students
Actively Learn gives educators instant access to a catalog of thousands of free assignments. These assignments include embedded media and standards-aligned questions, too. You’ll find scaffolding notes and teaching ideas right on their website. These resources are designed to engage students and can also save you time searching for the very best resources for your classroom.
Within the resources they’ve created, the team at Actively Learn has made sure that deeper learning activities are front and center. They have designed questions that align to Depth of Knowledge and Common Core State Standards. And these questions go beyond something simple, like having students restate the main idea. The questions help push student thinking either further.
One of the resources I mentioned earlier is the scaffolding notes. These go along with each interactive assignment from Actively Learn. The scaffolding notes can help fill the gaps in a student’s background knowledge to help them better comprehend their reading. This feature can make a big difference when working with students with different life experiences. It can help them make sense of their grade-level, rigorous texts.
High-Interest Resources for Students
Actively Learn provides resources for multiple subject areas. And if you’re looking to bring English Language Arts into social studies and science classrooms, it is truly ideal. The Actively Learn content catalog includes a wide range of content. You’ll find:
- novels
- short stories
- primary sources
- science simulations
- textbook articles
- videos and more!
After you create a free account on Actively Learn’s website, you’ll find that all the content is organized to make it easy for you to find. They’ve set up their content catalog into topic pages to give teachers a full suite of options for their core content needs.
As you can see in the image above, on Actively Learn’s landing page, there are articles related to current events, too. You can get a quick snapshot of the length, recommended grade level, and the Lexile level for each one. When you’re searching for articles for an interactive assignment, you can favorite it to save for later, or assign it to students.
Customizing Student Resources
The catalog of content you can access on Actively Learn’s website covers a wide range of topics. One thing I really like about this platform is the ability to customize the content, so it is the right fit for your students. Whether you are teaching middle school English Language Arts or high school science, you know that there are a variety of needs in every classroom.
Actively Learn lets you customize any of their assignments. You can give feedback to students as they read, and you can even create your own tasks for students. How does this work? Once you’ve created a free Actively Learn account, you can add a Google Doc, website, video, or PDF. Then you can turn it into an interactive assignment. This means that you can add embedded questions and notes for students to review.
Students also have the option to customize their learning experience with Actively Learn. They can translate text into over 30 languages and hear text read aloud as they go through a passage. Students can also look up words as they read and annotate a passage. As you can see in the image above, students can even have conversations (embedded in the text) with their teacher or classmates.
Any teacher can create a free Actively Learn account (that never expires!) by going to www.activelylearn.com. Learn more by visiting their website, where you can explore their catalog of resources!