21st Century Wow
Great Free Websites for Remote Learning
For a long time, educators across the globe, have utilised the benefits of fantastic, free websites designed to support student learning. Now, more than ever before, sourcing effective resources, has become paramount if we want our students to interact with online content in a safe, engaging way, that extends academic wellbeing and satisfies curriculum demands.
Freckle empowers teachers to differentiate instruction across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science. Students automatically work on lessons that are perfect for them. That way, they are always engaged and challenged, never facing material that is too difficult or easy for them. With Freckle’s easy-to-use reports, you can quickly see how all of your students are performing across standards and skills.
ReadTheory offers personalized reading comprehension exercises for K-12 and ESL students. ReadTheory’s reading comprehension practice is adaptive and caters to the individual’s needs. The texts are automatically matched to the student’s reading level and supplemented with questions. You can also track your students’ progress throughout the year with easy-to-understand reports. Easily identify struggling students and high-performers, and quickly analyze performance on the individual level and class level.
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Engage every learner with thousands of real-world texts that feature diverse perspectives and people all students can identify with
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Get visibility into usage and student performance with built-in activities and reporting
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Differentiate instruction easily with texts published at 5 reading levels
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Keep your lessons fresh and relevant, with up to 10 new texts added every day
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Search, filter, and explore content by standard
Smart Boarding School is a fantastic, free, online learning platform. Offering a vast range of digital learning resources, including Literary, Maths and Science, Smart Boarding School really does have every thing you need to provide engaging content for our digital learners. Broken up into age categories and key subject areas, resources are easy to find and fun to complete.
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The most engaging reading game for Grades 2-8, and all for FREE!
Combining strategy, engagement, and imaginative reading passages to create a fun, curriculum-aligned literacy game!
Prodigy is a free, gamefied, adaptive maths program that has been proven to improve student scores and confidence! It is aligned to the state or Australian curriculum, and features content from all mathematics strands. Prodigy was designed with three primary goals in mind:
1. To create deep engagement so students double their math practice time at home.
2. To equip teachers with reports and assessment tools to inform their instruction.
3. To provide curriculum aligned content for free, regardless of a student’s demographic.
It is by far the best mathematics program I have used.
Wonderopolis®, is a place where natural curiosity and imagination lead to exploration and discovery in learners of all ages. Each day, the Wonder of the Day® is posed and students are able to explore it in a variety of ways.
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Thousands of Amazing Kids’ Books that are FREE for teachers & librarians.
Use Epic! for the "Listening" portion of Daily 5 using Read-to-Me and Audiobooks.
Project Epic! on your interactive whiteboard to teach a specific skill or strategy.
Use non-fiction books for research projects, such as reports on animals.
Students create a "wish list" of books and then partner up to explain that list.
Epic! is perfect for Read Aloud, Shared Reading & Independent Reading Time.
Students create book reviews and recommend favorites to classmates.
Expose students to different expressions and intonations using Read-to-Me books.
Perform experiments using ideas in Epic!'s STEM books.
Create book commercials using multimedia tools such as iMovie, Telestory or ChatterPix.
Compare two books by the same author.
Kidsnews.com.au is a ready-to go literacy resource for teachers using current daily news stories for students in the classroom.
The content is written into educational stories in child appropriate language and filtered/censored to remove any inappropriate content or imagery. The site does not link to any outside news sources or sites, therefore pupils can use it safely in an unsupervised environment or for independent learning.
Kids News provides 3 classroom activities per news article. These are written by teachers for teachers and are linked directly to the Australian curriculum.
The activities vary each day and are specific to the article. Each activity also includes an extension for higher students. The types of activities include:
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Written projects for literacy, comprehension and storytelling.
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Art projects
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Geography
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Speech writing
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Persuasive text
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Maths etc.
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ReadWorks is committed to solving our reading comprehension crisis and student achievement gap. Driven by cognitive science research, ReadWorks creates world-class content, teacher guidance, and integrated tools that improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement. They are a nonprofit organisation that provides F-12 teachers with the largest, highest-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles in the United States, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary supports, formative assessments, teacher guidance, and more! Most importantly, everything ReadWorks does is based on proven cognitive science research, not unproven academic theory.
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Topmarks gives children the opportunity to learn online, through safe, fun and engaging games and activities. Topmarks helps parents and teachers save time by finding the best, inspirational, educational web resources. They Include only the best educational websites on their site, saving valuable time and providing safe access to high quality, free teaching and learning devices.
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Arcademics combines the excitement of video games with educational content to produce a high rate of learning through exciting, focused repetition that enables automaticity and fluency to be achieved quickly.
The approach is based on these principle points:
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Students respond to challenge and errors can be viewed as opportunities to improve rather than as indication of failure.
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Repetitious drill can be fun, as games increase the time-on-task and engagement through competition.
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Immediate corrective feedback facilitates improvement in performance. Teachers and students can quickly see mistakes and how to correct them.
This is a highly engaging, effective way to build progress.
Imagine a world where students can't get enough of writing, where students can unleash their creativity and where pictures really are worth 1000 words!
Enter Pobble 365, a writing stimulus website that publishes a different amazing image and related writing prompts every day. If you need to ignite the writing spark for your students, if you want to fuel their creativity, and if you want to have them begging to write, then Pobble 365 is for you.
The Literacy Shed is home to a wealth of visual resources. The aim is to provide high quality resources that can be used in stand alone literacy lessons, can form the basis for a whole Literacy unit or can support literacy units that you already have in place.
The NRICH Project aims to enrich the mathematical experiences of all learners. To support this aim, members of the NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, including providing professional development for teachers wishing to embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice.
Acknowledgements
Freckle: https://www.freckle.com/
Read Theory: https://readtheory.org/?redirectUrl
Newsela: https://newsela.com/
Smart Boarding School: https://www.smartboardingschool.com/
Kids News: https://www.kidsnews.com.au/
Dreamscape: https://www.squigglepark.com/dreamscape/
Readworks: https://www.readworks.org/
Prodigy: https://www.prodigygame.com/
Top Marks: https://www.topmarks.co.uk/
Epic: https://www.getepic.com/
Arcademics: https://www.arcademics.com/
Wonderopolis: https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonders
Pobble 365: https://pobble365.com/
Nrich: https://nrich.maths.org/
The Literacy Shed: https://www.literacyshed.com/home.html